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It’s essentially the most unique misplaced property workplace on the planet. Deep underground, in a thrumming, humidified laboratory, a world-historical statue is being reunited with its historic marble foot. Of all of the rooms on the Acropolis Museum in Athens, that is essentially the most pulse-quickening, which is saying one thing contemplating that the constructing homes treasures of antiquity together with friezes from the Parthenon.
Prof Nikolaos Stampolidis, director-general of the museum, is taking part in the position of an archaeological Prince Charming: he should resolve if the deftly chiselled toes are a match for the sculpture of a kouros, or bare youth on show as a part of the everlasting assortment till conservators started to suspect that the foot bone linked to the leg bone may be the incorrect one. Maybe the foot within the lab, which was discovered elsewhere on the Acropolis, will likely be an ideal match. If museum employees are proper, these jigsaw items, separated for millennia, have been inside only a few sq. metres of each other.
It’s not the primary time that the kouros has required the ministrations of Stampolidis and his workforce. He factors out elements of the statue, the place marble the color of clotted cream, patinaed with age, provides method to sections of plaster forged which are so brilliant and white by comparability that they may have been furnished by a Harley Road orthodontist. The determine’s arm has been damaged in a number of locations and researchers have detected indicators of fireplace injury, believed so far from 480BC, when the Persians burned down the Acropolis. The carved photos of the outdated web site are likely to undergo injury to necks and ankles as a result of they’re weak factors, simply as they’re for us.
Considering the lame statue, you may be reminded of the story of Achilles and his weak spot from the books of Homer, particularly for those who occur to set eyes on a bust of the good poet, which is propped up on a laboratory bench and sporting an expression of hard-won forbearance. Just like the kouros, the Homer is within the lab for operating repairs. Stampolidis and his workforce will return their astonishing trove to the general public galleries when their work is finished. They hope that in the future quickly they’ll resolve an excellent larger jigsaw puzzle than the crocked statue, and reassemble all of the surviving items of sculpture from the Parthenon. That will require the return of the Parthenon (or Elgin) marbles from the British Museum, the place they’ve been for greater than 200 years. Talks have begun between the UK and Greece, by way of the auspices of Unesco, the world heritage physique.
The Parthenon is the star attraction of the Greek capital, in fact. So the pure inclination is to lookup; however as Stampolidis’s basement bodyshop demonstrates, a whole lot of the attention-grabbing motion is to be discovered underground.
The museum homes artefacts recovered from the rock the place the Acropolis stands and its surrounding slopes. The museum itself lies over ruins from Roman and early Byzantine Athens, and it was beneath floor degree that I encountered one of many best-preserved relics of town’s previous. The Hadrian aqueduct is an historic watercourse relationship from AD125 that runs for 12 miles beneath a few of the most traffic-thronged streets in Europe. There’s nothing prefer it in the remainder of the continent. A lot of it’s dry at this time, however Athens is bringing it back to life as a priceless useful resource in native irrigation and to inexperienced the areas it passes by way of.
On a sweltering morning, the sunken passage has the chalky cool of a catacomb. I’m strolling behind my information, George Sachinis, director of technique and innovation at Eydap, town’s water firm, who factors out that we’re capable of stand upright. “The Romans wanted the aqueduct to be excessive not for the water however for the boys who had been excavating it,” he says. They sank 400 wells to the depth of the water desk, after which joined them to one another. The gentlest of inclines meant that gravity delivered water to Hadrian’s settlement.
However after the Romans left, the aqueduct disappeared from reminiscence and wasn’t rediscovered till the late nineteenth century, when locals observed that a few of their neighbours had no problem rising greens, even within the driest months. These fortunate people lived by the outdated wells. At current, the aquifer beneath Athens discharges into the ocean, with no environmental profit. The town goes to divert this movement by way of the outdated aqueduct once more, and pump it up at factors alongside the route to be able to water market gardens, allotments and livestock. The work will start in 2023, and is because of take 4 years.
Making use of this pure useful resource, as a substitute of losing it, will cut back power prices, and assist Athenians to maintain their metropolis inexperienced in temperatures which were recognized to achieve 48C. On the very level the place Sachinis and I are standing – the mouth of the outdated Roman tunnel – the aqueduct will debouch into new water gardens, a lush and refreshing oasis on the coronary heart of the metropolis.
Not all of Athens’ underground points of interest are strictly subterranean, nonetheless. Take the occasions of the summer festival, which runs within the capital and the neighbouring metropolis of Epidaurus. Though 1000’s head to the slopes of the Acropolis to look at opera and rock from the marble bleachers of the classical pleasure dome that’s the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, there’s another, off-the-books aesthetic at one other venue throughout city. Pireos 260 is a disused furnishings manufacturing unit in an industrial quarter close to the port of Piraeus. The rust-streaked steel partitions of the previous workshop will reverberate to digital music, dance and theatre.
“This can be a hidden space of Athens,” says Maria Panagiotopoulou, one of many pageant organisers. “Foreigners would possibly miss it if it wasn’t for the exhibits and occasions, however it’s stuffed with bars and cafes. The actual lifetime of Athens is right here.”
The outdated couch mill has been staging a brand new manufacturing, The Other Side of the Tempest, a mashup of Orson Welles’ unfinished final film, The Different Aspect of the Wind, and The Tempest. The Welles screenplay was itself a sort of homage to the Shakespeare play. Throughout rehearsals, the actors take a break behind the good hangar of the cashiered plant, whereas stagehands and sparks move by of their conventional costume of black T-shirts and cargo shorts. The place seems to be just like the backlot of an outdated movie studio. The cultures of various ages are in dialogue with one another this summer season in Athens, the place the achilles heel of an vintage statue could be a connection between the previous and the current.
The journey was offered by Marketing Greece, with lodging at Athens Capital Center hotel (doubles from €193 room-only)
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