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Flight BCN-Athens, with Aegean Airlines. Cloudy weather, overcast sky. Between Cape Sounion and Piraeus, we sail over a choppy sea, in a range of grays: pearl gray, silver gray, anthracite black gray. On the blurred horizon, the silhouette of Aegina, Plato's birthplace, fades away…
The nefos (the fog) is the smog of Athens, currently the city with the most polluted atmosphere in Europe. With the crisis, which has hit the country so hard, the capital, always humid, has become a dirty, very dirty city. As in the underworlds of Genoa, or Naples, it seems that the port activity has stained everything with juices and excrement.
We take the metro, which also runs above ground in sections. The Greeks are visual, plastic. Unlike London, for example, where looking at people is not at all well-regarded, here people look and are looked at without reservation, and I like that. "Du fond des âges monte la nécessité irrepresible de voir" (Paul Éluard).
On the bus, I observe the rogue in front of me, with a piercing in his lips and isolated in his headphones. He quickly crosses himself as he passes a church. Then the Orthodox pope smiles, with long hair ending in a tail, encased in his cassock, now the color of a fly's wing. I imagine him inside the iconostasis officiating with his back to the people, while burning incense and the choir of men with very weathered skin sings.
We take the metro, which also runs above ground in sections. The Greeks are visual, plastic. Unlike London, for example, where looking at people is not at all well-regarded, here people look and are looked at without reservation, and I like that.These Byzantine Christians cross themselves, kiss the icons, touch them, revere them. It is an overacting that must come from the depths of history, from when the terrible struggles of the iconoclasts (who considered the representation of divinity inconvenient, for them a pure idea). I mean that these displays of adoration perhaps come from the reaction against those purists, and from that they must have retained this clinging to imagery.
Responding to a deeply rooted sense of representation, the iconography of Orthodox Christianity has as the object of its images all those dogmas and beliefs that become perceptible to sight. But they are only painted images. Not sculpted. Carvings are still not admitted today. In fact, they were not introduced into the Roman church until the 10th century.
The Schism of the East (or of the West, depending on how you look at it) is key: we are talking about 1054. A century and a half later, the crusaders cause great misfortunes in Constantinople: they destroy the iconostasis of Hagia Sophia, seat a public woman on the patriarch's cathedra, melt down the treasure of the schismatic church… It is a civil war between Christians.
Rome falls into the hands of the barbarians in the year 410, but the Eastern Roman Empire will endure until 1453, when the Turks enter Byzantium (formerly Constantinople, now Istanbul); and it has also endured until today, in the memory of the Greeks, the awareness of having been the Byzantine Empire, perhaps more than the Athenian democracy…
We climb to the Parthenon, amidst the frantic masses of tourists, but the spectacle compensates for all the discomforts: the elevation allows us a clear view of horizons unusually free of haze today, completely swept clean of veils. In a wide-angle panorama, Athens is shown to us bathed in light, spread around the sacred mountain, under an azure sky.
On the south flank of the Acropolis is the theater of the sanctuary dedicated to Dionysus or Pan, the god of wine, disinhibition, and dance. He was the pastoral god of Arcadia, the most popular god of classical Greece.
Here, in this open space, like a roofless temple, the Dionysian festivals were celebrated, the festivals announcing spring, with maenads, satyrs, and sileni. Here the tragedies and comedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes premiered, which had so much of a secularized religious office.
At first, disguised as a forest animal, a snake, or a bird, the actors officiated, alone, a sacred rite, which must be related to the cult of the plant world. Afterwards, the scolding, well-coordinated chorus was added.
The Apollonian Aristide Maillol considered the Parthenon "the most beautiful work of humanity," which "from afar has every appearance of being the pearl of Greece." "Nothing is as beautiful in colors as the Acropolis, all in a golden, pale, and mauve tone," he writes in his travel notebook.The theater, as a school of human learning, is born from this dialogue between the formless and that which takes shape, this substitution of the wild community for regulated society. All Greek culture, and all Western culture, comes from this duality between the rapture of Dionysus and the sanity of Apollo.
The Apollonian Aristide Maillol considered the Parthenon "the most beautiful work of humanity," which "from afar has all the appearance of being the pearl of Greece." "Nothing is as beautiful in colors as the Acropolis, all in a golden, pale, and mauve tone," he writes in his travel notebook.
The great Roussillon sculptor made a pilgrimage to Greece in 1908, looking for "an outdoor statue" (which he found in Delphi), since it is outside, in the open air, he said, its natural environment. "What a craze to put everything inside museums, where you get bored, where you see it badly, where you are stalked by guards"...
Since there is no better spectacle than people passing by, we eat at street level, under the Acropolis, in the Plaka neighborhood: the traditional Greek salad (with olives, capers, and feta cheese), retsina wine, pork souvlaki, and for dessert a slice of watermelon.
To finish, a Turkish coffee (which here they call "Greek," just in case) with abundant grounds and served, as it should be, with a glass of fresh water; and music, the always tender popular music of the great Manos Hatzidakis.