Greece 2010, Two Almost Similar Days in Lindos

The next day after breakfast we took the advice of our neighbours and took the bus to Pefkas which turned out to be an unremarkable little place but as promised it did have a very nice beach. There were a few sun beds and umbrellas at €8 a time but also plenty of space left over for blanket people like us. The sea was nice and deeper than Lindos so swimming was better and if I had had room in my luggage for a snorkel I am certain there would have been plenty of fish to watch.

It was a nice spot with a cool breeze and the sound of gentle lapping waves but, as I have explained before, we are not really beach people and two hours is generally more than enough. We have never owned up to this to each other but I suspect we are both secretly hoping that the other one will be the first to say the magic words ‘shall we pack up then and go and have a drink?’ and certainly there has never really been any debate on this matter that I can ever remember. And so it was today and as boredom levels began to rise we packed up and strolled back to the bus stop stopping on the way in the centre for a Mythos.

Like most places on Rhodes, and indeed Lindos, there were some restaurants and tavernas and they all had unnecessary pictures of the food on display boards outside. I really don’t like that and I don’t see the point of it either. Surely most people know what a chicken kebab looks like and if they want to see a picture of a moussaka they can see that every week in Tesco or Morrisons? And what’s more the pictures don’t generally look like what you are likely to get anyway so I find it all a bit distasteful and common. But then again Rhodes is an airport island and there were quite a lot of football shirts and tattoo people wandering about and they probably welcomed this sort of assistance with making dining selections.

The amount of tattoos on display was incredible and almost as many women as men with decorated bodies proudly showing them off. Personally I cannot understand why anyone, unless they are a Maori, would want to disfigure themselves in this way but here on Rhodes it seemed as though they were almost in the majority.

We caught the ten past two bus back to Lindos and once back at the Chrysa Studios Kim declared it too hot to do anything except enjoy the air conditioned room so I sat on the terrace for a while and then worried that I might be missing something in the village went for a walk to find some streets that we might have overlooked so far.

As I walked around the corkscrew lanes and became confused in the maze of alleys I found myself at the beginning of the path to the Acropolis so although we were planning to visit tomorrow, just out of curiosity I walked to the top to see how much it was going to cost. It was quite a climb and the well worn path was slippery and precipitous but at least I had had a practice ahead of the next day.

On the next day we had slipped completely into routine and we did the same things over again. First we had breakfast on the terrace and because we had liked the beach at Pefkas in preference to Lindos we caught the bus there for a second time. Two hours on the beach, a drink at the same bar and the ten past two bus back to Lindos.

For the afternoon we did plan something different and the visit to the Acropolis. We had waited until Sunday because sometimes museums and archaeological sites are free on Sunday so we thought it was worth the wait until the last day in Lindos. When the time came to tackle the steps and the walk Kim declared herself too hot and tired so I had to go alone and when I got there was disappointed to find that you do have to pay on a Sunday after all.

The walk and the climb to the entrance to the site actually turned out to be the easy bit because once inside there was an energy sapping ascent up a steep stone staircase with a sheer drop on each side to the entrance to the medieval fortress which was built by the Knight’s of Saint John in the fourteenth century to defend the island against the Ottoman Turks.

There were some good views from the top as I walked first through the foundations and the towers of the castle and the Byzantine church and then to the very top and the ancient Acropolis itself, the DoricTemple of Athena Lindia, the Propylaea of the Sanctuary, a huge staircase and a Hellenistic Stoa and finally the remains of a Roman Temple. Although hundreds of people visit this place every day four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon turned out to be a very good time to go indeed because there were no more than a dozen or so people here right now so it was easy to walk around and admire the ruins undisturbed.

They are ruins of course but some of the buildings and columns have been restored and in the twentieth century there was a lot of archeological and restoration work carried out by the Italians when they were in control here between the two world wars. Unfortunately some of the work they carried out wasn’t that good and as well as incorrectly reinterpreting some of the construction they also used poor quality materials and a lot of the reinforced concrete they used has begun to fail leading to even worse damage than they tried to rectify and most of this work is having to be done again at great cost under the supervision of the Greek Ministry of Culture.

It was still very hot and the walk had made me hungry and thirsty so I bought some pizza and beer and went back to the apartment where Kim was just about planning her shopping trip to the silver workshop having taken a couple of days to make up her mind which piece of jewellery she was going to buy.

In the evening we finally broke with routine and instead of Kamariko and the irritating waiter we found an alternative restaurant with a roof top terrace and we enjoyed a lazy meal in a cool breeze without waiter interruption and with free sweet and complimentary ouzo. This was our last night in Lindos, we had enjoyed it but we were ready to move on back to Rhodes town and over Metaxa on the balcony we reflected on our four days and made our plans for the next day.

Greece 2010, Lindos

There was no wind today and it was already hot on the balcony by breakfast time and unfortunately because of yesterday’s little accident there was no umbrella for shade. I walked to the mini-market for provisions and then we enjoyed a Lindian breakfast that we prepared for ourselves and ate on the terrace with its lovely view of the ancient and important village of Lindos. Here history stretches back over three thousand years and Lindos grew to prosperity under the Knights of St. John who built their fortress on the site of the ancient Acropolis. So much of the medieval village has survived that it has been declared a national landmark.

Because of its east coast location, Lindos is the hottest place on Rhodes and even in September by mid morning it was much too hot to sit on the terrace so we set off down the steep uneven steps towards the shady streets of the village and heading for the beach. Once past the steps where we had to watch every move it was a real delight to walk around the narrow streets with their traditional, distinctive, white and black chochlaki pebbled surface because no vehicles other than the odd delivery van are allowed inside. The village felt authentic because little or no changes can be made to the buildings, many of which have survived since the fifteenth century and the architectural style of the village is a mixture of Gothic, Byzantine Greek and middle Eastern influence.

Although there are no vehicles we did have to watch out for the donkeys that every day transport hundreds, probably thousands, of day visitors from the bottom of the village to the steps of the Acropolis and then back down again. I rode on a donkey here in 1997 and it seemed cruel so I vowed I wouldn’t do it again but later at lunchtime Mario explained that there are four hundred donkeys who work for two days and then get a day off and that working is good for them because they live an average twenty-one years which is seven years longer than a donkey that has nothing to do and I have to confess that they did look healthy and well looked after. We didn’t go on one though!

Eventually after a long descent we reached the first small beach which was full of sun loungers and umbrellas for people who stay there all day and no room to put down a towel for people like us who only stay for an hour or so. Not being prepared to pay €8 for the beds we continued to walk towards the main larger beach where there was some space on the stony scruffy bits behind the umbrellas where it was at least possible to make our own arrangements.

We swam in the sea and that was nice but we didn’t really like the beach all that much because it was much too organized for us with regimented rows of sun beds all crammed together in such a way as to make it difficult for cheapskates like us to put our towels down and avoid the charge and let’s face it €8 is quite a lot of money that we calculated would soon add up over a fortnight’s holiday. As well as the sun beds there were pedaloes, canoes, diving instruction and water sports and on balance we preferred the rock on Symi so we didn’t stay too long.

After a cold drink at a busy beach bar we walked back into the village which was bustling now with coach loads of visitors pushing and shoving through the narrow streets. There was a pretty whitewashed church at the bottom of the village which was built by the Knights in the fourteenth century and had some lovely frescoes and decorated floors but as there was an entrance charge and photography was forbidden we made do with admiring it through the door without going inside.

After lunch at Mario’s again we explored the other side of the village where the shops and bars petered out to be replaced with narrow streets of local houses where the smell of fresh moussaka and tide washing powder seeped out from behind the windows and doors. At the far end of the village there was an ancient amphitheatre, almost two thousand five-hundred years old and so adjacent to the modern buildings that it is certain there are more hidden treasures concealed below them which must have archaeologists drooling with anticipation.

Back at the apartment by late afternoon the terrace was much more comfortable now because the sun had swung to the west and was disappearing quickly behind the mountain range backbone of the island and by six o’clock the entire village was in shadow with only the massive outcrop of rock and the Acropolis remaining bathed in early evening sunshine. It was delightful so we sat for a while and enjoyed it and when it got dark we changed and went for evening meal at the same restaurant where the same irritating waiter pestered us again but the food was excellent so whilst we would rather that he hadn’t we didn’t really mind.

On the way out Kim convinced me that there was an alternative way down but it turned out that this was really just a ruse to make sure we passed a silver jewellery workshop directly below the apartments where she had a great time looking at the sparkly things on display and debating which particular piece to buy.

Pete and Jane and their friends John and Zoe were on the balcony so we joined them and Jane introduced us to the joys of Greek Metaxa brandy which we declared such a liking for we thought we might buy a bottle for ourselves the next day. We told them that we hadn’t especially enjoyed the beach experience at Lindos and with their extensive local knowledge of the area they recommended that we should try the beach at the next village of Pefkas instead which they assured us was quieter and less organized.

Greece 2010, Symi to Lindos

The ferry docked in Rhodes just before half past nine and already the harbour was busy, noisy and hot. We had to walk about five hundred metres to the bus stop where we purchased tickets for the Lindos bus which was due in about ten minutes time. The bus said no. 6, the ticket said no. 6 but we still did the usual thing of double checking this with the driver and then just to make sure checking again with two or three other passengers as well as we got on the bus and moved down the aisle. This is a curious English behaviour which makes us mistrustful of transport systems and although we know it is the right bus or train or boat, because we have just heard the person in front ask exactly the same question and be told exactly the same answer, we just have to double and triple check.

The bus left Rhodes and drove through the untidy suburbs of the new town, stopping frequently and filling up quickly with people going to the east coast resort beaches for the day and soon the bus was full to capacity. The road to Lindos took us first through Kalathea with its ribbon of high rise package tour hotels and then to the party town of Falaraki, which once had a reputation for being mad and dangerous but is apparently not so bad now because the party scene has moved to Kavos on Corfu. Falaraki is trying to change its reputation but as far as I could see it remains a bit of a dump with English pubs, wide screen televisions and a string of fast food places which would make it one of the last places in Greece that I would ever want to visit. Kim missed all of this because as usual on public transport she was fast asleep.

After Falaraki the bus drove through barren hills punctuated with the occasional village and town and then through acres of olive groves before it dropped down to the bay of Lindos before arriving at the busy bus terminal where it dropped us off. Finding the Chrysa Studios was a lot more difficult than it should have been but eventually the owner came to help us and walk with us the two hundred metres to the apartments.

They were excellent and in a perfect location with an uninterrupted view of the village and the Acropolis on the other side. Unfortunately our stay here began with a disaster. It was a hot day so Kim put the terrace umbrella up and sat in the shade but it was also very windy and an especially strong gust unexpectedly blew the canvas inside out shattering the wooden struts as it did so with an ear splitting crack as the whole thing completely disintegrated. The owner wasn’t especially pleased about this and I could see a bill coming our way so as this wasn’t a particularly good start we abandoned the terrace and went for a walk into the village instead.

Because of the early start we had skipped breakfast but now it was lunch time so we were a bit hungry so we found a suitable looking place called Mario’s with our sort of (low) prices and went inside. The way we select a taverna is to look at the price of a Greek salad and a Mythos to make sure they are in our target price range and while satisfying ourselves on this point we hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to anything else and we were surprised when we looked around to see a sign for English roast Sunday lunches and another for Pukka pies and we wondered if we had made a mistake. We needn’t have worried however because there was a good Greek menu and Mario himself explained that he liked to offer as diverse a menu as he possibly could. We choose the Greek!

After an excellent lunch we walked around for a while but Kim was tired so we went back to the room where she slept and I read and later on the balcony that we shared with our next door neighbours we met Pete and Jane who proudly told us that they liked Lindos so much that this was their twentieth consecutive year of holidaying here. For someone who gets bored after three days I cannot even begin to imagine how dull that must be but it was useful for us because they were able to give us an address book full of dining recommendations as we chatted.

Later we took their advice and went to a restaurant called Kamariko which had a roof top terrace with a view of the Acropolis, a good menu and excellent food but an irritating Russian waiter who sat himself down uninvited at our table and insisted on talking to us for fifteen minutes or so. To compensate for this intrusion there were complimentary sweets and a free shot of grappa so we declared the first day in Lindos a great success, paid, left and went back for a final drink on the terrace.

Greece 2009 - Day 17, Athens, a city of thieves

After four years of visiting Athens on the way to a Greek island-hopping holiday I have finally managed to see the new Acropolis Museum. It was originally planned to be completed in 2004 to accompany the return of the Olympic Games to their spiritual Athenian home but construction setbacks and various outbreaks of controversy along the way have meant that it did not finally open to the expectant public until June 2009.

The long awaited €130m Acropolis Museum is a modern glass and concrete building at the foot of the ancient Acropolis and home to sculptures from the golden age of Athenian history. Unlike any other museum in the world this one has been designed to exhibit something it doesn’t own and can’t yet exhibit and the Greek Culture Minister has said that he hopes that it will be the catalyst for the return of the disputed Marbles from the British Museum in London because about half of the sculptures have been there since they were dubiously sold to the museum in 1817.

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/the-acropolis-museum-in-athens/

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/acropolis-museum-and-lord-elgin/

We spent most of the morning in the museum and after we had finished we walked around the ancient city admiring all of the sights. Athens is a wonderful place for visiting ancient monuments and buildings, in addition to the Acropolis there is the Ancient Greek and Roman Agora and the dramatic Temple of Zeus with its spectacular columns thrusting triumphantly into the sky. They are all in pretty poor shape it has to be said, the Parthenon at the Acropolis was blown up by Venetian invaders when it was being used as an armoury store, most of the Agora is pretty much non existent and the Temple of Olympian Zeus has only a handful of its original columns still standing.



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We checked the bus times back to the airport and discovered that the metro line had been reopened so we agreed that would be our preference and once confident of times we walked through Monastiraki with its cramped little tourist shops and back to the Plaka where we found a place for a drink next to the Agora. For some reason Athens felt different this year, there were more beggars, more lucky-lucky men and more gipsy kids pestering us at the table for handouts. It didn’t feel quite so safe.

Despite this, it was the last day of the holiday and we had spent a good day in the Greek capital even when it started to rain later in the afternoon. Finally we had a last meal before collecting our bags from the Royal Olympic and made our way back to the airport. This was the fourth year of taking the metro and I have never felt uncomfortable or unsafe in any of the previous three years but this time something was different. Syntagma station was busy and felt edgy and when the train arrived we had to force our way onto unusually crowded carriages.

As soon as I got on board I knew something was wrong and this is how they did it. At the very last moment a group of three or four young men rushed onto the train causing mayhem and confusion and pushing and shoving and moving other legitimate passengers around. In the melee we were separated so couldn’t watch out for each other and I knew instinctively that something was going to happen in that carriage. In hindsight it is easy to see that we had been targeted, we had been on holiday, we were off our guard, weighed down with bags and the way that Kim was looking after her bag made it obvious that there was something inside that she would prefer not to loose.

One man stood by the door but then I sensed that he was determined to stand next to me and he pushed in and stood so close I could smell his body odour and it was most unpleasant. I knew what he was doing but luckily I was wedged in a corner so I gripped my wallet in my pocket in a vice like white knuckle grip and turned away from him so that he couldn’t get a hand to my right side where my wallet and my camera were. He knew he was rumbled, gave up and moved on pushing and shoving the other passengers as he went.

Kim was stranded in the middle of the carriage but I could see that she was clutching her handbag tight to her chest and I felt reassured that she too was being extra careful. Suddenly I noticed that she was bothered by something and was examining her ring. One of the thieves had placed a bit of wire around the stone and had pulled it so hard that it had bent the ring and it had hurt her finger. She said that at the time she thought it had been caught in a zip or a strap from someone’s bag but this must be a well practiced diversionary tactic because at the moment she reacted he managed somehow to open the zip of the bag and remove the first thing that he found. All of this happened so quickly and at the next stop they were gone and so was Kim’s camera.

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This incident rather spoilt the holiday and we left Greece with a sour taste in our mouths. All of Kim’s precious pictures were gone including her favourite of the naked man on the beach on Ios and these were priceless and irreplaceable. I hope we will return to the Greek Islands again next year but we probably won’t be stopping off in Athens.

Acropolis Museum & Lord Elgin

After four years of visiting Athens on the way to a Greek island-hopping holiday I have finally managed to see the new Acropolis Museum. It was originally planned to be completed in 2004 to accompany the return of the Olympic Games to their spiritual home but construction setbacks and various outbreaks of controversy along the way have meant that it did not finally open until June 2009.

I purchased tickets on line for just €1 (prices will rise to €5 in 2010, so if you want a bargain go soon) and arrived at my alloted time of ten o’clock. I had feared that the place would be crowded and uncomfortable but this was not the case at all and without the lines of visitors that I had anticipated it was easy to cruise past the ticket desks and into the museum. I had a gigantic sense of anticipation because I have visited the old inadequate museum at the top of the Acropolis a couple of times before in 2000 and 2006 and I have been genuinely looking forward to seeing this magnificent replacement. I have to say that anticipation was mixed with trepidation because having followed the saga of the open wound debate about the Elgin Marbles (Parthenon Sculptures) I genuinely wondered how I was going to feel.

The long-awaited €130m Acropolis Museum is a modern glass and concrete building at the foot of the ancient Acropolis and home to sculptures from the golden age of Athenian democracy. Unlike any other museum in the world this one has been designed to exhibit something it doesn’t own and the Greek Culture minister has said that he hopes that it will be the catalyst for the return of the disputed Marbles from the British Museum in London because about half of the sculptures have been there since they were dubiously sold to the museum in 1817. The gloves are now off and the battle is now on between this, the new state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum, and the British Museum for the right to permanently exhibit them.

Outside the museum and also in the cavernous entrance hall there are glass floors with views of the excavations that were discovered during the construction of the building and contributed to the delays and then there is a steady incline through seven centuries of history and impressive well set out displays along a generously wide gallery that provides sufficient space for everyone to stop and enjoy the exhibits without feeling hurried or under pressure to move on. Moving on to the second floor there are two galleries that I have to say I did not find so well set out and involved a rambling walk through a succession of exhibits that was not helped by the absence of a simple floor plan guide to help guide the visitor through and having finished with the second floor I then had to double back to get to the third and the Parthenon Gallery having avoided the inevitable over priced café terrace and shop on the way.

After an hour passing through centuries of ancient Greece I finally arrived at the top floor Gallery, which is designed to eventually hold and display all of the Parthenon sculptures but for the time being has only about 50% of the originals and the rest are plaster casts made from (and controversially paid for) of the remaining treasures temporarily remaining in London. It is truly impressive and with the Acropolis Hill and the Parthenon looming up outside I can only explain it rather inadequately as a memorable experience. The top floor is designed to provide a full 360º panoramic of the building and how the sculptures would have looked when they were originally commissioned and sculptured in the fifth century BC.

Today, the Greek Government, and most of the Greek people, would rather like the sculptures back but have recently turned down a British Museum offer to give the Marbles to the Acropolis Museum on a loan basis for just three months. The Culture Minister Antonis Samonis explained that “The government, as any other Greek government would have done in its place, is obliged to turn down the offer. This is because accepting it would legalise the snatching of the Marbles and the monument’s carving-up 207 years ago,”. On the whole I am inclined to agree with this and believe that the place for the sculptures are in Athens and not London but this is a complicated debate that cannot be rushed and a few more years sorting it out is hardly going to matter.

I really liked the Museum but what I didn’t like especially was the demonising of Lord Elgin and the unnecessary nationalist, provocative and belligerent anti-English sentiment attached to the explanations and the video commentary because I consider that offensive as an English visitor and it made me feel slightly uncomfortable and unwelcome. The descriptions of Elgin as a looter and a pirate seemed especially designed to stimulate a reaction from visitors from the USA who were encouraged to gasp in awe that an Englishmen could have done such terrible things. I know that a lot of what should be in Athens is in London but let’s not forget that there is also bits of it in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Vatican Museums in Rome, the National Museum, Copenhagen, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the University Museum, Würzburg and the Glyptothek in Munich all of which seems to have been conveniently ignored.

There are many factors to take into consideration. We do not know if Elgin's actions were legal at the time but he had certainly obtained from the Turkish authorities, then in control of Athens, permission to work on the Acropolis and it seems that he had a genuine interest in archaeology and the preservation of the past. What shouldn’t be forgotten is that when Elgin removed the sculpture from the Parthenon, the building was in a very sorry state indeed and this is expediently omitted from the commentary and the otherwise excellent interpretation. From the fifth century BC to the seventeenth century AD, it had been in continuous use. It was built as a Greek temple, was later converted into a Christian church, and finally, with the coming of Turkish rule over Greece in the fifteenth century, it was converted into a mosque.

Although we think of it primarily as a pagan temple, its history as church and mosque was an even longer one, and no less distinguished. It was, as one British traveller put it in the mid seventeenth century, 'the finest mosque in the world' but all that changed in 1687 when, during fighting between Venetians and Turks, a Venetian cannonball hit the building, which was inappropriately being used as a temporary a gunpowder store and approximately three hundred women and children were amongst those killed, and the building itself was devastated. By 1800 a small replacement mosque had been erected inside the shell, while the surviving fabric and sculpture was suffering the predictable fate of many ancient ruins.

Elgin might be the bad guy in the eyes of the Greeks but what the Acropolis museum conveniently fails to mention is that at the time he removed the sculptures the local population was using it as a convenient quarry and a great deal of the original sculptures and the basic building blocks of the temple itself, were being reused for new local housing or simply being ground down for mortar. Whatever Elgin's motives for removing the sculptures there is no doubt at all that he saved them from possible even worse damage and without his intervention we might not be even having the ‘Elgin Marbles’ debate at all. I would urge visitors to think about that especially the indignant American who I overheard saying that he planned to write to the British Government with his ill informed opinions! It is important to put things into historical context. Two hundred years ago there was no UNESCO and this wasn’t like turning up in Washington DC and removing the Lincoln Memorial and just carting it away because two hundred years ago very few people actually gave a damn!

Yes the sculptures should be returned to Athens but let’s please acknowledge Elgin’s important role in having saved these precious artefacts for posterity and for the World. The man was not a villain!

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/the-acropolis-museum-in-athens/

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/athens-ancient-greece/

http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/news_and_press_releases/statements/the_parthenon_sculptures.aspx