Greece is Great!
Jan Migenda
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In 2016, I did a guided tour through Greece with a group of Irish students! From Athens to Sparta and more ... enjoy lots of history!
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War Museum
Greece, along with the rest of Europe, has had a fair share of the burden of war, starting perhaps from the Sea People (Myceneans?) devastating the Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, over the Trojan War, the defenses against the Persians, infighting between city...
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Acropolis Museum 3 - Statues!
Level up! Having come to the last floor of the museum, a huge collection of statues awaited us under the rooftop ... Entering, you would see a small cinema showing a film about the history of the Acropolis with all its destruction, reconstruction and reuse (see my first...
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Acropolis Museum Part 2 - Statues and Colours
Having finished the ground floor of the museum, we walked up to see the next part ... parts from excavations were to be seen along the walk upstairs. They used all the space available! The first floor of the museum showcased something surprising. Maybe we thought of...
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Acropolis Museum
Why do we put old stuff from millennia ago in musea and pay to see them? There is something fascinating about delving into history using objects rather than books, marvelling at the skills of people in the past that lead up to the development of our technology and...
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At The Foot of The Acropolis
Coming down from the Acropolis, some nice sights await you: At the foot of the Acropolis, there lies the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. It was built in the 2nd century AD, and singers such as Maria Callas gave concerts here. This stone inscription is a dedication of the...
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The Acropolis 2
Here comes part 2 of the Acropolis because it is so big ;) An illustration showed us what the Acropolis looked like when it was intact in the Classical Period: A statue of Athena, protector goddess of the city, with some votive offerings, and a temple in the...
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The Acropolis 1
The next day, we got to see an absolute highlight in Athens: The Acropolis! Having been settled since the Neolithic Age, it was used by the kings of Mycene and later re-designed under Pericles by Phidias, a genius architect in the 5th century BC. Walking up to the...
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Areopagus - The City Council
This simple rock on a hill above the city of Athens is the orator's stage for the Areopagus, the historical city council of Athens that existed since the 6th century BC. Nobles and magistrates (later also more citizens) would gather here to decide on the state's...
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Temple of Olympian Zeus
The Olympieion (Temple of Olympian Zeus) was the largest temple in Greece and took over 600 years to complete (from the 6th century BC with some breaks until the 2nd century AD). It must have been majestic, but fell to a barbarian invasion in the 3rd century AD and was...
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Roman Agora: Hadrian's Heritage
Time to leave the musea and go outside again! We walked quite a bit as you can see: The Orthodox church close to the Kerameikos is on the hill to the right, the Greek agora to our feet on the left, and here we were overseeing it all. However, soon we went down to see...
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Agora Museum
The Agora Museum close to the Stoa offers some little highlights important for understanding Ancient Greece: Ceramic shards like these were incised and used for voting in the new democratic system, also for ostracising (banning) people that were considered dangerous....
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The Stoa (Shopping Mall of Philosophy)
Behind the trees of the marketplace, you see the Stoa Poikile (colourful shopping mall) where the popular philosophy of Stoicism originated in the 3rd century BC (Zeno of Citium). It focuses on a divine principle (logos) as the principle of a passive material world...
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Marketplace (Agora) and Temple
After crawling all the musea described in my last post, we finally headed out onto the marketplace (agora). It was a cultural and political centre (apart from the Acropolis) from the 5th century BC onwards. It is a very green place today, and you can see the Acropolis...
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Kerameikos Museum
Leaving the Kerameikos cemetery, we went to the ceramics museum close by. It was small but showed some fine examples of Ancient Greek ceramics. It showed not only amphoras and ritual vessels, but also toys as gifts for deceased children. Remember that child mortality...
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Kerameikos Cemetery
You could spend hours, no - days, in all the musea of Athens! However, our group also had plans for outside to get the blood flowing ... we went to see the Kerameikos, cemetery of Athens' ancient noble families. The geometric structure of the Classical Period is...
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National Museum of Archeology Athens - Hellenistic Period
The Hellenistic Period (4th century BC - first few centuries AD) was a period of profound political change: The poleis (city-states) gave way to the empire of Alexander the Great and his successors, spanning from Sicily to India, where Stoic Greek philosophy met...
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National Museum of Archeology - Classical Period 2
The reconstruction of the Pantheon reliefs of the Acropolis in colour was an important work as the originals were partially destroyed by wind and weather, partly by some Christians (!) as they thought they had to do away with pagan superstitions. Also, buildings and...
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National Museum of Archeology Athens - Classical Period
The Classical Period (5th - 4th century BC) saw extremely important inventions in politics (an early for of demcracy), art and architecture, literature and theatre, philosophy (Plato) and science (Aristotle) that shaped nothing less than the course of Western history...
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National Museum of Archeology Athens - Archaic Period
The Archaic Period (ca. 750 - 500 BC) saw a variety of changes: The structure of the "polis" (city-state) with an army of hoplites emerged, accompanied by various intellectual achievements such as poetry and drama (A. Snodgrass). Minted coins showed man conquering...
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National Museum of Archeology Athens - Bronze Age II
Although the Bronze Age was famous for warlike values and competing nobility, as Homer's "Iliad" tells us, also other cultural achievements were made in that time. The Linear script on these clay tablets is the forerunner of the Greek alphabet, and as far as I know,...
