Grilling

Last year's program directors purchased a gas grill. Despite a winter that was warmer and dryer than normal, it really hasn't been BBQ weather until recently. For our weekly community meal on Sunday, our appointed cooks of the week fired up the grill and gave it a good workout.

 

There were all-American burgers and dogs (even if everything on the menu actually came from Malta), and it was all good. Our cookout was on the roof of our apartment building. It's the only open space we have available.

But do note that some are still wrapped up in blankets. It's warmer in Iowa this week than in Malta! Still not quite BBQ weather here, but we're pushing the envelope.

Song Circle

We're getting down to the final few lectures in our classes at the University of Malta. In a couple of weeks, the semester will be all over except for the minor details of the term papers and/or final exams.

In the European model, most university classes do not have regular assignments -- only a general reading list and one big evaluation at the end of the term. Generally the assessment is a big exam or a major paper. Our students aren't used to this sort of model, so feelings of panic are setting in for some.

One change of pace was today's lecture by Prof. Godfrey Baldacchino on the changing demographic trends in Malta. Dr. Baldacchino is a professor of sociology, who will be moving up next year to the position of "pro-rector" (what most U.S. universities would call a vice president). Not only was he a dynamic lecturer in presenting the material, but he got the class warmed up in a rather unusual way.

Prof. Baldacchino brought his "song circle" to class. This is an informal group, none of whom are professional musicians, who simply like to sing. They get together at least once a week to do just that. They came prepared with pop songs (David Bowie's "Space Oddity," which they said hit the charts in 1969 when Bowie was performing in Malta), as well as several folk songs about life on the island. We were invited to sing along, though a couple of the songs were in Maltese, which made it a challenge.

It was an interesting way to begin a lecture. Class discussion was much more lively than usual. That may have been the presentation, or it may have been the music.

Acropolis

When we have more time to plan, we generally like to get some background on tour guides, either from online ratings or from other faculty who have used that guide in the past. We didn't have that luxury for this trip, but we got lucky.

Christina explains the Theater of Dyonisis

Our guide, Christina, met us at the hotel at 8 a.m. and walked us through the Plaka to the Theater of Dyonisis, then up to the Acropolis. There was hardly anyone there, and she did an excellent job of explaining the history and architecture of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion.

Mo and Maddie take in the view with their cameras on the way up the Acropolis

As crowds gathered she used the view from the top to point out the general plan of the city and key landmarks.

Entrance to the Acropolis in morning light.

From the summit we walked down hill to the Acropolis Museum, a wonderful facility that would be more complete if half of the ancient sculptures from the Parthenon hadn't been stolen by the British in the early 1800s.

Squinting into the Athens sun with the Parthenon and Erechthion behind us.

Everything in this museum was discovered on the Acropolis, and there are hundreds and hundreds of statues that were buried there by the Greeks to keep them from falling into the hands of invading Persians. This preserved them very well.

Finding some shade in which to learn about Greek mythology

The various models and videos are very helpful in understanding how the Acropolis changed and developed over the centuries, transformed through Greek, Roman, Christian, Byzantine, Muslim, and modern eras.

Erechthion

We had been here four years ago, but had a more comprehensive art and history lesson this time.

The Acropolis Museum brings a smile to Maddie and Greta as the rest follow.

The students were dragging a bit by noon, so we took a quick snack break. That revived everyone a little bit.

Whole group pose at the Temple of Olympian Zeus with Acropolis in background

Continuing through the Plaka, we were led to the Arch of Hadrian, which we had visited on our first afternoon, but the students received a better explanation this time. We also actually went into the grounds of the Temple of Zeus, rather than just seeing it through the fence.

Pondering the site of the first modern Olympic games

The day was getting warm and long when we visited the Stadium. The ancient stadium was unearthed, restored and expanded to become the site of the first modern Olympic games in 1896. It has been further modernized, but only had a symbolic role in the 2004 games.

We finished with the Agora (both Roman and Classical, plus the museum) which took quite a while. We were all getting tired, so I'm not sure how much the students truly appreciated that they were walking on the very stones once trod by folks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (not to mention St. Paul and other New Testament figures). It was an excellent tour, though a great deal to take in all in one day.

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.

Athens

The van picked us up right on time to take us to the airport. But I foolishly neglected to ask everyone if they had their travel documents until we had been underway for a few minutes. So we circled back, then tried again. We still arrived at the airport in plenty of time, and the flight was on schedule. We've been very lucky with flights all through the semester.

Athens is only about a one hour and forty minute flight. The airport is easy to navigate, and thanks to the 2004 Olympics, connections to the city are cheap and easy. We opted for the express bus. The Metro might have been a few minutes faster, but cost €2 per person more, and we weren't in a rush.

We were fortunate to have a nice hotel located very close to Syntagma Square (or in English, Constitution Square) -- the very heart of Athens. So it didn't take us long to get checked in. One exciting note, however -- an elderly Greek man came up to me as we waited for a stoplight and said, "Watch your bags! Gypsy women are following you." He may have been looking for a tip for himself. I didn't see any suspicious-looking women in the crowd. But I did remind the group of a famous Rick Steves travel tip: In most European tourist destinations there are only two kinds of people -- tourists and pick-pockets. Since we'd just learned of increased pick-pocket activity in Malta, it was a good reminder.

We weren't surprised to see some political protesters in the Square. The Greek Parliament meets in the National Palace here, so protesters are par for the course. If we could have read the signs, we might have known what they were protesting, but it was all Greek to us. (As I discovered when we visited here four years ago, two years of New Testament Greek in college is very nearly useless in modern Greece -- partly because of changes in the language, but mostly due to four decades of forgetfulness.)

After everyone got settled, we met in the lobby for "Mark's official orientation walk." I had done some research to prepare. The Greek Ministry of Tourism takes a dim view of unlicensed tour guides, but I decided to risk it and was ready to plead that I am a professor teaching rather than a guide leading a tour. After all, Socrates used to walk though the agora with his students following behind him. (But then again, look what Athens did to Socrates!)

Maddie poses with one of the guards

We started by seeing the changing of the guard at the Greek tomb of the unknown soldier. It's a pretty unique exercise, especially in the traditional 1820s uniforms.

The honor guard approaches. There is one pleat in the skirt for each year of Ottoman occupation.

We then walked down Ermou Street, the big, high-end pedestrian mall (think Nicolette Mall in Minneapolis), hoping to visit the 1,000-year-old Church of Kapnikarea that sits right in the middle of the street. Unfortunately, it was closed.

Kapnikarea

So we continued on to Monastiraki Square. That place was so lively on a Saturday evening that I doubt the students heard a thing I said about the monastery that used to be here (with only the chapel remaining), or the mosque left here by the Turks. They did show some interest in the 2nd century A.D. ruins in the Metro station.

Some of what was found when excavating for the Monastiraki Metro station.

We left the commotion of the square, working our way down the narrow Pandrossou Street. Fortunately, none got lost in the souvenir shops. At the Mitropolis (cathedral) we got inside another 1,000 year old church, the Eleftherios, so that I could explain the architecture and iconography. That helped the cathedral make better sense, perhaps.

Tiny Eleftherios Church was the cathedral of Athens during Ottoman rule, when Christians had to keep a low profile.

Side view of Eleftherios showing carved stones. Sorry, no photos allowed inside.

On Saturday evening, all the church supply, vestment, and icon shops of Filotheis Street were closed, but we saw what we needed to see in the shop windows. Then we continued on Adrianou (Hadrian) Street to the Lysicrates monument (in ancient Athens, they had trophies for the best play or poem, as well as for the best athletes), and on to the Arch of Hadrian and a peek through the fence at the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

Ruins of the Temple of Zeus

By that time, the group was sick of me, and anxious to explore the shops and nightlife of the Plaka, the old center of Athens. So we turned them loose. Mary and I returned to the neighborhood around Syntagma, completing the triangle of our tour. Based on online recommendations Mary had researched, we found a little, family-run restaurant off the beaten track for some real Greek food and some cold liquid refreshment.

Meggie and Abby have just had a look at Hadrian's Gate

More Visitors

We had some surprise visitors from Iowa this evening. Two recently retired Luther faculty members, Uwe Rudolf and Ruth Caldwell, a married couple who are not strangers to Malta by any means, dropped by. They had been traveling in Italy and came back for several days on the island.

Uwe said this must be at least his eighth visit to Malta, and Ruth said this was at least her fourth time here. They have been directors of this program, as well as maintaining other links here through former Luther students and others.

Mary looks out over St. Julian's Bay

It was good to see them, to hear news from home, and to get a sense from them of how the program and the neighborhood have changed over the years. How odd to go three months with no visitors, and then to have two couples from Iowa in the span of a couple of weeks!

Changing Course

In the months leading up to our departure for Malta, we had several people remark to us about our "bravery" in going to Europe. The Paris attacks last fall put everyone on edge, and the March attack in Brussels has increased those concerns.

The U.S. State Department has a world-wide travel caution in place, as well as an alert for all of Europe. On March 29 they issued a Travel Warning for Turkey. While the primary concerns are in the capital city of Ankara and near the Iraqi and Syrian borders, tourist areas in Istanbul were also mentioned. It's true there have been recent bombings there, though none in the area of the old city. None of the cautions, alerts, or warnings tell people not to travel, only to be careful.

We were scheduled to take our students to Istanbul next week. We were there four years ago, and it's an absolutely perfect place for these students to see. The history of Byzantium, interplay between Christian and Muslim influences, the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and modern politics of the European Union -- all things they've heard about in their class lectures -- can be seen in Istanbul.

Security, however, is a primary concern. So this week, powers that be back in Iowa canceled our plans for Istanbul. I respect the decision. There are factors involved for the institution that go beyond historical interest or the study of current events.

The last 48 hours have been hectic. I've had to cancel everything we'd planned in Istanbul -- flights, hotels, ground transportation, guides. Flights were non-refundable, so thousands of dollars are forfeit. We've also had to make alternative plans -- our students are promised a number of trips as part of this program. So new flights had to be booked, a new hotel reserved, new guides discovered, etc., etc. At the last minute, there are few bargains.

Our "Plan B" destination is Athens -- also a great city that we visited four years ago. There's not quite as much to see (more ancient and Byzantine, less of the rest), and flight schedules mean we'll have a trip one day shorter. But it should still be a valuable experience and a good time. Stay tuned for details.