Hello Acropolis, Goodbye Athens

The day after my ankle injury, my history class went on an excursion to the acropolis. The long walk there and the steep terrain made it an impossible trip for me to make. Fortunately, my instructors purchased a ticket to the acropolis for me so that I would be to go when I found the time. Busy with group excursions and saying good bye to friends and packing for the transfer to Rome, I found my time quickly running out. The day before I was to leave Athens, I woke up early and set off for the centerpiece of Athenian history. For the walk over, I serenaded myself with Mozart’s Requiem. This seemed all together fitting and proper, especially as the great hill rose larger and larger in my sights. Music truly can be the perfect accent to an experience, and since I was making this trek by myself it worked very nicely. As would be expected, the entrance to the acropolis was choked with hundreds of tourists. American’s in Nike t-shirts that bloom plumply at their rotund bellies. The Asian tourists whose cameras dangle always around their necks like ornamental offerings to a Samsung god. And swirling through the air, beaten together into a rich Babelic cacophony was the conversations of every language imaginable. It was a windy day and on top of the hill (acropolis means the high point of the city) and the wind was pressing clothes to the skin like wet drapery. My hair was flowing and the wind whistled into one ear mixing with the entire rabble and contrasting to the music playing through a small ear bud headphone in the other ear; now listening to Mozart’s string concerto. The Parthenon, completed in 432 BC, was constructed either as a temple to Athena or was the new Treasury of the Athenian empire after it dissolved the Delian League and moved its riches to Athens. In the seventeenth century, the occupying Turks housed munitions in it. Until this point, the Parthenon maintained much of its ancient glory. An explosion set off the munitions stored in the temple, and the shattered shell of a once breath stopping sight are what remain as result for us now. I saw sitting in the grass around the steps of the western façade of the Parthenon a broken brass canon. While I cannot be for sure that this is a remnant of the Turkish firepower housed here that caused its destruction, I feel that it served as a perfect contrast; and it made a sweet ass picture. In the foreground we see the dark colors of a device of war which contrasts with the white marble of a temple for the goddess of Wisdom. Further, the history tells us that it was because of the oppressive and censuring government of a military rule that beauty and art and architecture of an ancient civilization are lost forever. While this picture does not show it, the canon is cracked down the middle. Its reign of hate and war is rusting and broken, resigned to sit, lost in the weeds at the feet of the temple it destroyed. But rising from that, is the perpetual emblem of Greece. Broken and battered, but not destroyed, its perseverance reminds us that art and beauty will always be a stronger power than hate mongering. Finally, being that high in a low lying valley, your view is truly superb. I could see on the slopes of the hill and the Hephastion. I could see the Theatre of Dionysus and the Herodian Theatre. Further I could see Lyvettikos hill and the stretching sea of white homes that comprise Athens. In the distance, as the fast wind blew the smog and haze from the horizon, I could see the Port of Piraeus and massive ships waiting but looking like tiny paper vessels placed in puddle of water formed after a recent storm. It was proper that I say goodbye to Athens with my solitary trip to its most famed site. I was content with Athens, and while I had made some new friends and some close friends, I was ecstatic to begin the truly Roman chapter of my Roamin Ruminations.