My Very First Morning in Europe

by David McGuffin

Chapter 9: May 3, 1977 – Athens

Even though I’d been up late the night before, I woke up early. I’d brought a small wind-up alarm clock from home, and before drifting off to sleep, I’d set it for 8:00 AM — plenty of time to shower, eat breakfast, and meet the group for our departure. As it turned out, I didn’t need the alarm. I was awake at 5:00 AM!

Here in the Plaka, the ancient neighborhood sprawling below the Acropolis, the city never really went quiet. The shuffle of pedestrians on the street below my balcony mixed with traffic noise from the avenue up the way, and together they roused me out of my sleep. I wasn’t used to a big city. I’d grown up in the country, at the end of a dirt road, where the loudest thing most mornings was a rooster.

I lay in bed for a few minutes, but then the sun came up and poured through my open balcony door, and that settled it. By 5:45 I was dressed and heading down the stairs. Not a soul was in the breakfast room or the lobby, so I went outside to see what Athens looked like before it woke up. As I turned left out the door, my friend Doug was heading out at the same moment, and we joined up to go explore.

I’d picked up a paper map of Athens the night before at the hotel reception, and between the map and the Acropolis looming on the hill above us, we had no trouble finding our way to the ancient sites. It was 6:00 AM, and the only people on the streets besides us were shopkeepers getting ready for the day. Heading down Adrianou Street, we hit our first ruin — a circular structure about thirty feet high, topped with a bronze tripod, standing in a small wooded park to our left. I recognized the Corinthian columns decorating it, but only because of a Humanities and Art History course I’d been required to take at FJC before the trip. Later I learned the monument marked the spot where a man named Lysicrates had once set up a trophy after his boys’ choir won a competition. It went up in 335 BC, commissioned by the choregos — the wealthy Athenian citizens who financed choral and dramatic productions in ancient Greece. It was just one of many such monuments that had once lined the Street of Tripods, which ran from the Sanctuary of Dionysus around the base of the Acropolis.

Turning left, Lysicratous Street led a few hundred yards toward a massive open field littered with toppled columns. But first we had to cross Vasilissis Amalias Avenue — a wide, chaotic river of traffic. Cars, buses, scooters, streetcars, and pedestrians all fought for space, drivers weaving between lanes, honking, squealing tires, slamming brakes. The ruins sat right across four lanes of it, but we decided our legs were worth more than the shortcut and walked fifty yards up to the nearest light. Once across, the ruins were entirely ours. Not another soul in sight.

The field was enormous — ten acres, maybe — littered with broken marble. But before we even got to the scattered ruins, an intact arch stood there as if placed on purpose to welcome us in. The Arch of Hadrian rose sixty feet above our heads and stretched at least forty-five feet wide, untouched by the collapse that had claimed everything behind it. It turned out the Athenians had built it in the early 130s AD to mark Roman Emperor Hadrian’s third and final visit to the city. Greek letters were carved into the pediment above us — it really was all Greek to me at the time — but I later found out the inscription facing the Acropolis read, “This is Athens, the former city of Theseus.” I completely missed the matching inscription on the other side, facing the open field: “This is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus.” Scholars still argue over what the two lines were really saying — whether they were meant to write off the old city and its mythical founder, or to elevate Hadrian to co-founder alongside him.

Past the arch, in the middle of that desolate field, fifteen columns rose toward the sky, capped with ornate Corinthian tops and still holding up a few massive stone lintels. I’d seen them from a distance the night before, driving in from the airport, but now, standing at their base in the morning light, I just stopped and stared, mouth open. This was the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

A plaque nearby, its paint faded from decades in the sun, told the story. Construction started in 520 BC and ran for about ten years before stalling — only the foundation and a handful of column stubs had gone in before the project was abandoned for centuries. It picked back up in 174 BC under King Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who hired a Roman architect to redesign the whole thing in Pentelic marble, with 104 Corinthian columns in a new floor plan. Then the architect died, and his vision died with him — the temple sat unfinished for another hundred years. By 86 BC, with Rome on the rise and Greece in decline, a Roman general plundered the site and hauled one column back to Rome as a trophy, installing it in the Temple of Jupiter on Capitoline Hill. It took another century, and the arrival of Hadrian himself, before the temple was finally finished, in 132 AD. He marked the occasion with a gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus — and, not modestly, one of himself right beside it. The temple lasted only about a hundred years before Germanic invaders sacked it in 267 AD. From there it was slowly picked apart for other building projects, and by the time the traveler Cyriacus of Ancona passed through in 1436, only twenty-one columns were still standing.

Time was getting away from us, and we had a breakfast meetup with the group back at the hotel. So after a few photos with my Instamatic, we hustled back toward the Hotel Plaka.

That breakfast was my first taste of a European morning meal. By the time I got to the hotel dining room, most of the Chorale group was already seated and eating. I looked over the spread: olives, something wrapped in slick green leaves, yogurt, honey, jam, several kinds of bread, butter, salami, juice, coffee, water. That was it — no scrambled eggs, no bacon, no grits. I settled for a very strong cup of coffee and some bread and butter.

Breakfast done, I went up to my room, brushed my teeth, and grabbed what I needed for the morning tour. Before long our big bus pulled into our narrow street, we climbed aboard, and watched out the windows as the driver threaded it through tiny lanes and sharp corners back to the main road. As we passed Hadrian’s Arch and the Temple of Zeus again, our tour guide picked up the microphone and started telling us all about the ancient temple I’d already explored on foot, hours before anyone else was awake.