All Greek to Me

I spent last weekend in London celebrating my one-year anniversary of moving to Delhi by reuniting with my old flatmates from our Gautam Nagar guesthouse.  On the way, I did a wander through the British Museum with another friend who happened to be in from Boston.

It's a testament to London's cultural and historical wealth that this was the first time in many trips that I was retracing my steps through a tourist attraction.  Even if I had been to the British Museum hundreds of times, though, I would go back in a heartbeat.  As a philosophy major and a longtime student of Greek antiquity, the giant collection of statues and marbles makes my heart just pitter-patter.  I wandered through, my mouth agape, pointing out every artistic detail I could remember to my Boston friend.

She nodded along for a while, then wondered aloud, "I wonder how the British Museum got to keep all of this stuff.  Shouldn't it be in Greece?"

That is an excellent question, of course, although one I left for the pamphlets at the entrance to explain rather than go into the details of colonialism.  It reminded me of my own trip to Greece as a backpacking undergrad, just a few short months before the Athens Olympics were to kick off.  Even then, I was eager to see Greek history up close, and it was with a deep and profound awe that I looked forward to seeing the epitome of architectural mastery: the Parthenon in Athens.

Photo not mine -- original from linz_ellinas

When I approached the building however, I learned that a few key pieces were missing, or had been replaced by replicas.  It wasn't the real Parthenon, in other words.  The majority of the originals were in the city where I had just made my first, three-day visit, though, sadly, without stepping foot into any museums -- London.

Whoops!  There it is!

Yes, they were all kept in what is now my favorite room on the island of Britain: The Parthenon Room.

I felt a right idiot.

Of course, that wasn't the only odd part of my trip to Athens.  In preparation for the Olympics, the authorities were giving the entire Acropolis a little facelift.  Scaffolding propped up parts of the Parthenon and the Erechtheum.  Approaching the windy southwest corner of the rocky promontory, I noticed a jumble of stones where the Temple of Athena Nike was supposed to be . . . but no Temple of Athena Nike.

Well, readers, they had taken this gorgeous, ancient temple apart. To clean it.

Don't worry. They were going to put it back together when they were done.

So, if someone isn't putting it indoors in another country with the outside facing in, someone's quietly dismantling it for a week or two. Which, speaking of philosophy, begs an interesting question: if a temple has been rebuilt for the hundredth time last week, how ancient is it really?