Historic Places to Visit in Greece
Travel Guide – There Are Hundreds of Archaeological and Historical Places to Visit in Greece
Historic Places to Visit in Greece. Many people in the world love visiting wonderful Greece for some reasons. Greece is popular for its long history. There are hundreds of archaeological and historical places to visit in Greece
Greece is a country in southeastern Europe. Greece is situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula. The country has land borders with Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east.
The white walls of the Acropolis hide wars, sieges and corruption scandals.
During one of the battles in the War of Independence, the Greek insurgents encountered a serious problem. They had taken Athens and surrounded the Ottomans in the Acropolis, but just when their enemies were finishing their ammunition, things took a bad turn. The besieged threatened to destroy the Parthenon to make bullets from the lead clamps holding its stones if they were not allowed to go free. Read also: Santorini Greece Travel Beautiful Places
The insurgents chose to keep the temple. It had already suffered significant damage. During the Venetian siege of 1688 a mortal bomb blew up the gunpowder stored inside it and at the beginning of the 19th Century British ambassador Lord Elgin took away most of its marble reliefs.
The Acropolis enjoys the indisputable fame of one of the most harmonious architectural complexes in the world. Its proportions are both in accord with a man and provoke respect for the goddess it was devoted to.
It was something more than that, however. The buildings of the Acropolis, which were constructed during the Golden Age of Athens under Pericles (448-429 BC), were a sort of large-scale publicity. They extolled the virtues of the Athenian democracy, which had defeated the Persians and become s superpower. Architects Ictinus, Callicrates and Mnesicles and sculptor Phidias turned the political commission into a triumph of art. There is, however, an embarrassing detail hiding behind the perfection of the buildings, friezes, and caryatids. The Acropolis has a dark past. Read also: Athens Travel Vacations
A solid wall guarded the temples and the palaces of the local kings located on it. For this reason, the first thing that the participants in each of the three coups that shook Athens in the 7th-6th Century BC did was to take the Acropolis and fortify their positions there.
The Persians destroyed the buildings on the hill in 479 BC and General Sulla’s Roman army, which invaded Athens in 86 BC, also did a lot of harm. The soldiers looted all statues they could lay their hands on. The buildings survived the pillage. But the Parthenon suffered additional damage when it was successfully turned into a church, a mosque, and a gunpowder magazine.
The darkest part of the Acropolis’ past happened during the most glorious period of its experience: the Golden Age. Following the rule that no good deed goes unpunished, the turn of events affected the very man who had made the Acropolis a wonder of the world.
Phidias was a universally recognized genius. His statues of gods made such an impression that, according to his contemporaries, he was the only mortal who had seen the Olympians in person.
Nevertheless, he got involved in a couple of scandals because of his work on the Acropolis. The problems began when rumors spread that Phidias had stolen some of the ivory and gold that he used to make the 12 m, or 40 ft, tall statue of Athena for the Parthenon. The first known corruption scandal in history had a spectacular ending. Phidias stripped down all gold from the statue in public and had it weighed. Not a gram was missing.
Then somebody examined the relief depicting the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons on Athena’s shield. Two of the figures bore a striking resemblance to Pericles and Phidias. The sculptor was convicted of blasphemy.
The absurdities on the Acropolis continued in modern times too. In 1832 Greek King Otto1 turned the Parthenon into barracks for his personal guards but, fortuitously, did not manage to realize another of his ideas – to build a palace on the hill. A new threat appeared in 1890. The reconstructions of the Parthenon took such an artistic turn that there was a real danger the temple would end up looking totally different from what it did. The occupation during the Second World War resulted in yet another absurdity: the Acropolis acquired a post of Italian soldiers.
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