athens

next stop for us was athens in greece. but unfortunately we didn't get to go straight there, we had to go the "round about" way via london!!

athens is a huge city that goes on and on and on and this is one the views from the acropolis.

speaking of the acropolis, here it is. the acropolis is a flat topped hill where the city was founded and where the greeks built a bunch of amazing temples. this picture is taken from below the acropolis in a place called agora which used to be one of the markets in athens where people like socrates used to hang out.

the most famous temple at the acropolis is the parthenon. finished in 480BC it is dedicated, like almost all other temples in the city, to the greek god of wisdom athena. in fact the greek name for the city of athens is 'athena' and only the english call the city athens.

the parthenon is huge! to get an idea of the size here are some scales. the picture here at the top is a model of the frieze at the top of one side of the parthenon. in the middle you can see poseidon with his right arm raised. the picture to the left shows the torso from poseidon taken from the parthenon and it is very big, about 4 foot tall. the whole frieze must have been quite impressive originally then! unfortunately, as the picture on the right shows, there is not much left :(

one of the amazing things about places where there are more temples than greek salads is that there are amazing pieces of rubble just lying around in piles. this is a carved stone at the acropolis that you can sit on! most other places you would see something like this in a museum!

around greece you see lots of statues of this fellow, even though he was not even greek! this is a torso in agora of roman emporer hadrian. when the romans took greece hadrian wandered around and everywhere he saw cool old greek statues he took them back to rome and replaced them with statues of himself!!

though hadrian's statue is failing apart a bit some of the other statues, like this one, seemed to be in much better shape.

others things to looks at!
next stop, delphi!
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