Elginism: For or Against?

From a 2001 print ad by TBWA\Athens highlighting the plight of the Parthenon Marbles. There seems to be no elginism.org any more, but you should definitely be reading elginism.com, a great source of news on repatriation struggles from all over the world. Lord Elgin was the man who ripped the Parthenon Marbles from the Parthenon and brought them back to Britain in 1801.

Via someone's Facebook feed (sorry, forgot who!)

Breaking News: Ancient Greece Entirely Fabricated

You suspected it, all along:

According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.

Frustrated by the gap in the record, and finding archaeologists to be "not much help at all," they took the problem to colleagues who were then scrambling to find a way to explain where things such as astronomy, cartography, and democracy had come from.

Within hours the greatest and most influential civilization of all time was born.

"One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago," Haddlebury said. "One thing led to another, and before you know it, we're coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad."

"That was a bitch to write, by the way," he continued, referring to the pic poem believed to have laid the foundation for the Western literary tradition. "But it seemed to catch on."

I bet! It takes a long time to read, it must have taken at least a week to write.

NOW we know what's up with the scaffolding. They just built it!

Emily Nguyen-Whiteman, one of the young academics who "pulled a month's worth of all-nighters" working on the project, explained that the whole of ancient Greek architecture was based on buildings in Washington, D.C., including a bank across the street from the coffee shop where they met to "bat around ideas about mythology or whatever."

"We picked Greece because we figured nobody would ever go there to check it out," Nguyen-Whiteman said. "Have you ever seen the place? It's a dump. It's like an abandoned gravel pit infested with cats."

She added, "Inevitably, though, people started looking around for some of this 'ancient' stuff, and next thing I know I'm stuck in Athens all summer building a goddamn Parthenon just to cover our tracks."

Read the rest here.

Greeks Beseige Acropolis

Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (via NY Times)

AOL News has the archaeopop headline of the day: "Greeks Beseige Acropolis". Some Communist protesters against the Greek government's austerity plan decided to get themselves some unforgettable media via a banner drop below the Parthenon. Reactions were mixed:

ATHENS, Greece (May 4) -- As thousands of workers spilled onto the streets of the Greek capital to protest new austerity measures, some 200 communist supporters swarmed the Acropolis, Greece's most sacrosanct archaeological site, and unfurled banners reading: "People of Europe -- Rise up."

The scene at the most important symbol of ancient Athenian democracy didn't leave just onlooking tourists aghast. "I'm a communist, but this is a disgrace," said Aliki Rizopoulou, phoning in to a radio talk show early today. "There's nothing catchy about having foreigners seeing us as wacky on top of being considered liars and cheaters."

Minutes after protesters lined up along the defensive walls of the Acropolis, they began picketing before the Parthenon, wielding red flags and shouting anti-government slogans for more than three hours before a state prosecutor ordered them to leave and riot police escorted them off the grounds.

Interesting reactions - the Parthenon has such a religious character in contemporary Greek identity that even some Communists are uncomfortable with the gesture. Happily, no tourists were interfered with. The AP has a short video with more on the context of the protests, with lots of loving closeups of booze, cigarettes, and gasoline!

1668: The Parthenon as Monster Manual

George Wheler's Athens, 1676 (via Surprised by Time)

How did people experience archaeological sites in the age before archaeology? We like to think that sites we know well have 'obvious' meanings, but it's not always so. Take the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, who found first himself at Athens - then barely a village - in the hot summer of 1668.

When Evliya saw the Parthenon, he saw a mosque with a minaret, surrounded by 46 columns, and for most of the way around, the space between the columns and the walls was open to the sky, not lidded over. He saw sculptured scenes on the metopes between the tops of the columns, and more scenes around the top of the cella. Our interpretations are dominated by archaeologists, but Evliya was under no such handicap. The sculptures he saw contained fairies, angels, dragons, elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes, scorpions, crocodiles, thousands of mice, cats, ghouls, cherubs, and many many other kinds of creatures from this world and others in processions: one of the saved in Paradise, the other of those petrified in Hell.

This reconstruction of his experience, from Diana Gilliland Wright's wonderful blog on Greece in the 15th century, exposes how modern is our understanding of the mysterious place-time called 'Classical Greece'.


More fantastic than it looks.

I love this vision of the Parthenon as a fantastic bestiary, a Monster Manual if you will. You could tell stories about it without being an 'expert' or a trained tour guide, and find ways of fitting the building organically into your life experience. To me, it's a little sad that the Parthenon - and other monuments like it - have become places whose meaning is controlled by academic research. People make culture by telling each other stories about places. When you take away their right to tell stories - take away the element of fantasy - you strip away their ability to engage with the environment. If you take away the fantasy, it becomes really boring to visit archaeological sites.


The Parthenon metopes, as seen by Evliya.

There's a lot of talk in archaeology about "multivocality", or including non-experts in storytelling about the past. Of course, almost no one actually does it.

The rest of Evliya's stories about the Parthenon and Athens are fascinating. He reports that Athens was founded by Solomon, and describes the ceiling built for the Byzantine cathedral of the early middle ages:

The ceiling Evliya saw was made of cypress, gilded and painted. This was not the lid of marble coffers constructedby Iktinos and Kallikrates. At some time in the unwritten history of Athens between about 250 and 550 -- Evliya said it was on the night of the birth of Mohammed -- there was a catastrophic fire in the cella. The gold and ivory Athena was consumed, and the marble lid came crashing down, bringing down most of the interior structure with the double levels of columns... The Christians took over a shell, not Pericles' Parthenon.

In a sense, there was no such thing as the Parthenon until the 17th or 18th century: it was the church of the Virgin of Athens, then the Friday Mosque after the Ottomans took over the city. The concept of the "Parthenon" had no relationship to the experience of the users of the building, and had to be constructed over centuries. With, needless to say, mixed results.

Read the rest of the post over at Surprised by Time, it's great. It gives you a real sense of the history we lost in the mad rush to purge modern Greece of its Byzantine and Ottoman heritage.