Dec 5 – 7, 2008 – Athens, Greece – Riots break out…

Our second morning in Athens we headed in the direction of the National Archaeological Museum, in the Exarhia district, thinking we would spend the morning there.  As we neared the Museum (it too was within walking distance of our hotel, we noticed a dust or smoke hanging in the air that started to irritate our eyes and throats.  At about the same time, a street vendor, in broken English, asked us if we were headed to the Museum and, when we said we were, warned us to not go there.

We wondered if it was because the strike also included this Museum, but the street vendor didn’t have enough English to answer this question or give us more information.  Now we were curious so we headed on towards the Museum and since it was a Sunday morning there wasn’t much vehicle or pedestrian traffic.

As we rounded the corner to where the map showed the Museum, this was our view and we walked through broken glass and litter everywhere.  The entrance to the Museum is through a gate that can be sighted directly over the top of the burned out car on the opposite side of the street.

 

We headed past this car and turned right down another street and this was the view.  I didn’t connect until later that the burning we had felt in our throat and eyes earlier had been tear gas.  This sight took some digesting and we weren’t making connections with our other observations yet.

It was obvious to us by this point that we were looking at the scene of a riot.  We proceeded further down the street and saw that dumpsters had been overturned to cordon off both ends of the street.

 

A small crowd had formed at this point, surveying the damage, and I went over to one of what appeared to be a local and asked him what had happened.  He said there had been riots between police and what he called "anarchists" (we learned later that the Exarhia district is a hotbed of radicalism in Greece and has a long history of being volatile).  The riot had been touched off by the shooting death, by a policeman, of a 15 year old boy that had thrown a bottle at a passing police car.

At this point we realized what the street vendor had been trying to convey.  We shouldn’t go to the Museum because it had been the scene of a riot early the previous morning.  As we walked away from the area, we saw many scenes like this.  At this point we still though the rioting had been localized to this Exarhia area.

 

With our plan for the day in tatters, we wandered around a little bit before hitting on the idea of hiking up this height of land, which we learned later is called Lykavittos Hill.

On our way to the Hill, we returned again to the National Gardens to enjoy its tranquility and get our bearings.  Exiting the Gardens on the side facing the Hill, we saw these buses which were riot police transports and mobile command centers for Athens law enforcement agencies.

We thought this was leftover from earlier in the day (boy, were we naive!) and that everyone was putting away equipment and heading home.  We headed up the Hill and took these pictures from the top.

A theatre on the top of Lykavittos Hill where they hold outdoor concerts.

I think this is Panathenaic Stadium which was built for the 2004 Olympics and hosted the archery and some other events.  This site had historic significance either to ancient times or the modern Olympic Games which date to 1896 in Athens.  This was not the main stadium used for the track and field events and opening/closing ceremonies, it was located elsewhere.

As we were enjoying the view from up top, we started to hear sirens and saw thick black smoke

Then, we started to hear sirens and saw this thick, black smoke coming from one of the neighborhoods at the foot of the Lykavittos Hill.  We didn’t know what was going on at this point.  Our theory had been the violence had concluded earlier.

As we descended the hill and walked through what appeared to be a calm, affluent neighborhood where families were enjoying Sunday afternoon walks and coffees in sidewalk cafes, our route back to our hotel took us through the Plateia Syntagma square where, from a distance we could see what appeared to be some kind of clash or riot scene.

From the point this picture was taken we could see rocks and other debris that had been thrown popping up above the crowd in the top right corner of the picture.

We also saw this squad of riot police forming up (this is about 2 or three blocks away from the center of the the conflict.  Not long after this picture was taken, this group of police lowered their face shields and swung their gas masks into place as if they were getting ready to move.  We took this as our signal to move on.

We headed down the pedestrian shopping street – Ermou – that we knew got us close to where our hotel was located and learned to our surprise what had generated the smoke and sirens we had heard from the top Lykavittos Hill earlier in the afternoon.

These are examples of probably 30 firebombed buildings we saw as we walked down Ermou.  There were also countless shop windows that had been shattered by rioting earlier in the afternoon.

We headed back to our hotel and the hotel desk clerk helped provide further interpretation of the events of the previous 24 hours.  We turned on the television in our room and all channels were covering the riots as well as CNN which provided us with coverage in English.

We headed out of town the next morning but learned later that the rioting had continued for a number of days and taken place in other Greek cities also.

Dec 5 – 7, 2008 – Athens, Greece – Walking tour

We followed a walking tour route suggested by the Lonely Planet guide book we were using in Greece and its suggested starting at a main square called Plateia Syntagma.  Facing the square was the Hotel Grande Bretagne which was built in the mid 1800s and had served as the headquarters for the Nazis during WWII and the scene of an attempt to assassinate Winston Churchill on Christmas Eve in 1944.

A pedestrian underpass took us from here to this place in front of the Greek Parliament buildings which are guarded by a corps of presidential guards known as the evzones.  They stand guard under a memorial to the Tomb of the Unknown Solider and every hour participate in a changing of the guards ceremony that is shown underway in the following photo.

Just down the block from the Parliament Buildings is the National Gardens which was calm and serene after the frenzied action of the Athens streets.  One of the big attractions for us was this turtle pond that was home to 10s of turtles of all shapes, sizes, and ages.

 

After walking through the park for a while we emerged to a street and this memorial – ruins that had been discovered during the metro excavation work.

 

We walked past the site of the Temple to the Olympian Zeus but didn’t go in because there was an admission and everything you needed to see could be viewed through the fence.  Right next to the Temple was Hadrian’s Arch which marked one of the boundary of Athens during Hadrian’s time.

We took an interesting walk through a funky older neighborhood and wound up at the main gate to the Acropolis where we found this sign.

We were naturally disappointed but as we left the entrance area an elderly gentleman stopped me, commented on Allister and Charlotte’s obvious disappointment and said there was an excellent view of the Acropolis from a nearby hillside that might partially compensate.  We took his advice and he was right, we had an excellent view and saw not only the Acropolis but how much of it was under renovation.

 

 

After viewing the Acropolis, on our way back to our hotel we visited the Ancient Agora, which contains a few ruins of interest, mainly an ancient church and this Temple (according to the Lonely Planet, the Temple of Hephaestus) which dates to the 4th century BC and is a well preserved example of the Doric style.

Dec 5 – 7, 2008 – Athens, Greece – Street scenes

After France and Italy and a familiar alphabet, the Greek alphabet comes as a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, many of the important pieces of information are translated and many Greeks speak enough English to help us on our way.

This map, for example, was outside a major downtown Athens subway station and it was entirely in Greek.

From our hotel, located in the Monastiraki district, we were only a short stroll to one of Athens main shopping streets, a pedestrian-only street named Ermou.  It looks similar to other such streets in other European cities except that those streets don’t often see rioting and firebombing as this street did later this day and the next.  See the separate post about the Athens riots and how close we were to the action.

This the standard European intercity and tourist bus.  The mirror placement is a design requirement to cope with narrow streets.

The main street of the Monastiraki district, Athinas, where our hotel, the Hotel Cecil was located, was lined with shops just like these.  The shop keepers were not as aggressive as some I’ve encountered on other trips but the scene was definitely lively.

 

Within 2 blocks of our hotel was what appeared to be Athens main meat market.  There were probably 40 stalls on each side of this aisle that went from here to the back of a long shed.

Next door to the meat market, was the seafood market, housed in the same sized shed and hosting at least as many booths and vendors.  Another lively scene with the booth vendors loudly extolling the virtues of their wares to anyone that would listen.

Most varieties of fish we could think of were for sale here.   Allister and Charlotte made it about 1/4 of the way down the meat market and about the same down the seafood market before asking to be taken back to the sidewalk outside.

The Monastiraki, where our hotel, the Cecil, was located, is a great location for sightseeing in Athens.   Guide books advised against driving in Athens so we did the same thing here as we did in Paris and dropped our car at long-term parking at the Athens airport.  It was even easier here than in Paris.  Athens airport and metro were upgraded in 2004 for the Olympics and it was easy to find the long-term parking lot and a shuttle took us from the parking to the metro station.

We jumped on the metro which took us to within 200 meters our hotel to which we walked with the luggage we needed for our 3 day stay in Athens.  Everything else we left in the car at the airport.  Our experience in Paris had increased our confidence that nothing would happen while we were gone and nothing did.

As I started to say above, our hotel was centrally located.  About 3 blocks away we found this street, roughly two blocks of which became our dining headquarters while we were in Athens.  We dined the first nigh at the restaurant at one end of the block and then went to another restaurant further down the block for the other two nights of our stay.  As we learned move about the second restaurant we noticed it had cornered one end of this street – its ownership operated the restaurants on both sides of the block. We ate outside all three nights at one of the tables you see in the following photo.

On our first day in Athens, we went on a walking tour to see the sites and found the Acropolis closed due to a strike.  On the second day, we headed towards the National Archaeological Museum and found it was closed due to what we initially thought was the same strike that closed the Acropolis but later learned was the strikes that are described in a separate Athens web post.

Since we couldn’t get to the Museum, we walked towards one of the main heights of land in Athens, Lykavittos Hill, shown in the picture below.  There is a funicular railroad that takes passengers to the top but also a good set of quite manageable paths that was good exercise for us.

From here we had a panoramic view of Athens.  This is the view towards the Acropolis and the ocean beyond at Piraeus.

On our way to Lykavittos Hill, we passed through the National Garden (an Athens Central / Stanley Park) and visited the turtle pond as we had the day before and took pictures of this tree that had the strangest trunk.  We looked around for a sign that described its species but didn’t find one.

Finally, here is a picture of the Hotel Cecil and its location on Athinas Street.  They had a unique approach to providing us a family room and sleeping spaces for 4.  They had two double rooms that were joined by a door and could share a bathroom.  This gave Charlotte and Allister one room and Laura-Lyn and I the other.  

 

One of its features that Allister enjoyed, in addition to breakfast (in particular the Greek yogurt), was its elevator which was one of the old style.

 

As I mentioned, we took the metro from the airport to our hotel and back again.  It was an impressive system.  Everything was new as much of the system had been upgraded for the Olympics in 2004 but many of the stations also had interesting art.