Museums, Church, and Paul

So, it has been exceptionally busy here. As our professors keep reminding us, this is not a vacation, and lately, it has definately been a whole lot of homework. For those of you who think that semesters abroad are way fun, they totally are . . . but they're a whole lot of work, too!

On Thursday, we went to the Acropolis Museum. There isn’t very much in there, but it was built because Athens did not have a place to store the many pieces of the Parthenon and other ancient buildings that were stolen by Sir Elgin of London. He stole many marble figures from the Parthenon and surrounding areas, and brought them back to the London Museum where they still are. This means that people who go to Athens to see the Parthenon in its entirety (like, say, a class from Concordia) cannot do so. The argument of the brits is that if they had been left on site, more than likely they would have been quite deteriorated if not completely defaced and destroyed. That’s accurate, but what are pieces of the PARTHENON from ATHENS, GREECE doing in the BRITISH MUSEUM???? That really makes no sense at all to me. In response, the people of Athens built this huge building, and are in the process of filling it with archeological pieces they found while excavating, with the hope that someday those darn brits will return the pieces of the Parthenon that were stolen. Dr. Hammerling doesn’t think that this is very likely, but I guess we all can hope. I guess the moral of the story is, if you're ever in London, go to the British museum to see parts of the Parthenon. There is an active excavation going on beneath the building itself, and the floors are see-through, so a really neat part of the museum is that everyone can see the old dwellings, bath houses, aqueducts, stairs, paths, and even things like the tiling on the floors. It’s so awesome. There isn’t very much to the inside yet, but they’re still working on it.

On Friday we had Greek dancing lessons which were totally sweet!!!!!! Dmitris was our dance teacher (a different one than the church one) and we learned some dances from different regions and cultures of Greece. It was so interesting how the people at the dance school had such pride in keeping the tradition of their ancestors and when the dance from their particular region came up to be taught, they made sure to tell us that that was where they were from. He showed us some costumes that people normally wear as everyday clothing. Embroidery and jewelry are supposed to keep away evil, and so women embroider the aprons that they wear to keep their womb protected from evil and curses. I thought that was really interesting. Perhaps they also have embroidery on the back of their coats so that no one can shoot curses at the from behind either. Pretty smart, eh? Most of the dances were done in a circle, with a few steps, seeing as almost everyone in our group were novices; however, our tour guides have been members of this dance group since they were kids.

On Sunday we went to this church, (and of course, Rufus, our guard dog that has adopted our group, followed us from the hotel to the church) an Orthodox one that our professor and his wife had found that was actually spoken in English and not Greek, so that we could start to understand parts of the service. However, apparently that church doesn’t have services on Sundays (I didn’t really understand that) so we went to another church. It was a large gorgeous church, and the service was spoken in Greek, and I knew nothing about Greek Orthodox services (still really don’t know much) so I didn’t really know what to expect. I did think that because it was so big that there would be more people in there than there was, and there were only a few chairs, maybe around fifty I guess, and then everyone else was supposed to stand in the back or on the sides. The women sat/stood on the left side of the church, and the men on the right. Since there were many more girls than guys, we all went to the left side of the church. However, we were blocking the Icons. One of the few things I know about Greek orthodoxy is that there are many pictures of saints and Jesus on the walls of the church, called icons, either painted onto the walls or hung paintings of them. The Orthodox faith believes that these icons are windows to heaven; the church is the place where heaven and earth collide and can coexist. The parishioners venerate the icons by kissing them where ever they could reach them. Anyway, on the sides of the church we were all in the way of the icons and did not realize it until a few women came in to venerate them. One of these women grabbed me by the shoulders and just looked at me. To be honest, I was kind of freaked out. I thought that maybe she would be mad at me for some reason, because I was in her way, I don’t know. Anyway, after a while she smiled at me, said something, and kissed my cheeks, said something else. I smiled back and murmured something (I don’t even know what, something between English and Greek), and then she walked away to go sit down. I told my Religion professor, Roy, about this episode later in the week, hoping for some kind of explanation. He said that not only were the paintings of the saints in the church icons, but living people are also viewed as icons, a place where God dwells, and so that was why the woman kissed me; she was venerating me. Anyway, the Orthodox Church has something that is called an iconostasis. It separates the place where the ordinary people can go and the place where only the priests and deacons can go. It is kind of like the Holy of Holies in the Jewish synagogue. In the other churches we’ve visited, these doors have always been closed; however, on Sunday obviously they’d be open so that the priests can walk in and out, so you can kind of see into the priest’s place, which I don’t know the technical term for yet. There was a lot of incense used in the service, which was waved both at the icons on the walls and also the icons of the congregation. There were two choirs up in the front that were kind of doing a chant-like song; I don’t think it was quite a call and response type of thing, but the men and women doing the singing were all dressed in black. They had microphones, but they weren’t really necessary; the singing was quite loud. The message was given from a balcony type thing that jutted out into the church above the people on the left side. It was quite short, and I have no idea what it was about. Of the actual happenings of the service itself, I really do not know what went on; however, we are going to learn about that sometime soon, I hope, and then I will write more on that subject. Also, I think it's worth noting that after an hour in the Church, Rufus was waiting outside for us, to take us back to the hotel. :) These dogs are silly.

One of the coolest things I've done since I've been here is go to a Greek folk concert. It was one of the coolest concerts that I have ever been to, a George Dalaras concert. Look him up. It started off a little shaky for me; there was some quite unfamiliar singing, pitched quite flat and somewhat abrasive and I was thinking, oh man, this is going to be a long night. But it totally picked up after that! Oh, I loved this band so much! It was amazing. There was a violin player, two percussionists (one was in charge of triangle and tambourine only . . . ) and a string bass player, an accordion player, and like, three guitar players and four or five mandolin like players. Also, a string dulcimer like thing that was also pretty cool. The music was, for the most part, upbeat, with asymmetrical meters and quick subdivisions that kept the music flowing, the singers were amazing. Just completely and utterly wonderful. There were two women whose voices I absolutely adored, but also while the band was onstage, it was like there was this play type thing going on in the background, and it was somehow connected to the music, but I'm not exactly sure how. It was all in Greek, so I had no idea what they were saying, but there were images on the back screen of people getting forced out of their homes and the part I could understand the most was when the Nazi flag kept coming on. I think it was mostly about keeping their Greek culture and not letting anybody stop them from singing their songs and doing their dances. I was sitting up in the nose-bleed section, in the third tier of seats (the box seats) but at intermission another girl and I moved down to the main floor, pretty much right where we were sitting before, only two levels down. We got kicked out of some seats at first . . . oops! Upstairs we were sitting in the middle of all these students from the united states, from Moorhead, MN, who had no idea about Greek music. But down on the main floor, the people were all singing along. EVERYONE knew the songs, everyone knew all of the words; at least, that was the way it seemed. One of my professors, David, described it as going to a Rolling Stones concert where everyone there has been a fan for years and knows all the songs and everyone sings along. But it wasn't because everyone was a fan of the band that they knew the words; it was because these songs have real meaning to the Greek people; some of them were banned during the world wars. I guess all I know is that the music tonight was wonderful; and I wish I spoke Greek.

We have also been to a lot of museums. One was the Museum of Cycladic Art, which had some of the first art. Some think that they are symbolic of the mother goddess, though no conclusive clues really point to that. There was also jewelry that was buried with the dead body; they would dig up the bones after the person had been buried for a year and was relatively decomposed, and then put the bones and the jewelry into a bowl type thing. Another was the National Archeological Museum of Athens - there were so many statues in that building. Grave monuments, and steles, and some of them were just pieces of the statuary, not whole statues, because what are they going to do with a monument that they only find pieces of? They can’t really just throw them away. So they tried to reconstrut them to be what they thought that they might have looked like. Agamemnon’s mask was also in this museum, along with more examples of Cycladic art. There were examples of the paintings from Crete (a Greek island that we’ll be traveling to), and ancient things that people used everyday, like potter, tweezers, jewelry, hair decorations, rings, necklaces, and a whole bunch of pottery. We went to the Jewish museum yesterday. The museum was started because after world war two, there were so many artifacts laying around, possessions that Jewish people would never return to claim, that a few Jews decided that they were going to start a museum to protect them and educate people about the Jewish life and culture. It was a seven floor building, but the floors were quite small. There are not many Jews living in Greece anymore, after world war two. All of the communities were shipped off to concentration camps in Germany, the last one three weeks before the camps were liberated. Our guide’s maternal grandparents and her parents lived in concentration camps; her grandparents did not make it out. There was a small floor dedicated to the holocaust, and it was interesting because some of the artifacts on that floor were dedicated to the museum by people who had been in the concentration camps, such as shoes and the work clothes they wore. There were also examples of fake identification cards that the Greek government distributed to Jews through police stations in the cities before the Nazis came to occupy Greece. They used the identity of people who had died, and it was completely legit by the Greek government, identifying them as a religion other than Jewish so they wouldn’t get picked up by the police. Our guide reiterated that the Greeks were generally a peaceful people. Before the full blown occupation, Jews were allowed to be members of groups that were dedicated to Hitler. As our guide put it, “they just didn’t get it.” Jewish children were members of the Hitler youth. They just really didn’t understand what was going on. They also had a lot of information there about the Torah, and they had many cases that displayed it. The Law of Moses always has to be handwritten by the Jews, and the cases that this is kept in are just ornate. They had information on the Jewish holidays, and I was just totally taken back to “Fiddler on the Roof.” They had examples of the clothing that the women wore, and of marriage ceremonies, and Bar and Bat mitzvahs.

Today, after class discussion about Aristotle and Greek gods and heroes, we went up to Mars Hill or the Areopagus, the place where Paul was supposed to have preached in Acts 17 in Athens. Emily, my roommate, read that section of Acts 17 up there, and it was so amazing to hear the words that Paul spoke while in Athens. We ran in to a grad student from North Carolina up there who was doing his dissertation on that particular hill. He told us that that probably wasn’t the place where Paul actually preached, but that the symbolism of the place is more important than the place it self. The Parthenon is on the Acropolis, the center of religion, that was higher up than that hill, and higher than the center of commerce that was at the bottom of the hill. The Areopagus was also the name of a council that was involved with the carrying out of justice in Athens. It was just so cool to see the Bible come to life like that. There are so many names of places in Acts where we'll be traveling to, and before, when I read these passages, it was like they were kind of abstract, kind of out there in space, but we're actually going to be going to places where Paul traveled to, like Thesselonica, Ephesus, and we're already in Athens! Just totally mind blowing.

It rained, and kind of sleeted today! It was weird. And wet. And cold. Although, cold is now becoming relative, because it’s 32 degrees . . . and somehow that’s cold to me. In February. I think I could get used to this . . .

Alicia