Being restored

I am at the Acropolis, walking in the footsteps of everyone, of millions, including my younger self.

My first visit was during a school trip when I was an impressionable 17. No-one thought twice then about allowing us to climb inside Athena’s ruined temple to eat our packed lunches. Perhaps my profound sense of being a European dates from then, when I was allowed to own the place where a large chunk of my history and my stories come from, and where many of my words are rooted. Perhaps it helped that I bumped into a friend inside the temple and discovered that the world is small.

I next visited twenty years ago when we brought our children to Greece to explore the places they were learning about in school. By then the restoration of the Parthenon had started and the stones inside were protected from clambering feet but as we read aloud children’s versions of the myths and legends it still felt like the source of my culture.

Two decades on, the restoration continues and there is now a fabulous museum where we can see close-up the original sculptures that once adorned the outside of the Parthenon (or copies, where the originals are in the British Museum, having been crow-barred off by a British aristocrat over 200 years ago in an act of breathtaking colonial-minded vandalism). An excellent video teaches me more than I ever knew about the gods on the pediments, the procession in honour of Athena on the frieze and the battle stories on the metopes. Then I head out onto the Acropolis and the feeling through my feet that I belong is stronger than ever. Only the engineers and restorers can pass through the columns and enter the temple and I can’t help wondering, now that they have identified where each hacked and fallen stone belongs, where the one I sat on to eat my sandwiches all those years ago has been placed. It sort of feels just a little bit mine.