Xi'an's Og

Yesterday night, the workshop ended earlier than planned and we took the opportunity to get to the Acropolis in the early evening. While the place was not immensely crowded with tourists, it was still very busy. I found the fact that the hill is surrounded by the endless city of Athens detrimental to the beauty of the site as most vistas have the city in the background… It was as if the extreme encasement of those ruins within the modern Athens had killed the magic of the centuries of history and the cultural significance of the place. Surrounded by blathering crowds, it was indeed extremely difficult to see beyond the noise, cranes and scaffoldings towards the one birthplace of civilisation. (I experienced similar feelings when I visited the Guiza pyramids in Cairo last year, for the same reason that the place was progressively swallowed by the surrounding suburbs, and also not properly maintained…)

It was furthermore a major disapointment to find the new Acropolis museum unexpectedly closed for the evening, due to a social gathering there, as I was very much looking forward to the visit… We could thus only stare at the modern building behind the gates. Next workshop, maybe?!

This entry was posted on September 15, 2009 at 7:29 am and is filed under Travel with tags Acropolis museum, Athens, Greece, Parthenon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.