Greek travel as altruism and inspiration

A pair of travel articles highlight the disjunction between the terrible difficulties of modern Greece with the beauty and inspiration of the ancient sites. The travails of modern Greece are not explicitly mentioned in Juliet Rix's piece on Crete, but the truly excellent quality of their tour is a poignant reminder of how serious many Greeks are about safeguarding their heritage:

Archaeology isn’t always that easy, as we discover at the tiny Sitia museum into which we are driven by rare rain. The place doesn’t look like much and the labels are lousy, but we have insider information: one of our guides is responsible for the dig that produced many of the finds. We stand in front of the star exhibit, a statuette known as the “Palaikastro Kouros”, a lithe Minoan male (“dismissive colleagues say he’s a Ken doll”) with a figure not unlike Evans’s Lily Prince.

We have our attention drawn to the Egyptian influence in the pose, and the delicacy of the carving on the hands, feet and hair. And then our archaeologist says, “The legs were in 300 pieces. We sieved six tons of soil to find them and his eyes… It took the conservator three years to rebuild him.” Times have clearly changed in archaeological reconstruction — and that’s no bull either! 

Jonathan Jones' piece on Delphi right stresses the extreme beauty of Delphi's landscape and the uplifting effect of a visit to the archeological site:

It was a place of holiness shared by all the rival city states of ancient Greece, where they sent gifts and raised sanctuaries and shrines. All this was done in homage to the Delphic oracle of Apollo. Games were held here, the classical Hellenic world gathered here, and what remains is a captivating landscape that fills you with joy, rhapsody, and a sense of what human beings are capable of. 

This is the thought-provoking thing about Greek antiquities: they make you believe in us, the humans. 

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