Of course, we went off with a map of Athens, my guidebook, which said when it was open, and a vague desire to see the grave of the great Mr. Schleimann. The first thing that we realized was that the cemetery is beautiful. The next thing that we realized was that it was huge. Many, many impressive monuments. No map of where everything was. It was going to be a challenge to find the tomb before we had to get back to Greek class.
The great problem was that many of the grave monuments are beautiful and impressive. It's not like you can look around, find the big monument, and go, "oh. That must be the grave of someone famous." The cemetery is very different from the ones that I am used to in Massachusetts. It is a green place, but not in a rolling-grassy-hills sort of way. There are a lot of cypress and olive trees. The monuments are mostly made of white marble.
It's actually very hard to tell how old some of the graves are. It isn't like in Boston, where you can tell by the condition of the headstone and the decorations on it the age it must be. The problem is further compounded by the fact that many of the monuments are not individual tombs, but family plots.
There also are three churches in the cemetery- two are Greek Orthodox, one is Catholic. They are beautiful, as most churches here seem to be.
And finally we found it! Ironically, the tomb of Heinrich Schleimann is one of the buildings that you can see as you enter- it's the little building shaped like a Doric temple in the first picture. It actually has very cool friezes- they depict Schleimann excavating archaeological sites as well as the usual images of gods and heroes fighting. If ever you find yourself in Athens, I would suggest a trip to the cemetery- it was very quiet, free from most of the tourists you see everywhere else, and since it is free, it is definitely good value.
And yes, we did get back in time for Greek class.
No comments:
Post a Comment