The ancient Greek temples and their landscapes
“Since 1987 a huge, mournfully flapping and increasingly mouldy tent has covered the monument while complex restoration work is carried out.
Seeing the temple in this state on a cold March morning, nearly 40 years after being stunned by its bare, rugged magnificence, was the most shocking moment of a nostalgic trip to the Peloponnese with an old friend to revisit sites we had last inspected as schoolboy classicists. The venerable building seemed like a patient on life-support.
....everything was changed by the tent, interrupting the relationship with the landscape and the way the sanctuary emerges from it. You could not help feeling the shrouded, melancholy-looking temple was an emblem of the whole beleaguered country.
...How about this idea: European nations, in a gesture of goodwill, get together in providing a fund to hasten the works and ensure the speedy removal of the tent?”
Seeing the temple in this state on a cold March morning, nearly 40 years after being stunned by its bare, rugged magnificence, was the most shocking moment of a nostalgic trip to the Peloponnese with an old friend to revisit sites we had last inspected as schoolboy classicists. The venerable building seemed like a patient on life-support.
....everything was changed by the tent, interrupting the relationship with the landscape and the way the sanctuary emerges from it. You could not help feeling the shrouded, melancholy-looking temple was an emblem of the whole beleaguered country.
...How about this idea: European nations, in a gesture of goodwill, get together in providing a fund to hasten the works and ensure the speedy removal of the tent?”
Nikos Kazantzakis on this temple and its landscape:
“….And suddenly, at a turn of the mountain, the famous temple of Epicurious Apollo rises unexpectedly in front of him. Directly facing the cliff, shaped as it is with the same stones of the mountain, you feel the deep response of the landscape and the temple. Like a piece of the mountain, stone from its stone, the temple seems inseparably wedged between the rocks, a rock too, but a rock over which the spirit passed. The pillars of the temple, carved and placed in this way, express the essence of all this mountainous austerity and desolation.
You are confident that it is the head of the landscape, of the sacred area, where its mind is kept, vigil, and protected. And here the ancient art, continuing and perfectly expressing the landscape, does not surprise you. Agility, calmness, from a human path takes you, without panting, to the top.”
We have seen wonderful success with protected archeological sites in this country. But, we can do better. 
Before 1987
After 1987
The article by the British journalist and author above was the first time I heard someone mentioning the need for landscape restoration: 'removal of the tent'. Something so obvious!
Is there no landscape consciousness in this country?
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| The temple in the first years of the 19th century, Edward Dodwell. |
But the Peloponnesian coverved temple is not the only case. The Archeological Service and Hellenic Minitry of Culture seems to have forgotten many a monument's tie with the landscape.
Enter the Parthenon!
This amazing building on the Acropolis of Athens. Probably one of the five or so wonders of the global archeological monuments of all time...It seems to be permanently “scarred” by the presence of scaffolding and other engineering works....since the early 1980s. No end in sight! No reference to bringing the glory of the building and its landscape back. Very sad.
Before 1983
Recent years
We who teach and promote landscape appreciation in Greece would like to help.
Photos in this post are from internet sources; I appreciate their contribution. The last landscape photo from the hill of Pnyx with the view of the Acropolis of Athens is from College Year in Athens (CYA). https://cyathens.org/
