I.
On a hill in the northwest corner of the ancient Athenian Agora, the Temple of Hephaestus is pocked with bullet holes. The little craters of exact proportion stand in stark contrast to the more natural degradations of time on the Dorian columns, those marks of erosion on marble like the jagged teeth of some primordial being. The pockmarks signal a rational destruction, a testament to humanity’s ability to destroy itself faster and with more accuracy than any god or demon. They are a fitting tribute to Hephaestus, the cripple god of craft, irrespective of their providence. The bullet holes could be said to be the culmination of a several hundred-year process, an effort to mold a Southern Balkan nation long attached to the Ottoman Empire into Europe’s Eden, the foreign homeland which had for so long eluded the new masters of the world. But, in another sense, their origin was quite straightforward. The bullet holes in Hephaestus’s temple originated from machine guns fired from the hill underlying the Acropolis, from where British forces sought to extricate the Greek Partisans taking cover in the temple.
The partisans, who had fought alongside the British against the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis in years past, had learned the lessons of combat in the ancient city. They had learned that the hovels and tenements where most of them lived could be torn to shreds with modern automatic weapons, but the marble buildings of the ancients? They were resilient. No one worried much about the building’s significance; there were more pressing concerns. Athenians had always lived among the ruins of the past, they were used to conversions of structures from temples to churches to mosques and back again as meaning was imposed upon them.
It was the British and the Germans, though these ones (usually) without machine guns, that seemed hellbent on turning the city into a museum, and the process was relatively new. It had been less than 15 years since the American School of Classical Studies in Athens had bought the strip of land in the central city and declared it the Agora, a sacred space to be left untouched by time, and evicted and demolished entire neighborhoods which sat on top of their discovery. Some of the partisans under Hephaestus’s protection had probably lived in now-vanished buildings at the foot of the hill, after and before the Agora was the Agora. Between taking cover and returning fire, the partisans probably didn’t consider the irony that it wasn’t the horrors of occupation and civil war that had disappeared their homes, but rather a peculiar thing called “historical preservation.”
The temple receives fewer visitors than some of the nearby attractions. Take, for instance, a mossy foundation sitting just beyond the formal bounds of the Agora, which, since 1976, has been called the Prison of Socrates. Socrates’s prison was in fact first excavated in 1949, as the last of the partisans from up on the hill were rounded up and sent to island prisons, but it was not until the democratic era that an American archeologist, after rereading Plato’s Crito, noticed two conspicuous features in the otherwise anonymous structure. He noticed a room with a bath, which Socrates is said in the dialogue to have used, and he noticed thirteen small jars, the exact kind, he reasoned, which would have been necessary for the systematic administration of the hemlock poison that the philosopher used to end his life. Thus, Socrates’ prison was born. To look at Socrates’s prison and experience it as such is to look at a line of stones and imagine the building that grew from it, imagine the people who came and went, and the person who never left. It is to imagine the philosopher as a mortal of flesh and blood whose temporal life was and then was not. It is a powerful exercise in radical empathy and in the decentering of the sensual perception of a thing’s existence towards an ephemeral reality in which ghosts are real and omnipresent. It is an exercise which, if done correctly, makes the line of stones entirely superfluous.
II.
Today’s Athens is a city of museums, and you can trace the history of Greece, the middle east, and the entire world if you spend long enough in their halls. But there are limitations. To the English speaker in Athens, history ends in the year 1944. The Athens War Museum traces the greatness of Hellenistic martial prowess from the Spartans and Macadoneans all the way through to the heroics of the Greek soldiers of the Second World War. Of course, the Greek military is humble about their great victories of the second half of the 20th century: the wars against farmers and laborers, the war against democracy. The museum, in its personal history, is a testament to papered over divides and negotiated amnesias. The museum’s establishment was decided by the Greek parliament in 1967, when that body served under the watchful eye of the colonels and their allied royal family, and the museum was finally inaugurated in 1975, after both had been expelled, its opening presided over by Konstantinos Tsatsos, the first elected president of Greece to serve a full term. It was as if to give the military their museum was to imprison them in it, to replace the body which had served as an authoritarian modernizing force, the Latin junta, with an apolitically patriotic one, the European military.
November 17th is commemorated as the end of the military dictatorship and the return of democracy in Greece. It marks the last day of the Polytechnic Uprising, when students at Athens premier university protested for the return of democracy and were gunned down by tanks in the courtyards of academic buildings. There are monuments and plaques remembering the uprising, but its most important commemoration was written in law, a statute banning police and military from college campuses in all but the most dire of circumstances. In 2019, after a decade of civil unrest and legitimacy-bleeding left wing governments, the newly-elected right wing New Democracy party repealed the law.
Despite the nominally legitimate nationalist bent to the November 17th commemoration, it is more or less the exclusive purview of the left. In Athens it is marked by a march in which I saw more red flags in one place than in any other moment of my life. At the head of the march are the survivors of the original uprising, followed in turn by the labor unionists and respectable leftists, with the anarchists and the general milieu of black-bloc/crust-punk types making up the rear. The march ends at the American Embassy, and after a while the elderly and respectable types disperse, leaving only the anarchists and armored police to stage their ritual combat, a pastiche of pitched battle that lets both groups quench their thirst for the real thing. A tattoo artist I knew described the night as “a load of fun… After they pushed us to Exarchia, they left us alone… by the end of the night everyone was drunk and sleeping with each other.”
III.
Writing on ancient buildings comes in many forms. Inscriptions, written in a bizarre first person, announce “I am a boundary rock. I serve to demarcate the limits of the city of Athens and I was laid in the time of Pericles.” Others form fragments, in the Christian dark ages the means and skill to mine marble were lost, and old buildings were stripped of stone for the building of the new. It is for this reason that a Byzantine church might announce on its exterior walls a broken and half-erased dedication to Phoebus Apollo. But it was a third style of marking I found the most transfixing. Crude script on marble walls with cruder meanings, graffiti of times past, the bored scribbles of children and soldiers announcing themselves to history, marking their friendships and loves, but, more often than not, reveling in simple obscenity, penning broken verses on throbbing cocks, marking a wall without the intention of leaving a legacy for future generations, but because the wall was close by.
I remember Athens in these ways and others. I remember Athens in the smell of the Old Spice I was using when I was there, in flashes out a car window, in music in the streets, and in the worst weed I’ve ever smoked. I remember conversations in cafes where cigarette smoke wafted and English was used because it was the common language among the Afghans and the Serbs. I remember crushing feelings of loneliness. I remember uneven sidewalks and dog shit everywhere and broken drain systems which would dump gray water down onto the sidewalk. I remember the brief period before sunrise when the city truly ground to a halt, when the streets held a sublime stillness and the apartment buildings could have been empty for a thousand years.
Near the end of my time in Greece I took a short trip to the island of Lesbos. I went for a morning swim where the edge of Asia was visible on the horizon and found in the sea a red rectangle, seemingly of terracotta, which had a deep groove running longways through its center. I realized it was shindling, probably not from Sappho’s house, but conceivably Roman in origin, quite ancient to be sure. I dried it off and packed it away. I was going to give it to someone I loved. Something special, a thing to have and to hold, direct evidence of a communion with time and space, a talisman connecting then and now and there and here and her and I. But when I was leaving the hotel to board that propeller plane through a Mediterranean storm I paused, and I dropped the thing in the grass. When I got back to Athens I stopped in at a tourist trap in Plaka and bought her a t-shirt that had emblazoned on the chest, “I don’t need Google, my mother-in-law knows everything.” It was stupid, sure, but I remember how she laughed when she read it.
Miles Kenny is a writer and lapsed historian. He works at Rose City Book Pub in Northeast Portland, OR, where he serves used books alongside food and drink. He spends much of his time thinking about stuff and a little bit of it writing stuff down.