Chania Archaeological Museum, Crete, September 2011

The Archaeological Museum in Chania was founded in 1962, after the building it is in had served as a store house, a cinema and a mosque (dedicated to Yussuf Pasha) during various times in the island's history. The building was originally built as the church of St. Francis of the Franciscan monastery most likely established in the C13th and displays rare Mediterranean Gothic features.

We visited in September 2011, on the back of the 14th National Speleological Meeting… excerpts from my diary follow:

After so many years, I get to go to the Chania Museum. The visit was made in far from ideal conditions – not enough time and both girls with us. The museum itself is built / housed in the old Franciscan church a the centre of an old Franciscan monastery dating to the 13th Century, if I am not mistaken.

Unfortunately, the guards were not so well informed as to what is original and what is restoration, which is a pity as I am not sure I have seen better gothic ribbed vaulting in Greece.

General view of the nave / main hall

Gothic arches in the museum

Ablution fountain in the garden

The tourists from Northern Europe have no idea of the rarity or peculiarity of this and indeed of all gothic features. The museum itself has finds from all over western Crete, famously from the palace at Kydonia itself and from various other locations. It also houses the Mitsotakis collection, which is basically huge and spans all eras of Greek history. Especially notable is a bronze bowl, bearing an inscription in Linear A – apparently the only surviving bronze object to have been thus inscribed. The LED lights positioned to highlight the inscription were not working, so I did not actually see it well enough to photograph.

The bronze bowl, suffering from the LED malfunction

Bronze adorants from the Mitsotakis collection

Unfortunately, beyond the Mitsotakis collection, very little else is published and therefore very little else is permitted to be photographed. The bull offerings from a rural sanctuary in the Chania prefecture are actually unpublished and not allowed to be photographed, and yet it is in such small letters that unless the guard is actually next to you it is very difficult to know that you have gone astray. 

oops!

For me, and no doubt for many Minoan fans, the highlight of the museum is on the left about a third of the way in – a sealing impression, in clay, showing the so called Lord of Kydonia – an amazingly crafted scene, which may indeed represent the town of Chania, some three and a half thousand years ago…

The Lord of Kydonia

 and explanation:

Back to the Acropolis Museum, December 2012

So last week I went back to the museum... and it’s time for something positive, this being the season of goodwill and all.

I remember my three major complaints being the photography ban, the lack of printed and explanatory information and the lack of children oriented materials.

No photography sign, outside the New Acropolis Museum

Main entrance hall of the New Acropolis Museum, with prominent no photography reminder

Well, having gone on Saturday 15 December (a normal, pay to enter day) with the girls, we had the museum essentially to ourselves – up in the Parthenon gallery we walked round the whole thing twice, only seeing other people towards the end of our tour. An experience both satisfying and slightly worrying at the same time.

All the Hellenistic and Roman era to ourselves...

The major changes I noticed from the summer of 2009:

1. The Kritios Boy seems to have been raised on his pedestal to a much higher level. Can’t imagine why, but, there you have it. Blonde Boy also seems to have a new perch...

Kritios boy, on a new perch (2012) - compare with the image below (2009)

2. There is now material for kids to read or have read to them, in big letters, bright colours and targeted at them. So – yes, the museum is currently better for kids than it was three years ago. Can it be better yet? I think so, but this is a good first step.

3. (I took about 50 photos and hardly anyone minded, shhh…)

4. In 2009, I had a very specific complaint about the lack of “how” – well, in the archaic sculpture room, there is now a very nice display of marble-working tools along with an example of how each one left its mark on the marble. There was a similar display about the various minerals used to colour the marble, where they came from and how they were prepared to be applied.

Tools of marbleworking and the marks they make

So – the museum is getting better. I am more enthusiastic, and I can’t wait to go back. Oh, and as a coda: Ariadne, at 45 months old told me the next day that the sixth Caryatid should come back from London to be with her sisters. It’s not right that she’s far away from them. I had explained that the pedestal is empty because one of the girls has gone to London to another museum, in a totally non-judgmental and neutral way.

 

Tripolis Archaeological Museum, September 2011

The archaeological museum of Tripolis is housed in a wonderful neo-classical building with a wonderfully damp and drippy basement, which is a pity as the wall-mounted exhibits have suffered as a result.

Probably in an effort to avoid photographs of exploding drippy basement wall plaster, or else because some researcher has not been properly arsed to publish his or her material, photography in the museum is banned and as a result the guards, two older ladies not so well informed about what they are watching over but certainly well enough informed of the ban will follow and hound any prospective photographer ensuring that this ban of dubious legality is not circumvented. I mention dubious legality as according to law it should be possible to photograph the exhibits free of charge for personal use in the museums of Greece. See my posts on Naxos and the New Acropolis Museum...

Anyway – so there we were in September last year on a great Peloponnesian north/south roadtrip with an overnight in Tripolis. The museum was just across the street from the hotel, and I took Ariadne and went.

Ariadne enjoys the garden of the Tripolis museum…
Once you get over the bad state of the museum itself and the museological side of things, there are a few gems housed within. On the left on the ground floor, the finds from the LHIIIC Palaiochora chamber cemetery, pretty much exclusively ceramic but certainly worth a visit. In the basement, the sculptures from the villa of Heroides Atticus are also very much worth a visit, despite whatever feelings one may have about Roman-era 'art'. Most of the rest of the museum actually reinforces whatever feelings you may have of Roman-era 'art'. Well, it did for me…

For the rest of the road trip, click:

2011 Peloponnesian road trip

Isthmia museum, July 2011

The museum at Isthmia is really very much off the beaten track and this is a pity as it houses some amazing finds in materials not normally encountered when making any sort of must-see tour of the Peloponnese or indeed mainland Greece. It is modern, well laid out and with plenty of well-written texts.

A view of the main hall of the Isthmia museum

The religious site at Isthmia was of course dedicated to Posidon, the god of the sea and not without some reason. The site straddles and controls the paths from the south to the isthmus and along with Corinth itself two and a half hours to the west it effectively controls all access to the Peloponnese. The southern edge of the isthmus is just 15 minutes’ walk away while the harbour of Kenchreae is one hour to the south.

Excavations were conducted from 1952 onwards. It is one of the locations of the four great Panhellenic Games (Delphi, excavated by the French and Olympia by the Germans were both excavated before the end of the 19th Century, Nemea and Isthmia were both excavated in the last half of the 20th Century by the American School). The finds of the excavations from the fifties and subsequent re-examinations form the main part of the museum’s exhibition, although the finds from sites such as Kenchreae and Almyrae are no less interesting and the finds from Kenchreae are what give the museum its unique nature in terms of the materials on show.

Terracotta finds originally from the archaic temple of Poseidon, dated to the 7th CBC and found in the Large Circular Pit which lies to the west of the Palaimonion and south of the Temple precinct.

This Large Circular Pit contained many other finds. The pit was used to bury fragmentary and broken terracotta and stone artefacts and serves as a sort of Perserschutt pit for Isthmia. One of the larger finds is the Poros Kouros, below.

Fragmentary statue in the shape of a Kouros, youth

The kouros part was found at Isthmia in October 1959 by members of the University of Chicago digging at the site under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies. The piece was found at a depth of 18.70 m. in the Large Circular Pit.

The fragmentary nature of the find and the fact that the pit contained all sorts of finds spanning many centuries has allowed classical scholars free reign to try to date the statue on stylistic grounds alone. This, coupled with the relative paucity of Kouros finds in the Peloponnese, the soft material used (and the constraints this imposes on diagnostic indicators) makes it an interesting case.

Next up, back to the Bronze Age:

Mycenaean Psi-figurines

The ubiquity of the Psi and Phi figurines in Late Helladic contexts is one of those reassuring things. We are so used to them that that if there were none, you would be curious to know why. Other people do a much better job of discussing and describing these so I will not repeat what better researchers have already said. The specific figurines are part of the exhibition focusing on the chamber-tomb Cemetery of Almyri, near Isthmia. More precisely, Kato Almyri, Rachi Bechri. There are twenty odd tombs excavated at this site, yielding some pretty standard looking ceramics and the psi and phi figurines. The floor plans of the tombs look interesting enough and maybe I’ll make a trip sometime in the future – although given how long it has been since I first tried to get into this museum and how many years passed until I made it there when it was open to the public, I doubt such a visit would be any time soon.

Moving on to Kenchreae, the star of the show…

Kenchreae is one of the harbours around the Isthmus of Corinth. For some it is famous for the haircut of St. Paul (dude, srsly?), for others it is known for the amazing underwater excavations of the American school in the sixties. The reason for underwater excavations is the earthquake which struck in 375 and caused the land to sink a few feet, thereby burying buildings in the water of the harbour. How’s that for a funky terminus ante quem? Underwater excavations usually means that we get a whole bunch of stuff turning up which would normally have rotted away. When it sits underwater, there is a great chance that a site’s perishable materials will be buried in anoxic mud and will not rot, but remain for the archaeologist to find. And so we have it… the so called temple of Isis, looking remarkably like a village church in floorplan, revealed a whole lot of funky finds in materials we don’t normally encounter.

Wooden furniture find from the so-called Temple of Isis

The furniture is a great discovery as not only will it allow the interested visitor to have a good look at ancient joinery, but also to see the ivory inlays and sculpted decorations which would have adorned the furniture itself. The piece above shows some very finely wrought, presumably burned decoration in the wood itself.

Ivory plaques for decoration of wooden furniture

Speaking of inlays and decorative bits, the ivories above depict cupids doing everyday tasks. To me the worksmanship and subject look very much like later medieval ivories with almost identical theme. This is the sort of thing that if I had seen it without the context, I would have dated totally wrong... as such it is very much good fun.

One final but uber-funky wooden find from the so-called Temple of Isis is these wooden doors:

Wooden Doors off the so called Temple of Isis, Kenchreae

These are by far the largest of the wooden finds currently on show at the Isthmia museum. To me, they look not very much different to provincial or naïve doormaking of far more recent times. We don’t often get a lot of wood surviving in Greece so this is all good stuff.

Another great find from the so-called Temple of Isis were the packing crates with the glass panels depicting scenes from a seaside city... These were stacked in groups around the walls of the main area of the temple, presumably either for installation or for transhipment elsewhere and most likely originated from an Alexandrian workshop. They date to the period immediately before the earthquake that led to their burial and subsequent preservation.

Corner of one of the plates

There were originally about 120 glass plates which would have covered an area of about 150sq.m. The plates were either completely decorative, depicted life-sized figures of priests or philosophers or were part of a cityscape panorama showing a seaside town. The whole work is an amazing look at an art form for which we have very little (if any) other information and an impressive decorative programme spanning many meters of wall space.

Scenes from the seaside town panoramas

The panels were stacked face to face, and the faces were the parts most susceptible to the corrosion of the sea, frequently resulting in the fusing of the two panels face to face. Most of the finds on display are actually the back side, rather than the front side which would have been on show, and this should be kept in mind. Because of the difficulties of desalination and the fragile nature of the finds, they are now stored in climate controlled rooms in the museum basement.

To sum up – if you have not been to the Isthmia museum – definitely make a point of taking a three minute detour and go!

Palamari, an Early Bronze Age site on Skyros

I chanced to have had the opportunity to visit Palamari whle chasing bats with Dr. G in June 2011 – more about which I hope to write soon. Of my impressions at the time, my diary records only the following:

"The site of Palamari is well worth visiting. It’s like a Kastri on Syros only on a lower hill with less clambering. Brilliant EBA fortification, way more impressive than Lerna in its size and scope. Glad to have made the detour."

View over the excavations

Verbose, this description is not. And I will not be any more verbose now, fourteen months on.

There is an onsite “museum” with a pretty funky model of the excavated site and plenty of text with images on boards covering stuff like the changing environment from the EBII through the MBA as evidenced by faunal remains and the links with other civilisations as evidenced in the ceramic types found on site.

Model of the excavations

The ceramic types cover Trojan depas amphikupella through to Cycladic beaked jugs and Mainland Minyan kantharoi. Not surprising really, given the location of the island and the site, but reassuring to see it.

I stand by my “worth a visit” conclusion of 14 months ago, even for the uninitiated for whom this sort of thing isn’t their bag:

Bunny Burritos

So here’s what I did yesterday:

I started with three onions, this much goes without saying. Coarsely cut up, these were fried in butter with some olive oil to keep it from overheating, until they became transparent. Next, I took the meat off a rabbit – apart from one leg, a big piece of saddle and one arm plus chest (those are for tonight). I then liberally applied Montreal steak seasoning, which is essentially garlic, coriander, black pepper, red pepper flakes, dill seed, and salt, so it gives the meat a nice kick, but also has the coriander and dill in there for some underlying interest.

This then went in the frying pan until done. I snacked on the kidneys and liver at this point as no one else wants them. The rest then came out of the frying pan and was kept on the side.

I deglazed with some cheap white wine, and then put in a tomato (sliced) and two aubergines (cut into sticks). When these had started to soften and the tomato had disintegrated, I added two courgettes (cut into sticks) and two green peppers. Every now and then it was necessary to put more white wine in to avoid sticking and I put some more olive oil in at some point to help the process. When the courgettes were softish, the rabbit came back in for long enough for the flavours to talk to eachother.

This was then spooned onto tortilla wraps, grated cheese was added and burritos were thus fashioned.

Yummy!

All work and no play...

Every retelling of an experience is a recreation of that experience – it goes one step further from the experience itself as every re-imagining requires us to recreate in our minds eye that which we are retelling. I do not fancy going into Plato’s theory of forms right here, so don’t push me.

I woke on Saturday morning after seeing an amazing dream. I have recounted it twice, very conscious how each retelling destroys some of the magic and awe in the original dream I experienced, but since I haven’t had one in a while, here is the dream I had on Saturday night, in its third outing, and the first time in English – all original dialogue or rather esologue was in Greek.

I was sleeping in bed – not my bed, but my bed, you know how it is in dreams. I was hot, too hot to sleep, so I woke up and noticed I had two t-shirts on, and took one off. I woke up again, too hot to sleep, and again I had two t-shirts on, so I took one off. In the end, realizing I would not be sleeping any longer, I got up.

K was there and told me to come and see how things were, now the packing cases had been moved away. There, behind where the packing cases had been, a narrow corridor led away, glass blocks making up the wall on the right, and on the left the main door to the apartment, which I realized we weren’t using because it had been hidden away behind the packing cases. The corridor had a large room at the end of it, and when I reached it I was in a huge sitting room with sofas and armchairs on a number of levels, with all mod cons and plenty of space and good lighting. The house was not set up as I would like it, being something a little too much towards a sort of seventies set up, but it had everything I could want or need. From the sitting room, a dining room led off, with dining table and chairs, again, everything anyone could possibly want. Up some stairs, a second sitting room, less formal, with huge TV, stereos, electric guitars with amps, and a playstation with a broken steering wheel accessory.

And I remember at this point thinking to myself, where has all this stuff come from, and sensing the answer that it has always been here: I just couldn’t see it because the packing cases had shut off access to these rooms. So there I was in a house full of everything anyone could want or need, and realizing that I had always had it.

Jack Torrance aside, it was an amazing, awe-inspiring dream. I woke fully aware of the interpretation of the trunk of the dream, if not all the details and said to myself, oi – you better not forget this one if you go back to sleep now!

Three days on, I am still high on the realization that it’s up to me to move the packing crates and reveal what I know to be behind.

About moving the cheese

Yesterday I was somewhere between denial and rage and not ready for this new movement of the cheese. Fuck my bastard luck. Another day spent reading dodgy statistics and wallowing in various blogs. It all felt like what I imagine freefall to be like: the only sense of movement is the whistling of the air in your ears and the ground spiraling towards you, fields visible, then individual trees, then the crops or blades of grass and all along you have known what grows in the fields but when you’re looking from afar, it’s all so easy to ignore... A new adventure, but I am not ready to see it as such – when I started the 'old' adventure, I was unmarried and young. Now I have a family and this makes it all so much more difficult to come to terms with. And yet, talking about it helps so much, and so does having the family.

I woke today so much more ready for the adventure, so much readier to step out.

Урок 30, 1997

I learned Russian for about two years, more than fifteen years ago, with the Athens branch of the Pushkin Institute. When I visited Kazakhstan in late 1997, I got by easily enough and even now, I can figure out what our slavic northern neighbours are talking about, despite how they treat their articles. Feels like only yesterday, but fifteen years sounds like a long time ago...

Part of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

Leaves, 1980s

This is from the early 1980s, a collage of autumnal leaves, made no doubt after a nature walk. When I was younger, I could probably have named all of the trees these came from. Now I doubt I can identify one.

Part of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

Avocado, June 1980

June 23rd
This is my avocado. It needs to be watered every Friday. Its got light green leaves. We have lots of cacti in our class. We have a green pepper. We have lots of other plants.



This also dates to June 1980. I still have an avocado plant, though obviously not the stringy-looking one in the image.

Part of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

Cyclops, June 1980

June 24th
My puppet is a cyclops from Greek mythology. Odyssiuses ship landed on a greek island. He went to a cave for shelter not knowing it was a cave of a cyclops. Then he came back with his herd of sheep. He ate two of the men for lunch the other two for dinner. Odyssius gave him some wine when he was drunk they made him blind. He screamed nobody made me blind.

Nearly at the beginning of the story he said that his name was Nobody.



The text is from an exercise book I came across at the weekend from 1980. The spelling is great. I have photographs of the Cyclops puppet, but I am not sure if it is still around. I very much like the post punchline explanation of the whole thing - nearly at the beginning of the story... I also like the was the cyclops is never named when the subject of the sentence, always “he”, even when this is confusing to the flow of the text. Well tried, indeed. I have recycled the exercise book.

Part of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

The dead pool

STELIOS
1. 105 William Shatner
2. 48 Jim Bowen
3. 93 Arnold Palmer
4. 41 Chuck Berry
5. 65 Rhodes Boyson
6. 91 Noam Chomsky
7. 1 Queen Mum
8. 32 Tony Curtis
9. 77 Marti Caine
10. 54 Warren Mitchel[l]


I date this piece from between November 1992 and July 1993, probably in the first part of this range. We got together with ten other guys (I am pretty sure they were all guys) and put ten names each into a hat and then drew names for each of us. The idea is that the guy holding the card with the first celebrity to die would win the pot. In short, betting on random outcome events. I came across my card, written in someone else’s hand while cleaning out boxes from our recent moving house thing.

It is interesting to note that of my list, I recognise / recognised only six of the names. I had six entertainers, one sportsman, one academic, one politician and one Royal. Also interesting to note is that I got a real bum deal, given that seven of my celebs are still very much alive, though some have been in and out of hospital recently, almost 20 years after the list was drafted. Only the Tony Curtis (2010), the Queen Mum (2002) and Marti Caine (1995) are gone and although Marti Caine left us soonest someone else won. I can’t remember who actually won the jackpot and with which names.

One of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

Trojan war so much alive still

THE TROJAN WAR

Six hundred ships
Set sail from shore
And soon arrived at Troy

Our attack began
And when we’d won
We gladly sailed for home

By Stelios

[Good **]


I date this to between 1979 and 1981, probably in the middle of this range. I just want to comment on the quality of the stick man and wooden horse, surely worth the two stars; also on the interesting use of the first person personal pronoun. I would say that is shows how the young Stelios identifies with the subject (rather than believes that he was there when the shit went down). If he had been there he would know that there were in excess of 1,000 ships.

The first of a new series, called "Cleaning out my closet" (ComC), where I present things I find while tidying up packing boxes from our recent house moving.

Time passes, stuff happens

In 2001, in spring, while making a circuit of Sicily in my old cinquecento with a friend from college, I bought two paper bags of sun-dried tomatoes from an open market next to the temple of Apollo, on Ortygia in Syracuse. I ate the last of those tomatoes with K tonight in a rather fine risotto. I really ought to get round to writing about Sicily some time.

Degree from UK university just not good enough for Greek state

I took my desmond to DOATAP this morning for the last time. DOATAP is one small part of the monstrous bureaucracy of the Greek state. It has for years existed and sapped precious funds from the state budget in an effort to protect the musty-smelling state educational system from having to hold a mirror in front of its face and see how truly without merit it is.

DOATAP is the old DIKATSA. I do not know why the initials changed although I am sure the Greek taxpayer paid unnecessary money for this unnecessary re-branding.

The essence of the work of DOATAP is to wave a magic wand over academic degrees and thereby declare them to be of equal merit to the equivalent degrees from a Greek institution. My degree, which I was awarded by the alma mater of Byron and Newton for studies at a department inaugurated by Erasmus himself, is not considered to be of equal merit to the equivalent degree from a Greek institution.

I have no quarrel with Mr. Papavlasopoulos the friendly guy in charge of classics degrees. As he said, he was just following orders. Actually, to give the guy credit, he said that he is only implementing the law, and not involved in passing it. I have to write to the members of parliament to see where they stand.

I cannot apply to the University of Athens to read for an MA because I do not have a degree that is considered good enough for them. I am not certain, but I have a sneaky feeling that my rights as a human being are being curtailed here. Article 26 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects my right to higher education: “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”. On the basis of merit. In any one of the other countries of Europe and a whole bunch of other countries besides, my degree would be considered good enough. Not in Greece. Not for DOATAP.

I will be writing to my MPs. I will be writing to my Alma Mater. We are not done here.

Open e-mail to the New Acropolis Museum

" Is the museum still implementing its no-photography policy? If so, how is it justified, given that the archaeological law (Ν. 3028/2003) in conjunction with the joint decision of the Ministers of the Economy and Culture of 28 December 2011 (126463, Article 1.1) permits free photography in museums when carried out with non-professional equipment?

What is the procedure for an interested amateur photographer to be granted permission to take photographs inside the museum for personal / educational purposes? Many thanks for your time. "

So - let's see what they reply.

On having hair and drinking milk...

- Μπαμπά, γιατί έχεις τρίχες;
- Γιατί είμαι θηλαστικό. Και εσύ είσαι θηλαστικό, αφού έχεις τρίχες και πίνεις γάλα.
- Η [αδελφή μου] είναι θηλαστική;
- Θηλαστικό. Δεν έχει τρίχες; Δεν πίνει γάλα από το στήθος της Μαμάς;
- Και η Μαμά είναι θηλαστική;
- Θηλαστικό. Δεν έπινε και η Μαμά γάλα από την Γιαγιά, όταν ήταν μικρή;
- Και η Γιαγιά είναι;
...etc.