Contra

Draft reflections on a first visit to an ancient city


Contra

Athens is a city of contradictions. It is at once threatening and friendly, ancient and thoroughly modern, beautiful and crumbling, the monuments impeccably kempt, and yet the streets strewn with litter, grime and starving – or dead – dogs and cats. There is a sense, today, of both a strutting confidence in its history, yet at the same time a fragility brought about by extreme financial crisis and uncertain relations with neighbours near and not-so-near; Turkey, Cyprus, and now Israel (due to the storming by Israeli marines of a Greek-flagged ship taking aid to Palestinian camps) and the rest of Europe, who seem ambivalent about helping Greece out of the financial crevace upon which it finds itself precariously perched.

The Parthenon looks down upon the new Athens like a sandstone metaphor, propped and suspended by steel rope and girders, very gradually crumbling under the weight of time and the keen feet of the tourists whose Euro are now, more than ever, so essential to the city’s economy.

The archaeological endeavour – which was finally done justice by the improvements made to its presentation prior to the 2004 Olympic Games – has uncovered the most astounding historical sites in the Western world. The technologies of the aquaduct and the drains, along with the complex and precedential social and political structures revealed by the material structures only confirm the school-learned characterisation of the ‘cradle of civilisation’.

However, the tourist experience of Athens is also one of contradiction, as the museumified experience can only render the Acropolis, the Agora, their fabrications and sculptures, pure third order simulacra. They are all simply copies of the images of television, guidebooks and cinema represeatations of “Ancient Greece”, signs which signify the equally short-circuited and now seemingly empty notion of ‘democracy’.