The Road to the Acropolis

There are places I want to see because they are there and the Acropolis is one of them. It is at the top of my agenda for Athens. Our room overlooks it and the view is terrific. Or maybe I should say the Acropolis overlooks our room as it loom sover the entire city. When we arrived, we wandered around the Plaka district the first afternoon. It is an interesting, crowded city. The Plaka is the Old Town, so to speak, of Athens. It is full of street vendors and all sorts of trendy shops. People stroll and children ride on the merry-go-round holding onto huge helium balloons. There are clowns and pony rides. All sorts of street food. A plethora of things to see.

We bought ourselves a week-long pass for the subway and we were off to explore the city. First stop was the Acropolis. I have studied the Greeks and their mythology for some years and find it most interesting to see how other people in another time saw the world. I am actually walking in some of the same streets as Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Socrates.

I remember reading some years ago about some of the treasures that they found when they started to dig a new subway tunnel in time for the Olympics. One of the first things to see was the descriptions of what was found and replicas all over the subway system. I particularly remember reading about these horses. It was really neat to see them in person. This replica is hanging on the wall of the subway, as are many other artifacts that were found.
We headed straight for it as soon as we dropped off our suitcases. The guidebooks say that the ancient sites are not well marked and they are right. We knew about where it was and headed uphill through the tiny, crowded streets. The streets leading up to the Acropolis are very narrow and filled with restaurants and shops and so many people. As we passed them, many of the shopkeepers were on the sidewalks luring in the tourists with their postcards and replicas of various Greek heroes and sites. So many versions of the Trojan Horse. It was difficult to stick together and still negotiate our way uphill. There are people everywhere and so many of them. I have been in the hinterlands for too long.

What I was not prepared for was the Greek alphabet. This probably sounds ridiculously stupid, but in my planning, I felt confident that I could find my way around using maps. That works well if you can read Greek. I forgot that it is not a Latin-based language. The alphabet is completely different and I don’t know the sounds for the letters. It might have helped if I did. Little did I know that joining a sorority in college would have been useful. The map we had was in Anglicized Greek, but the street signs were in real Greek. English is not a universal language in Greece and so we had to cipher our way most of the time.

After a bit of meandering uphill, we found the entrance to the Acropolis park. It sits atop a huge flat-topped rock that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. On the way up the hill there were several other ruins in various stages of restoration. The Greeks are trying to restore all of the ancient monuments. It is a daunting task. I find it amazing that so much is actually left after two thousand or so years. I am surprised it wasn’t looted and used by any number of people in their houses or palaces.

This road has obviously been repaved over the centuries but it is still the same path that the ancient Greeks walked to get to the Acropolis. It is a wide, gently sloping path. On either side are ruins of one sort or another. Some are labeled, but many are not. It is amazing that archeologists can figure out what things were from the piles of ruins lying everywhere.