The Maidens of the Hill

Girl in Athens

Girl in London

Girl in Athens

Metope in BM

The last metope on the Parthenon (Acropolis Museum)

"Caryatids" is of course a misnomer. They were Korai, and more precisely Choephoroi, namely libation bearers to the tomb of Kekrops who was buried under the very porch that they had been carrying on their heads for so many centuries. Their outstretched hands bearing the phialae have long since been chopped off by jealous time, which has been particularly vicious with regard to the protruding parts of ancient statues such as limbs, noses, male genitals etc. It was this identity-obscuring mutilation that probably led to their association with the girls from Karyai in Laconia who visited the sanctuary once a year  to perform their ritual dance. I dare speculate that this must have been a rather sensational event, given the propensity of Lacaedemonian ladies to strut about scantily clad, as we are apprised in such a hilarious fashion in the Lysistrata.

Be that as it may, a major project is under way in the Acropolis Museum to clean up their torsos, ravaged as they were by twenty-odd centuries of exposure and especially by that suffocating smog that blighted the Attic sky in the eighties and the nineties. That shroud of pollution is now thankfully gone (one of the very few good tidings that one may relay from here), the maidens were replaced on the Erechtheion by replicas and were recently accorded the pride of place they deserve in the impressive new museum. The restoration project utilizing laser beams is  run by the Institute of Technology and Research in Crete, the only one of Greek insitutions of higher learning to rank among the top ones world-wide. The reason for this distinction (to digress a little, but not really as you will see) is that ITR was founded with a charter of its own which was modelled on those of Anglo-Saxon  institutions and therefore had nothing in common with the arrangements crippling the other local universities. This conjuction of classical culture and state of the art technology is a particularly happy one, if only as a sign of what might have been had modern Greece elected to embark upon the road of liberal republicanism conscious of its classical roots and inseminated with the modern scientific spirit. Alas, this destiny -as preached by the great Koraes- never came to fruition as reactionary nationalism eventually smothered all traces of free thinking and the values of individual autonomy in the country. Today we are living through the terminal consequences of that debacle.

At any event, already two of the five maiden remaining in Athens have been cleaned -three if you count the pitiful remains of one of them that was smashed by a Turkish shell during the siege of the Acropolis at the time of the Greek Revolution. And the results are astonishing. The grime of ages has been burned off and the honey-whiteness of the Pentelic stone has surged forth to display its breath-taking vivaciousness. You can sense the alert humanity pulsating through its hidden veins. The faces have sadly been half eaten away, but there is still enough of expression left on them to captivate an eager theoros across the chasm of the centuries.

These spruced up girls, each in her uniqueness, do indeed look so intimately in touch with their lonely sister in Rm. 15 of the British Museum. As I was staring at the latter during my visit this past February I could not help being affected by the sad abandonment oozing from her features, despite her being lovingly cared for. I was struck by the fact that her face is also half clawed off, which shows that even as she was being abducted Time had already been hard at work visiting its wrath. But even so, her almost erased eyes did seem to be beaming southwards messages of a mellow grief. Standing in front of her one cannot help conjuring in imagination the raptures of a family reunion. I have always thought that the only valid argument for the return of the Acropolis sculptures is the restoration of the aesthetic integrity of the Athenian monuments.No other consideration carries the slightest weight. And the sense of loss from that severance is today all the more poignant as one stands before that estranged girl in London, or before her companions in Athens as their shimmering whiteness is once again blooming in plain view.

Another significant event has also taken place. The last metope of the Parthenon remaining in place (the first from the western end on the south side) has been removed from the temple and brought into the Acropolis Museum. It depicts a centaur defeating a Lapith who in turn jabs the monster's thigh as he is being strangled. This piece of sculpture had never left its original place and the muck of twenty five centuries lay thick upon it. Now it has been chiseled away and the original marble has been exposed. Alas, it is seriously corroded, although even in this damaged state the explosive tension that Phidias instilled in the stone still leaps at you in waves. Once again, one cannot avoid the comparison with the condition of the metopes kept in the British Museum: those are immaculate, bar the inevitable fractures. The flesh of the creatures burns with the desire to be stroked. It is clear that their stay in London has benefited them greatly. Arguments, thus, based on the state of preservation of the sculptures would seem to favor those justifying Elgin's effrontery. I am saying this because a few year's ago, at the height of the nationalist frenzy for the return of the sculptures in connection with that foul show of the "Olympics", there was an outburst of indignation concerning some alleged faux pas of the BM restorers in scrubbing the frieze with some noxious substance or other. There may have been a grain of truth to this. But, whatever damage it may have caused, still the BM pieces are in visibly better condition compared to the ones in Athens -although if these are also laser-cleaned they may shine incomparably as well. But all this pales into insignificance compared to the botched repair work inflicted upon the Parthenon and the temple of Nike by Greek restorers back in the thirties (replacing for instance the lead joints with iron ones!). This veritable hatchet job resulted in the marble being fragmented from within. At the same time the loose pieces on the ground were haphardly stuck together thus deforming the architectural structure of the buildings. But this of course does not figure in the inane propaganda of nationalist demagogues, for whom anyway the issue of the sculptures is just a pretext for bashing the foreign "conspiracy" against the chosen race.

It is apposite to stress here that before the last two decades of the last century the issue of the Elgin loot did not figure at all in public discourse or in educational instruction. It was invented as a great "national issue" with the coming to power of the "socialist" party in 1981 as part of its "anti-imperialist" agenda. That was the same party whose educational policies ruthlessly suppressed classical learning, deformed the Greek language by cutting it down to the requirements of street agitation and in general gutted the school system by putting it under the control of party hacks. For the rest Melina shed crocodile tears before the horse heads of the Parthenon pediment in the British Museum. This crass hypocrisy, based upon utter ignorance of all things classical, has been the hallmark of official state policy.

All in all, even in this toxic environment some good things are happening for those with eyes to see.