Our Olivia cruise comes to an end. It was a very nice week on a wonderful ship, the Azamara Quest. Olivia does such a phenomenal job working with the ship staff to ensure that every detail is well-planned and organized. The logistics of it all is mind-boggling. This morning, we docked in Pireaus, the port of Athens at about 5:30 a.m. That’s the one thing about cruises that is not so great; everyone has to be off the ship by 8:00 a.m. so that the crew can clean everything and be ready for the next batch of cruisers by noon. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.
We signed up for an excursion this morning. Since we had a few hours to kill before we could check into our hotel, we needed something to do that would also take care of our luggage, so the excursion was a bus tour that took us around some of the sights in Athens and it included a guided tour of the Acropolis. About 25 other women also picked this excursion. We all left the ship at about 7:15 and went into the terminal to retrieve our luggage and find our tour meeting point. In the terminal, all neatly lined up in about 20 different groupings was all the luggage. For disembarkation we each had color-coded numbers associated with what our plans were after leaving the ship. The organization was very impressive and it made it very easy to find your luggage and then be directed to your meeting spot.
By 8:00 a.m. we were on a bus for our tour, which went around Pireaus into Athens. The guide was interesting and I learned several things about the history of Greece and Athens. One of the factoids that made a few things click was about gold and silver. These metals were what essentially made Greece a powerhouse throughout history. Still today, Greece is the world’s largest producer of gold and silver jewelry, which is why there are so many jewelry shops all over the country, especially at all the tourist locations like Chania, Santorini, and Mykonos. In Greece today, 50,000 people are employed in the gold and silver jewelry industry.
Greece is made up of about 3,000 islands of which only about 176 are inhabited. In Athens there are 5 million people which is about half of the population of Greece. Greece hosted the summer Olympics in 2004 and in preparation for that, Athens was substantially cleaned up and is a much better city than it previously was. We drove past some of the big stadiums that were built for the 2004 Olympics. Athens also built a big subway system during which nearly 50,000 archeological findings were discovered, many of them statues. All these findings were added to the enormous collection found in the Athens Museum of Archaeology.
Within about an hour of beginning our bus tour we arrived at the most popular and revered destination in Athens, the Acropolis. It was pretty spectacular and we did catch a couple of glimpses of it as we drove around on the bus. In the middle of Athens there the temples of the Acropolis sit atop a gigantic rock. The Acropolis is visible from all over Athens. We got off the bus with our tour guide and headed up the hill to enter the Acropolis.
The first things you see as you go up the hill are arches from an old theater and a bit of the Parthenon. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is still used today for performances, seating over 5,000. It is said that the acoustics in this theater are excellent. It hosts a big summer festival of world-famous performers.
We then entered the temples area through the Propylaea, the gateway, which was intentionally designed to be a narrow passageway, preparing people for entrance into a very sacred space. The sheer size of the columns in the Propylaea makes you feel quite small. As you go up the steps through the Propylaea on the right corner is the Temple of Athena Nike. It is a very small temple built in 420 B.C and is the first fully ionic temple on the Acropolis. It is located in a very prominent place. It is dedicated to the goddess Athena Nike. Nike means “victory” in Greek, and Athena was worshiped in this form, representative of being victorious in war. The citizens worshiped the goddess in hopes of a successful outcome in the long Peloponnesian War fought against the Spartans and their allies.
Once through the Propylaea, you look across the Acropolis and see two large temples and piles of marble bits and pieces, some old and some new. The preservation of these magnificent ancient buildings is ongoing, but the serious conservation of the temples wasn’t seriously started by the Greek government until 1983. The marble being used in renovation and preservation is quarried from the same place the original marble was quarried. As you look at the structures, you see a patchwork of old, more yellowed, marble and new, whiter, marble. In preparing and placing new pieces, the same cutting and shaping techniques are being used as were used in ancient times. It is really fascinating to see what I call the “boneyards” where old and new pieces lie seemingly arranged in some order, models for new pieces waiting to be shaped or replacement pieces to be set.
The Parthenon is the largest temple and is the one that is so visible from all over Athens. It is illuminated at night and really pops. The Parthenon is dedicated to the goddess Athena whom the people of Athens considered their patron. The temple was built in only 9 years, which is hard to fathom considering that all the marble had to be dragged from the quarry up the gigantic rock. The columns are several drums that sit on top of each other. There is a hole in the middle of each drum, and once placed, a wooden stake, like a dowel, was driven down through the hole to keep the drums aligned. The Parthenon is in the Doric style. Doric columns don’t have any decoration at the top; ionic columns have the curlicues on each side, and Corinthian columns have the decorative leaves. We learned that the Parthenon was constructed using mathematical tricks so that the visible image would seem straight and perfectly aligned. The scale used is 4:9, so that whatever number of columns are on the narrow ends, the sides would be double that number plus one. The Parthenon has 8 columns on each end and 17 on each side. There are 4 mathematical optical tricks used. First, the corner columns are wider than the others. Second, the columns are not equidistant from each other. Third, the columns are tapered, being wider at the bottom than the top. Fourth, the columns lean inward so that if they were built tall enough, they would actually touch, forming a pyramid. So, even though the temple appears totally straight, there are no straight lines constructed in the Parthenon. The Parthenon is considered the finest example of Greek architecture. It is pretty amazing.
Another temple on the Acropolis is the Erechtheion. In its day it was a very fancy, elaborately decorated building. The entire temple is on a slope, so the west and north sides are about 3 m (9 ft) lower than the south and east sides. It was built entirely of marble with friezes of black limestone which bore sculptures executed in relief in white marble. It had elaborately carved doorways and windows, and its columns were ornately decorated (far more so than is visible today); they were painted, gilded and highlighted with gilt bronze and multi-colored inset glass beads. What it still has is a fantastic porch, the famous “Porch of the Maidens,” with six draped female figures (caryatids) as supporting columns. Our guide made a big point of telling us that British aristocrat Lord Elgin, “stole” one of the original maidens and took it to a British museum (along with a great deal of other things from the Acropolis). Greece has been seeking a return of this precious statue, but to no avail. So many ancient Greek items were taken by other countries over the years and Greece has been trying to negotiate returns of many of these antiquities.
We roamed around until it was nearly time to meet up with our tour guide at the bottom of the hill. There is a belvedere from which one gets a fantastic view of surrounding Athens. It was so windy up on the Acropolis that one had to be very careful not to have one’s camera blow away.
We finished up our bus tour, driving by a few sights, and then the bus was to stop at 3 hotels, but not ours. We were advised to get off at the first hotel stop and take a taxi to our hotel, Hera. Two other couples were doing the same things. It was too early for check it so we went with 2 others, Liz and Chris from Morro Bay, CA, to a restaurant across the street. We had a nice lunch, too much food for all of us to eat, and then went back to the hotel to finally check in. We were all exhausted. Christine and I unpacked and had a nap. Eve arrived from London right on schedule at 7:00 p.m. We were waiting outside the hotel and a cab pulled up, the driver got out and announced, “I bring you your daughter.” It was a joyous reunion and so great seeing her.
After getting Eve checked in and settled in her room, we went up to the top floor of the hotel to the Peacock Roof Garden restaurant for dinner. The view of the Acropolis is even better from the top floor. We had a lovely dinner and caught up with each other. It was a very pleasant evening. Afterwards, we all were exhausted and tired and headed off to bed.
