Byzantine Day

We had to put the Athens trip together on pretty short notice. Travel days are always stressful, and one day we had planned would also be intense. So we opted to give the students a free day on Sunday, along with suggestions of several museums and other sites, and carefully researched directions on how to reach them. This gave us a free day, too.

A small part of the Byzantine & Christian Museum

Top suggestion for the students was the National Archeological Museum. It's the largest collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, and when we visited four years ago, we found it quite spectacular. We were pleased that at least a few of our students took our suggestion.

The parade begins.

Mary and I opted to check out something new, however. The Byzantine and Christian Museum is located quite near our hotel, so we walked there. It appeared to be a rather small place, so we didn't think it would take very long. Little did we realize that most of the museum is under ground. It's a pretty big place!

Mary got a good close-up

It pays to be a senior citizen with a residency card from an EU country. That ticket price is half the fee charged to the typical American tourist. It also helps that most Greeks, though they speak English quite well, are unable to discern American English from Maltese English. We quickly learned to avoid lengthy explanations and to simply be Maltese.

The band plays on

The Byzantine Empire ruled the area that is now Greece -- as well as much of Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and various other lands -- from the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. until the Ottoman conquest in 1453 A.D. Byzantium (now called Istanbul) had its ups and downs during that almost 1,000 year period, but it was a formative era for Orthodox Christianity, which broke from the Roman church in 1054 A.D. The museum is focused more on Orthodoxy than Byzantine politics.

The "Sacred Way" through Kerameikos

After nearly two hours with the spectacular icons and other artifacts at the museum, we began walking back toward Syntagma Square, and were surprised to hear band music. Each Sunday at about 11 a.m. there is a much more elaborate changing of the guard ceremony at the tomb of the unknown Greek soldier. It involves a marching band, as well as the entire elite regiment of honor guards. We happened to walk by right in the middle of it.

Kerameikos

The guards wear their "Sunday best," white uniforms instead of the usual blue, and march down the street behind the band in a rather odd step that extends the right leg out front. The right foot comes down hard on the downbeat. The parade is something to see, and seemed to us much more exciting than the ceremony which followed.

View of the Acropolis from Kerameikos

We continued down Ermou Street once again, past Monisteraki, through a large and rather bizarre Sunday flea market, to Kerameikos -- a word from which we get our English word "ceramics." It used to be the region where pottery was made. But long before that, in ancient times, this area was just outside the city wall, along the major road to the sea. It was, therefore, the "necropolis" of Athens, the city of the dead.

An Athens street merchant sells sesame rolls.

This ancient cemetery has been excavated in order to learn about the changing burial practices of the Greeks through the Archaic, Classical and Roman periods. Most of the surviving grave markers and monuments are preserved in a museum on the site. But faithful replicas have replaced these outside, showing exactly the spots where they would have originally been.

Street in Anafiotika

A unique feature of the monuments during the Classical period is that the inscriptions on the stone monuments are written as if the stone, itself, is speaking. "I am the monument erected by Dionysios as a testament to his grief over his dead son, Dexileos, the horseman." It's a fascinating example of the way written words were conceived of when the writing was a new invention!

Just a very small glimpse of the National Gardens

We'd been on our feet a long time by mid-afternoon, so we found a cafe where we could sit with a cold beverage and people-watch for awhile. There were certainly a lot of people to watch! It is Palm Sunday on the Orthodox calendar, so many Greek families are together for all-afternoon family luncheons in the sidewalk cafes. The streets of the Plaka are bustling with locals, as well as tourists.

An island of turtles in the National Gardens

Rested, we took on the final challenge of the day, an upward climb up the slope of the Acropolis to a neighborhood known as Anafiotika, because many of the original residents had come to Athens from the Greek island of Anafi. This area is notable because of the winding, narrow streets and quaint little houses that remain here, looking much as all of Athens looked a couple hundred years ago, before it became a big city.

After this, we'd had enough of being tourists. We returned to the hotel for a bit of a respite, then set out to find a good meal. This is not hard to do in Greece, so we were successful in finding a good spot where we lingered over the meal and the unexpected complimentary dessert before calling it a day.