Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  The city spread from the Acropolis to the north-west, in what is now Monastiraki, and held about twelve hundred dwellings, some of them houses, many of them shacks and shanties. The best of the dwellings went to the four hundred Turkish families and their slaves, then to the three hundred Albanians families and the remainder to the Greeks to manage as best they could. The Turks and Albanians decorated the outside of their houses with marble pieces from the antiquities lying abandoned all around them.

  In addition to these more local residents there lived eight Frank families, a Frank being the Turkish term for a non-Greek Orthodox Christian. The Franks were mostly consuls, who doubled up as usurers and traders, and all were under the ultimate protection of the French consul. In addition to all these there was a steady stream of Frank visitors like the Byron entourage, a stream that grew into a river with the rising tide of philhellenism - it wasn’t until ten years later that Hobhouse himself became a founding member of the London Greek Committee. All in all the Christian residents had a surprisingly lively social life, especially in winter when there was even a ball or two, and the state of war or peace between the consuls’ home countries did not seep through to any unpleasantness in Athens - where as far as the Turks were concerned they were all just Franks together anyway.

  Samuel Strané in Patras had given Byron the name of the widow of his ex-fellow consul for possible lodgings in Athens. The widow had a sister, Theodora Macri, and she not only had the two adjoining consuls’ houses to rent in what is now Agias Theklas, but three daughters, Katinka, Mariana and Theresa, aged from fifteen to twelve. These soon became Byron’s ‘three graces’ with whom he engaged in ’hours of dancing and buffoonery’, and Theresa was to become ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part/Give, oh give me back my heart.’

  Byron and Hobhouse were strangers in town but were soon visited by the Neapolitan painter, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, who had been hired by Lord Elgin to be his advisor and supervisor for the removal of the Parthenon antiquities. Lusieri, tall, talkative, witty and worldly, was to become one of Byron’s closest friends over the next two years; he was also the uncle of Byron’s soon-to-be ultimate boyfriend, Nicolo Giraud. As a result of his work for Lord Elgin he knew the sites of Athens and Attica better than any other Christian there at the time, and in spite of his work for Lord Elgin he shared Byron’s despair at the removal of the finest pieces from their homes; but he also agreed with Hobhouse that better they were in London than Paris, or being ground down to make a Turkish house, bath house, or mosque.

  Every traveller to Athens needs a Lusieri, and mine is a very fine fellow called Andreas Makridis. We had stumbled across each other on the Internet when he had seen some correspondence about this project on the International Byron Society forum. He is a Greek equivalent of a lobby journalist, and knows everybody in and everything about Athens. He is also a great Byronist and anglophile, a sort of reverse philhellene. The first time we met I had just breezed in from Albania and was catching the first flight out the following morning back to Malta. He picked me up on his motorcycle and we toured the wine bars of Plaka, the most amusing quarter of Athens. I seem to remember having a 4.30 a.m. call for a taxi to the airport, and surviving till midnight until we somehow weaved our way back to the hotel. He then rode back to the wine bar to finish the half bottle still left. As I say, a very fine fellow, and the perfect guide.

  The main point of visiting Athens two hundred years ago, and for many still the main point of visiting Athens now, is to be among the archaeological sites of Ancient Greece. Here one either falls into the Byron or Hobhouse camp: for Byron they were ruins which had to be seen but which made him distracted; for Hobhouse there were antiquities which were a pleasure to see and which made him marvel. The writer, I’m afraid, falls into the Byron camp. Hobhouse would wander around a site taking measurements, noting compass bearings, making notes, and drawing sketches. Byron would stay on his horse and ruminate, summon up some couplets for later and move on. Hobhouse saw them with his head; Byron saw them with his heart.

  And the ruined antiquities, to term them diplomatically, would have meant something to them, far more than they do to nearly all visitors today. Both had been schooled thoroughly in the Classics - Byron was introduced to Latin at the age of six at his school in Aberdeen, and there is no reason to suppose Hobhouse’s education would have been any different. By the time they met at Cambridge three years ago they were totally familiar with the legends and language of Ancient Greece. When they rode across the Temple of Olympian Zeus they would have known that it was started by Peisistratus in 550 bc and completed by Hadrian in 131 ad, and they would have known why it was built in the first place and what had happened to it in the intervening 700 years - unlike the writer who has just had to look all this up in the Attica Guide.

  They soon reached a practical arrangement for their visits to the sites. Byron had by this time finished the first draft of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage canto I and had started drafting canto II. This meant he was up most of the night and asleep for most of the day. Hobhouse would set off in the morning with Lusieri, and walk around the antiquities recording what he saw. In the late afternoon he would collect Byron, they would saddle up - Byron couldn’t really walk very well over the rubble anyway - and ride out for a highlights revisit of the sites that Hobhouse had seen earlier.

  Unlike Lusieri, who appreciated the treasures artistically, and Hobhouse, who viewed them academically, Byron saw them as symbols of the futility of even Man’s highest achievements. If they had just been found in isolation, like Stonehenge, the futility would have been stark enough, but now the very treasures were surrounded by the direct descendants of these giants who were now living in serfdom, and even worse, in hopelessness under ignorant and oafish oppressors. The tables had not just been turned, but even at their zenith shown to be ultimately meaningless, that even the most virtuous circles are subject to decay and death. His exasperation and frustration at the fall, the pointlessness of all that had gone before, cry out in anger - and wisdom - at the start of the second canto on which he was now working every night.

  Ancient of days! august Athena! where,

  Where are thy men of might, thy grand in soul?

  Gone - glimmering through the dream of things that were:

  First in the race that led to Glory’s goal,

  They won, and passed away - is this the whole?

  A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!

  The warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole

  Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,

  Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power.

  Son of the morning, rise! approach you here!

  Come - but molest not yon defenceless urn!

  Look on this spot - a nation’s sepulchre!

  Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn.

  E’en gods must yield - religions take their turn:

  ‘Twas Jove’s - ’tis Mahomet’s; and other creeds

  Will rise with other years, till man shall learn

  Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;

  Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.

  Where did Lusieri take Hobhouse and Hobhouse take Byron? I don’t intend to give exhaustive explanations of the sites as they are now, only to observe that apart from no longer being accessible they themselves are much the same now as they were then; it’s everything else that has changed. Many of the sites are now lost in the endless drabness of suburbs, and therefore unreachable within a reasonable band of patience and care for one’s health. Re-visited here are the main sites they visited then within the walls of the old city, which anyway are the ones the curious are most likely to visit now.

  But first to observe that if Byron despaired at what had happened to Greek civilisation then, he would undoubtedly despair at what has happened to its c
apital now. The major changes have come about between the ancient sites: the endless construction and the concrete dust, the sharp angles of cost effective architecture, the noise and pollution of rushing cars egged on by impatient drivers, the fencing in and locking up of the sites themselves to contain the meandering and the inquisitive, the shuffling queues and the competing babels, the curio shops with nothing curious, the tavernas with identikit menus and prices, all served up for the tourists who prefer to read about what they are walking past rather than seeing what it has now become.

  The main danger in central Athens now is the warren of pedestrian areas. These are signposted by a blue circle with a white image of a walking parent holding a child’s hand. These signs seem to have two meanings; ‘Pedestrian Area’ and ‘Motorcycle Shortcut’.The sport of the latter is to aim directly at the former, employing as many revolutions as his engine will manage while simultaneously encouraging his horn to blow a lively staccato. As the latter also do not have to wear crash helmets they have the additional advantage of being able to shout abuse at any of the former who do not clear a path at once. There’s no point in complaining as the police are the worst perpetrators, and have the additional amusement of being accompanied by wailing sirens.

  The Stadium, to which they rode out on several occasions, is the most altered site from Byron’s day. Early nineteenth-century engravings show the foundations of the white marble three-sided arena, which was completely rebuilt to host the first of the modern Olympics in 1896. It was then given a wash and brush-up for the 2004 Olympics. The shape is said to be the same as in 330 bc, and most pleasing on the eye it is too, almost a trompe-l ‘oeil. They say it will hold 60,000 but it seems far more intimate than that. The fourth side is protected by a voracious main road, and the only athletics to be seen today is the Pedestrian Sprint; instead of a starting gun a green man lights up once every five and a half minutes and the runners have six seconds to cross two carriageways of three lanes each. Once the green man becomes a red man, all bets are off and any motorist who dawdles to give a pedestrian merely walking a sporting chance of survival is subjected to horns of abuse from behind.

  The quintessentially photogenic Stadium has recently been ‘improved’ on its open side and is now almost impossible to photograph. I suggest we hire a helicopter. Andreas replies that one would not be too anti-social to take to the air as a helicopter hovering at camera height would hardly add to the noise and fumes. In the meantime tourists wriggle around the gates trying to find an angle. Lawrence Durrell observed that a good pair of binoculars is a far better friend than a camera, but here there will never be any lenses more useful than the ones in your eyes.

  Andreas and I then walk through a park to the Temple of Olympian Zeus. (‘Here, son of Saturn, was thy favourite throne! Mightiest of many such!’) Since Byron’s day one of the seventeen columns - out of the original 104 - that he saw has fallen down and now lies like a chopped-up sausage on the ground. For some reason this mightiest of monuments, still awe inspiring in its misplaced confidence, has hardly any visitors. Andreas suggests it is because it requires the most imagination. The site has recently become used by Hellenistic neo-pagans, but somehow one suspects their hearts are not really in it, and once the cameras have gone, and before the police arrive, they wrap up their robes and togas and revert to being annoying students.

  This visitor regrets not being able to actually enter any of the sites, but it is particularly vexing to be kept well away from the Temple of the Winds at the end of the Roman Agora. It is now surrounded by wrought iron railings and its rusting unornamented metal doors are shut tight and, should a pole-vaulting enthusiast manage to jump the spikes, padlocked. It must have been marvellous to ride as Byron could through the stones and altars and pedestals of the Agora and just tie up your horse outside the temple and wander in. Built in 100 bc by the astronomer Andronicus, the sides of its octagon show the direction from which the eight Greek winds, well known to sailors, blow. What is really remarkable - again especially from the sailor’s point of view - is the accuracy of the eight compass points, as mysterious as remarkable because the first navigational use of the compass, by the Chinese, was not recorded until 150 years later. It was a full thousand years later before compass use became common practice in the Mediterranean. The Ancient Greeks knew a thing or not about large-scale geometry too: from outer space the Parthenon, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion (we are going there later in the chapter) and the Temple of Aphaea on the island of Aegina make a perfect equilateral triangle.

  Originally the temple also had a wind vane and hydraulic clock, but by the time Byron visited it the temple had already been substantially vandalised, and the Turks had given it to the Whirling Dervishes for their whirling worship. What has not been vandalised has now been sanitised by the Department of Archaeology. I feel more exasperation for the genius Andronicus and what the moderns have done to him than for the mighty Zeus, who was, after all, only a god.

  Byron and Hobhouse’s favoured site was the Theseum, partly because it was the nearest one to the Macri house and partly because it was, and still is, the best preserved of the temples. Its scale is also much more manageable; no mighty monument to Zeus this, but to Hephaestus, god of metalworking, and Athena Ergane, goddess of pottery and handicrafts. This was clearly the artisan quarter then and is now on the western edge of the warrens of western Monastiraki. Well before the Ottoman invasion it had been used as a Christian church, dedicated to St. George. The Turks occasionally used to frighten the congregation with live target practice, and the bullet holes can still be seen on the walls. St. George’s became the cemetery for the Christians who died in the War of Independence, and here Byron wrote an epitaph in Latin to his fellow officer George Walden. Unfortunately it is no longer a church, or anything, the Gauleiters at the Department of Archaeology preferring to keep it locked, its spirit crying out to be a place of worship again.

  Enough traipsing for one day. Andreas and I repair to Vassilos Bar in Plaka, and in the spirit of philculturism he has a large Famous Grouse (just called a ‘Femmus’ in Greek) and I have a small ouzo. I can’t help but bitch about the way the sites are displayed, and Andreas agrees.

  ’They are overprotected,’ he says, ‘and poorly displayed. The archaeologists are overcompensating for the centuries of neglect.’

  ’I’ve always thought sites like the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal, or indeed the Theseum or the Temple of the Winds right here, should have a two-tier structure. Let’s say they are open from nine to five for free when the mass of tourists from cruise ships and coaches, who have no idea really where they are, could read and shuffle their way through in roped off lines. Then from five to six, or even seven, the site is open to those who want to wander around slowly, or sketch, or research or just sit and soak it up.’

  ’You’d have to pay,’ says Andreas.

  ’OK, but I’d happily have paid €10 back there to sit quietly and pray in the Theseum. Those of us like you and Hobhouse could look really closely at the details of the place without being shuffled along, and those like Byron and I could just sit quietly, doing nothing, taking it all in.’

  ’Well that’s not going to happen here. The arckies even wanted to pull this whole area down, pull all Plaka down, because it was built on old Athens. The worst that can happen to an Athenian today is that someone discovers a relic near your home, or actually worse you want to change a house and need permission. It can take twenty years. They nearly stopped the Olympics and delayed the Parthenon Museum by five years. They’re still squabbling about it now.’

  Ah yes, the Parthenon, the highlight for Byron and Hobhouse then and still the highlight for any traveller now. Hobhouse had to wait for two weeks before being allowed to visit it, or more precisely it took him two weeks to summon up enough tea and sugar to bribe the disdar to let him in. Lusieri smoothed the way and Byron soon followed.

  As bad luck would have it wh
en we visit the Acropolis most of the Parthenon is covered in scaffold and plastic sheeting. The whir of marble cutting machinery just about drowns out the drone of Athens below, the dust from it just about covers up the smog. It is being lovingly restored by craftsmen recently schooled in the old way of making marble joints and cement. For the first time I can sense the Athenian’s anger at the loss of the Marbles; up until then it had been an abstract argument, but the columns look sad and depleted without their trappings, as though a favourite aunt had just been mugged of her jewellery. Byron had already written a tirade against Lord Elgin before he had left England, and even seeing the Turks using the Caryatids for target practice did not move Byron to Elgin’s ‘saving the treasures’ argument. ‘Not the point,’ says Andreas. Anti-Elginism was a cause to which Byron was increasingly and passionately drawn, and one which would occupy him and the writer on their returns to Athens half a year later.

  We deliberately choose to enter the site as late as we are allowed, both to miss the bulk of the cruise ship brigade and to catch the columns in the sunset. It is a successful strategy, although approaching sunset we are all shooed off as the site is formally closed by half a dozen Greek soldiers. It is a most incongruous sight, as they funny- walk from the Acropolis up to the entrance of the Parthenon. Then on level ground they march in tramp, in great big studded army boots. I cannot help myself and shout out ‘Mind the marble!’, as Andreas asks ’where are the arkies when you need them?’