Philhellenism

Then

I have long loved ancient Greece, and with it, where its remnants (mostly) live and are celebrated, modern Greece. My obsession with Greece started way back so long ago, when I was in the single digits, after Star Wars fandom but before teenaged dedication to pop musicians like Wham! and Culture Club. (Actually, thinking about it, perhaps my love of all things Star Wars paved the way for my love of Greek mythology and history, or so a reading of Joseph Campbell would have you believe.) I made temples to the gods at the beach of our bayhouse, dressed as Artemis and Athena for Halloween, had a pen pal in Athens (Yiassou, long lost Martha Bitsopoulou, wherever you now roam), took Latin because it was the closest to an ancient language I could get at my high school, went to Greek festivals and restaurants, traveled to Greece twice, paid homage to the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum when I went to London, and even declared a classical studies major in college, taking 8 semesters of ancient Greek language.

The New Acropolis Museum opened last week, what looks to be a beautiful, modern home to the archaeological treasures of the Parthenon, Erechtheion, etc. Well, all except, of course, as you probably know, the sculptures that make up the Elgin Marbles, which were looted in the early 19th-century by Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Ottoman Empire which held Greece. Let us not get into that here (instead, go read Kimmelman, Hitchens, and Konstandaras etc.), if only because, while the temperature of that debate has been taken up several degrees with the completion of a suitable, safe home for the marbles, the disagreement between Greece and the British Museum is not likely to be settled, ever, to the satisfaction of all involved.

But I strongly remember my first visit to the "old" Acropolis Museum with its remaining damaged Caryatids housed in a dimly lit, thin case with dust visible everywhere. Even as an 18 year old on her first trip out of her own country, I knew enough to see that the museum was in tatters, that the marbles were better off in London, even though I had yet to see them there. Seeing everything I'd read about, dreamed about, was wonderful but also bittersweet; the state of it all often made me sad, like people who have beloved pets that they just can't take good care of. Despite that--because of that?--I have long had a soft spot for Greece and wished for its people a reunion with one of their most treasured masterpieces. And when the Olympics went off spectacularly, pretty much without a hitch, I had hopes for the country, maybe not for the return of the marbles, but even just for the possibility of being viewed without bemusement, frustration, and pity, as they had always seemed to be by their European (and American, though our relationship with Greece is different than Europe's) cohorts.

And it makes me want to go back. To create new memories of the Acropolis and its museum (which houses some ten times more than the old one), of the country as a whole, that has, in a way, grown up--which seems so patronizing to say of the many millennia-old homeland of Homer, Socrates, Euripides, Sappho, and Phidias--in the 20 years since I was there. I too have grown up in 20 years. And I'd love to go back again, both to Greece and to my childhood love, if only to see how Greece, and, perhaps as importantly, I have changed.

Now