Pieces of Monastiraki

It’s our last full day; we fly home tomorrow afternoon. Today we visited the archaeological sites which are a stone’s throw from us – the Ancient Agora, the Roman Agora, and Hadrian’s Library. In between, we retreated home for food and drink, and to recover from the heat (it is 32 degrees again today, and baking in the sun).

The Ancient Agora was the heart of working Athens – it was where everyone came to meet, shop, discuss the state of affairs, and make decisions. When I say everyone, of course I mean the men. The women were at home, no doubt plotting and scheming and wielding their own form of power.

Here there is a reconstruction of the Stoa, the forerunner of the colonnaded shopping mall. Inside is a small museum housing artefacts found during excavations of the Agora, which began in the 1930s when the powers that be realised they should be preserving their city’s extraordinary history. There is also the Temple of Haephestus, the most intact ancient building in Athens. The rest is mostly rock and rubble nowadays, but you can see how it sat underneath the Acropolis, and get a feel for life here 3000 years ago.

Shopping Athenian style

Voting machine

Temple of Haephestus

Frieze depicting party crashing centaurs

Headless Hadrian

Christian church

Fresco inside

Later, we made our way across Monastiraki yet again, and into Hadrian’s Library. In a corner, we came across another tiny museum with an impressive statue of Athena Nike – minus head and arms. It had some other smaller statues and more artefacts. From there it was a short distance to our last “old ruin”, the Roman agora. This developed when the original agora grew too small for the booming population, and it quickly took over as the commercial centre.

Hadrians Library

Athena Nike

Apparently the Swiss did not invent the Swiss Army Knife

Roman agora

Tower of the Winds

Treading a well worn path

Almost as an afterthought, we poked our noses inside a small church on the edge of the site. Inside was a display of personal photos taken by German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of Athens, from 1941-1945. It told an interesting story of how the Nazis manipulated ordinary people into spreading propaganda through amateur photography.