First Day in Athens: Anchovies and the Acropolis

I’m here in Athens tagging along with my colleague Birgit, who’s presenting at a really cool project called Weather Engines at the Onassis Stegi art center. The exhibition collects various interpretations by multimedia artists of the factors that drive weather–human and nonhuman, and Birgit is one of the scholars making presentations that help put the exhibitions in context.

The conference didn’t start until Friday, though, so we had most of the day Thursday to explore. After we checked into our comfortable and well-located apartment in the Kyma apartment complex close to Onassis Stegi, we wandered through the dim, quiet neighborhood of Koukaki with its fragrant orange trees and balconies crowded with houseplants to a delicious lunch at Opos Palia: fried anchovies, beet salad with olive oil, the best moussaka I’ve ever had tucked in its own little casserole, and a tiny carafe of Malagousia wine to split. I actually took a photo of our meal, which I usually don’t do when I’m eating in public, and then I somehow deleted it. So clearly the universe does not want me to be a food photographer.

We got a thick, black, sweet Greek coffee after lunch, as one does, and then found ourselves at the Acropolis. We hadn’t planned to go, but there was literally no line to get in, so we figured it was a sign. It was really worth it. It reminded me of nothing so much as Acoma Pueblo and the other Anasazi sites I grew up with in New Mexico, where people built on mesas to protect what was valuable to them. Except here the building materials were marble and limestone instead of adobe and pine.

The most impressive part of the Acropolis to me was actually the Propylaea, the epic colonnaded entrance Pericles built for the Acropolis in the 430s BC. It was sort of an ancient TSA as various classes of people (ritually unclean people, runaway slaves, convicts, etc.) were not allowed to enter the temple complex, where the Treasury of the Delian League was kept…and from which Pericles ironically embezzled to build the Propylaea. But just thinking about the Propylaea rhetorically–which the Greeks always did, as they didn’t draw the same distinctions between physical and mental spaces that we do–it does a fantastic job of making you feel small and overawed, visually bringing down upon you the weight of Athenian authority.

The Parthenon looks more elegant from a distance is what I can say about the experience of tiptoeing around all the scaffolding to get a good picture, as well as the squadron of Athenian women whose sole job it is to yell in multiple languages at foreigners not to touch things–more on that tomorrow. Their lungs certainly got a workout on the Acropolis, where every stone you trip over is like 2,500 years old at a minimum. I found the old temple to Athena more attractive, but really the whole time my eyes were drawn off the edge of the Acropolis north toward the Hephaestaion and the Agora.

But there’s only so much sightseeing you can do in a day, so we meandered back along olive-shaded paths over the Hill of the Muses past Socrates’s Prison (looks a lot like Jesus’s tomb with the same level of doubt that it was actually where Socrates was imprisoned) and back to our apartment. We got freshened up and headed to a fantastic dinner at Hytra on the 6th Floor of the Onassis Stegi. Dinner was an 11-course prix fixe, very reasonably priced and portioned, with nice local wine pairings, my favorite of which was this Cretan Liatiko. Our courses included a smoked herring “dashi” broth with sweet pea tart; the seaweed and potato breads served with taramasalata (oh man, taramasalata! it always sounded dubious to me, but it turns out just to be mayonnaise made with fish eggs instead of chicken eggs, and its very mild and briny and wonderful); finally, we could have each eaten like 5 of the yoghurt course that came with a dollop of green rhubarb compote under a clear sugar-candy “croute.” I couldn’t get a good picture, but they sat as at a corner table looking straight at the Acropolis for sunset. Hard to imagine a better first day in Athens.