Another marvelous, unforgettable trip to the eastern Mediterranean which I visit again and again, every now and then: I have been to many countries in Europe (actually some are missing, a handful of them on the Balkans: Bosnia, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, also Slovakia, Moldova, Belarus, Estonia and the two mini-countries of Andorra and Monaco), with a home base of Germany and another one in Northern Italy thanks to my wife and my daughter. I am a summer enthusiast, this summer, very last minute and very spontaneously, after finding the flight prices to Japan a little to high in the short term, we decided for a trip to Greece.
But Greece is not that small and cannot be seen all at once. Interested in new places, I thought, where have I been and what have I not yet seen:
- Crete, Santorini, Ios, Mykonos: a trip in my early 20ies into the unknown to the place of a foreign alphabet – unforgettable and among the best trips in my whole life
- Samos: in place of a colleague presenting his paper at a CICLING, this trip also took me to Ephesos and Padmos
- Paphos and Lefkosia, which I know, are on Cyprus, yet people speak Greek and the cultural sphere for me is inseparable
- Korfu with a boattrip stopping on the mainland and at Paxos and before Antipaxos, what a beautiful sea
And my wife also had seen some. So, I thought Rhodes must be nice, maybe with a short trip to the Turkish coast and Pamukkale or so, but then she had THE idea: the Peloponnes. I immediately loved that – all effort went into finding hotels, a car and a route and we ended up with an equal amount to what a precomposed hotel+flight package to Rhodes would have cost. Just with much more exciting names and places (sry Rhodes, maybe next time and after I visit you I’ll have a better opinion): Athens, the Akropolis, Mykene, Epidaurus, Olimpia, Korinth. And in a wild back and forth in a real summer between ancient sites, museums and beautiful beaches, we had a holiday which will remain unrivaled. Never have I seen such marvels of the ancient world in digestible packages wrapped in a modern and Byzantine costume of customs accompanied by the ingredients of every relaxing summer holiday such as amazing beaches with crystal clear water, restaurants serving delicious foods and drinks and shopping opportunities.
But what do you intellectually take away. Is there anything. Haven’t we studied Greek and Roman history so profoundly – even too profoundly at the expense of knowing little of ancient China and ancient India for instance, not to mention Persia and the middle east. But, in my view, if man is 200 000 years old as a species with no one ever telling the stories of our thousands of years lasting encounters with other primate species: Neanderthals, Denisovans, but also many others such as the Flores man etc. because none of us wrote at that time and details get washed away by oral transmission. So anyway all our modern understanding of history so over represents the age of writing that in the collective mind the earlier stages may seem to mingle together into some kind of stone age hunter-gatherer understanding, where we know little of how this kind of life really is, what knowledge and structures it requires. Yet, of course, it is true that those times must have been much more self-similar as only with script and after the neolithic revolution inventions and growth speeded up unprecedentedly. From this point of view, we also be better able to understand these more complex ancient societies of Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt and so on. And so returning to the first question, can one still learn anything new traveling to these places or is it merely seeing things with your own eyes, not through the shady curtain of frozen in time fotography or the unknown land of VR?
Yes, we can. At least my never resting mind spins a story connecting the things I have seen, maybe so as to manifest it in my mind. And this story revolves around the history of sculpture. A key moment was when a huge head of Zeus in the archaeological museum of Athens was facing me. Like some Egyptian heads and statues this was so human, that its size impressed. How could one not believe in such beings of those stories if surrounded by those statues all the time, some depicting real humans. How could the motivation for group selection and even individual selection, the evocation of the other in thy own mind not be enhanced in this way. The child care enhancer of homo sapiens? – the ability but also the need to love and care, be it for the group, your offspring or another. the statue is watching us, it is. And all those statues are known and connected by a canon of stories where actual humans mingle with gods, completely wiping away any delineation between story and reality and there is is, I remember the face of the last statue of Zeus I had seen, when I hear one of his stories and I think about the last story about him I have heard when I enter the next of his temples and see him in stone. And then some of the stories also speak of actual humans having magically turned into flesh. But as the story of Pygmalion reminds us, there is also a scary element in the cold dead stone and the stories are to be taken as what they are: stories, but even more scared by the imagery not everyone manages – what if they were real and the stone, just opposite to the effect of looking into the Medusa’s eyes turn into breathing, pounding flesh. What if we make no image of it, – that is another approach, but it is still centered around the image approach for it exists as outspoken opposition, so the sculpture or image must have been there. And anyway it is only saying no image of the monotheist god (which is a reflection of the author which is a term invented after the introduction of script). So, what is the history of sculpture? I looked for a book on it, similar to the seminal one on Before Writing which explains the greatest invention of man. I found none.
The neolithic people had sculptures, mainly fat small naked women where one cannot but also think the theory that this was stone age porn. Maybe this stuff is too abundant in our digital age, maybe those truly were cult objects or worship tokens. But everything had to be movable in those times, so bigger statues would have been impractical. Only after the neolithic revolution places of cult sprung up and an age of building higher larger farther started which we have still not ended with sky scraper competitions and km-long line cities. But as for sculptures, the Moai, the huge Ramses statues, smaller and larger figures at Ankor Watt, Bhodisattvas and all kinds of other small and large, magically enhanced by animal parts or additional body parts, naked, dressed. With or without political calculus. We know sculptures, smaller than, equal to and larger than humans. First, small, then they got huger, the Zeus statue at Olimpia being amongst the 7 ancient wonders. Just as the neolithic revolution started in the fertile crescent, monumental sculpture must have. So around Egypt, ancient Israel, Sumer, Persia, Greece and then Rome. With buildings statues became larger and more impressive. Statues of cult, but including often a number of actual people like Nofretete. So, the Greek probably perfected the realism of statues once superated the kind of toy-like looking Kuros. And this went until China, some theories say and connect the terracotta warriors with Greek influence across Asia. The more realistic, the more fearsome, I thought, as the limit between artificial and real melts. Now, huge statues of the cult. Romans introduced if I remember well removable heads and the rate of actual peoples statues must have increased. And then, with Christianity, another change. Only one statue, that of Jesus on the cross. Well, Mary and the child appear, but usually not as statues in the church. But on iconas, and those are there in Greece today. So, in some way the history of statues, statues and images of people, continues. The Christian church, like the ancient temple remained a place of sculpture. Public places take political and cultural actual people. Maybe the cave-like property of buildings and the cult is another factor. Arent these phases of sculpture, characterized by much more than mere formal characteristics, but more by their functions, places, usages. I need to think more about the history of sculpture and its place, read some books. Put together some facts, spin a story, but not a superficial one. So in a way, another intellectual journey has just begun. The journey to Greece has ended, long live the journey to Greece.
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