The lights shone brightly on the Acropolis high above Athens, Greece.
Several of us on last week’s Washington School group trip to Greece and Italy watched this spectacle from the open area of a highly modern building in the downtown of one of the world’s great ancient cities.
We walked back to our hotel rooms on modern, wide city streets dodging small hatch-back diesel vehicles, motor scooters and public transportation.
Athens is simultaneously a very old city and modern at the same time. It seems much newer in most places than even the downtown area of Greenville.
Both cities were flattened by war. In Greenville’s case, the war was the fight against flood waters in 1927 and in Athens’ case, World War II destroyed its buildings and population.
In both cases, reconstruction started some years later and the baseline of the age of the buildings is from that reconstruction period.
Athens still retains an old feel in certain districts, especially near the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Annunciation in Athens.
The streets are narrow there and chock full of shops, ice cream sellers and small, open-air restaurants that serve a wonderful Aperol Spritz.
The church is beautiful and is only 73 years older than St. Joseph Catholic Church in Greenville with which it shares an almost identical ceiling design.
The blue background is a slightly different color than St. Joseph’s ceiling but the gold stars are the same in color and number. If you haven’t yet seen the renovations at St. Joseph, do yourself a favor and see them soon.
The art of the church in Athens Is in the Greek Orthodox design which has a distinct style from Catholic Churches in the Roman Catholic denomination.
The depicted saints and figures seem to celebrate their own torture.
While the church is gorgeous, it is not Athens’ calling card. The Acropolis and associated Ancient Grecian history dominate the city.
The now-ruined portions of the building were constructed in 500 B.C. and work is ongoing to restore it to its original glory. There are obvious holes in the panels just under the roof surrounding the building where the so-called Elgin Marbles were removed in the early 1800s. Those stones are in the British Museum in London and those empty holes in Athens are a stark reminder of that theft.
I couldn’t help myself and participated in a little theft as well while on the Acropolis. I knelt down to tie my shoes and scooped up two fragments of cut marble near the temple of the Athena. They are coming home with me.
As we walked down from the Acropolis we stepped over to the Aeropagaus, a place where Paul of Tarsus is supposed to have preached to a few hundred Athenians. He converted a couple. Paul would later be crucified at one of our destinations in Italy.
From Athens, we left for the Oracle at Delphi. We spent a short time on a national highway at high speeds before leaving the four-lane for a two-lane winding mountain track.
The driver of the massive Mercedes van has both the arms of Superman and nerves of steel. He threaded the huge bus through and around tight corners and steep inclines.
The Oracle was not a person so much as it was a place for the Ancient Greeks to consult the universe for answers to questions generally given in vague and often misunderstood phrases. Supposedly those answers were driven by water in the area suffused with a cocktail of chemicals.
I put a few more small rocks in my pocket and we were off to Meteora.
This region of Greece is one of the most striking geographical formations in the world. There are limestone towers cut by the erosion of what was once a large sea bed millions of years ago.
Atop those towers, starting in the 1100s AD, Greek Orthodox monks began to build monasteries. There were a couple hundred, and now only six are still operating.
While the residents — five monasteries with monks and one with nuns — stick to their religious requirements their obvious job is to service the tourist economy these monasteries have created.
Like Athens, many of the monasteries and the town below them were flattened in World War II. While the monasteries were, and continue to be, rebuilt almost immediately after the war the town began an explosion of construction in the 1960s. The outside edges of the town are a rough-and-tumble mix of hotels, gas stations and groceries, but the downtown entertainment district is a gorgeous wide avenue looking up at the rising limestone towers in the near distance.
We toured the monastery of St. Steven home to 32 nuns and two novices. There are two chapels on the hill and the one we visited holds the holy relics of St. Charalambos. The relics are in a box and visitors often kiss the box as they pass. Canon, my youngest son, peered into the box and saw what he described as either the brains or the skull pan of the dead saint. It was the highlight of his trip so far.
As a recently ordained Presbyterian Elder, I am supposed to feel some antipathy about the Orthodox veneration of saints and the icons decorating their churches, but I didn’t. Their beauty and dedication are inspiring.
From Meteora, we crawled through the mountains to a small town called Metsovo in the heart of the Pindos mountains.
The mountains are rugged and covered in evergreen trees. Small communities dot the rare flat spots in the range.
The little town is as gorgeous as any place in the Swiss Alps or American Mountain West. We ate at an outdoor restaurant and watched a whole pig roast over an open fire. The food on the trip has been fantastic. I don’t know if Greece gets enough credit for its food scene. It’s not just Feta cheese and olives. It’s wonderful, cheap and I could eat like this every day.
After Metsovo, we found ourselves with a couple of hours to kill and located a beach on the Ionian Sea to deal with the time-lapse.
It will probably be the thing the children remember most. They put on their swimsuits and played in the chilly waters by the beach.
The parents watched from the deck of a beach-side café and listened to Jimmy Buffett’s Songs You Know By Heart. I’ll never forget it. I grabbed a couple more rocks and we were off to catch the ferry to Italy. The Minoan Lines Ferry is where I write these words. It’s not a cruise but is a service ship taking people and vehicles from Iguomenitsia, Greece, to Ancona, Italy.
I’ll write about Italy next week.
Jon Alverson is proud to be the publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.com or call him at 662-335-1155.
