October 7th, my last day; the National Archaeological Museum

I meant to write this the first day I was back, but I was a trifle pie-eyed by the time I got home.  I don't know what it is about flying, it always leaves me feeling like a wrung-out rag.

It's very odd to be back in the UK.  More on that another time, maybe.

My last day in Athens, Wednesday October the 7th, I had already decided was going to be spent at the National Archaeological Museum.  Although many of the ancient monuments I'd visited have small site museums now, the "big" stuff is generally displayed there, in Athens.  The collection of classical sculpture is unrivalled, and that's before you consider the contents of the Mycenean Hall; and then there are vases, small bronzes, jewellery, frescoes from ancient Thera, rather a nice small Egyptian section...  Ever since my first visit, right back in 1989, I've regarded it as one of the great museums of Europe.

It's a pity that the area around it is on the scruffy side.  Patission/28 Oktovritou Street used to be a bit like the Tottenham Court Road, but these days it's more like walking through Hounslow, only without the low-flying airliners (which is something, I guess).  It isn't a great introduction though to what is still a beautiful museum.  It suffers even more by comparison with the surroundings of the new Acropolis Museum, which you reach either along pedestrianised, tree-lined Dionysiou Areopagitou Street or through pretty Plaka, among old houses smartly done up, lively shops and cafes and not a closed business in sight...

I hope the balance may swing back, in time.  People should visit museums for the contents, not just because they are new and in fashionable areas...

Once through the big colonnaded entrance, ticket and museum map in hand, I decided I'd better stop and plan my day, or risk wearing myself out.  There's a pleasant small cafe in a courtyard on the lower ground floor, so I was able to get a large filter coffee and sit and look at the map.  This isn't a museum on the scale of the BM or the Louvre, where one knows there's not a chance of seeing everything; it's just that tempting size where you think it might be possible, with careful planning.

 In the cafe garden there are some relatively unimportant pieces of sculpture, like this late Classical gateway decoration or Herm, with two heads (& most of his bits, which is unusual - the whole of the lucky phallus has usually been broken off at some point by someone puritanical, but you can still tell this fella is a fella)

 A Hellenistic-era gravestone showing a soldier bidding farewell to his wife.  Why the horse was included as well I don't know; maybe it died with him?  Or maybe he was very fond of it too...

The centre panel of a rather splendid Roman mosaic, showing the gorgon Medusa - it's interesting that she's shown as an attractive woman instead of a monster, which fits with the more rational version of the story Pausanias tells...

Anyway, I planned my visit carefully, with the map; and I think I've proved to myself that it really isn't possible to do the whole place properly in one day.  I got there at 9.00 am and left at 5.30; so I put in a full day's worth of museum-going.  But I barely touched on the vases and didn't get into the Egyptians at all, or the Helene Stathatos Collection (ancient and Byzantine jewellery).  As it was I had fairly tired legs by the time I left.  A good kind of tired, though.  I saw the prehistoric rooms, the Myceneans, the sculpture halls, most of the small bronzes, the Thera rooms, and two excellent small special exhibitions.

If I'm going to try and describe this, where to begin? 

The obvious place is, where I did begin.

As you come into the main entrance foyer, ahead of you is a high doorway leading into the Prehistoric section.  "Prehistoric" in the BM means mostly stone axes and the odd bog body, because in the British climate not much else is preserved; in Greece it means not just the Paleo-to-Neolithic but also the Cycladic civilisations, with their wonderful white marble statues...

And the Helladic era, which is to say the entire Bronze Age.

So the thing you see shining through that doorway is not Lindow Man in all his brown gungey glory, but this:

 The entrance to the main Prehistoric Hall, with the treasures of Mycenae...

 Starting with the gold death-mask and breastplate of Agamemnon...

...at least, that was what Schliemann, who was a bit of a romantic after all, called them; they're probably several generations too old to have been the real Agamemnon's.  But the mask is a haunting sight; surely this has to be a portrait...

After visiting Mycenae and Tiryns and Asini so recently it was particularly thrilling to see their treasures again. One sees most of the really famous things reproduced in books quite often, so here are a few of the more "minor" items as well.

 Decorative gold leaf trimmings for clothing; there are literally hundreds of these, the dead must have been buried in clothes glittering with them

 One of several cases of magnificent swords and daggers

 A fresco from Tiryns; given her magnificent bosom I assume this lady must have been the Great Goddess...

 Another Goddess, carved in ivory

 A gravestone painted with stags and does, and (in the upper left) what is probably a hedgehog; a row of armed men in the upper section is more damaged

 Little bronze figures found in a shrine; worshippers, or Gods?

 Big painted wine jars

More gold decorations from clothing

After that, the Sculpture collection.  Room upon room of it. 

Whenever Pausanias refers to a statue somewhere being "said to be by Daidalos", this- or the equivalent in wood - is probably the kind of thing he was talking about

Early to mid-seventh century BC figures from religious sanctuaries, showing either divinities or devotees in a stark, simplified style.  Women are always clothed, men always nude; kore and kouros, maiden and youth...

The largest kouros in the collection is about 3 metres tall

They almost always have this beautiful, stylised Mona Lisa smile...

Then there are masses of relief sculptures; the majority are gravestones, many of them from the Kerameikos, which I visited a few weeks ago.  But there are others:

 For example, a statue base decorated on two sides with these charming reliefs of young men playing sports; wrestling, here...

 ...and a ball game here and in the next picture (they join up, but I'm not sure how to do that).  I love their gestures and expressions as they prepare for the throw-in; if they weren't naked ancient Greeks they could be modern lads playing footie in a local park

And this is possibly Selene, the goddess of the moon

 Coming into the Poseidon gallery

 This magnificent bronze statue was found on the sea bed a bit more than a hundred years ago; it's slightly larger than life-size and absolutely stunning...

 It's been described as an image of Poseidon, the ruler of the sea, but it might actually be Zeus...

 Whichever god is shows, it's beautiful in every detail

And, ahem, what a body...

Here are some other items from the bronze collections...

 A chariot wheel hub

 Chariot decorations

 A little group of dancers...

 Some of the many arrowheads and spearheads found on the battlefield at Thermopylae

 A life-sized galloping horse

 The "Youth of Antikythera"

 The "Boy of Marathon"

And the Emporer Augustus 

Upstairs is an enormous vase collection, and a room of beautiful things from the excavation of Akrotiri, on Thera (aka Santorini):

A ceramic vessel painted with dolphins

And some of the wonderful frescoes; boys boxing in one and gazelles in the other, displayed as they were laid-out in the house where they were painted, on the walls either side of a doorway

 

The Spring fresco lined three walls of a room 

Details of the boxers and the Spring fresco

Of the two special exhibitions, one was about travellers to Greece in the 16th to 19th centuries, and how their drawings, writings and maps, and tension between their romanticised vision of the past and the reality they found, formed the view of Hellas that still pertains to a large extent in the rest of the world.  It was fascinating stuff.  The other was about the Antikythera Mechanism, the extraordinary geared bronze object brought up from the sea bed in the early 20th century and now believed to have been something like an astronomical clock-cum-calculator.  

The pieces of the mechanism were on show along with x-rays of the interior, showing just how many gears there were and just how complex the arrangement was, and how many tiny incriptions there were on the inside; there was also a very good video about the mechanism, its possible uses and its conservation, and several models, built by various experts, showing possible reconstructions.  It was justv a single-room exhibit but I was in there alone almost an hour. 

That is just a taste of the things I saw; I left the museum a weary but a happy woman.  What a treasure-house!