Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  AND THEN, INCREDIBLY, just a few years later, it happened. The great bronze doors, richly worked, stood open, and I entered the Parthenon. The temple had a coffered ceiling, and all the sculptures on the metopes, pediments, and friezes had been restored in fine detail. The space was vast, dominated by the huge chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos by Phidias, rising more than forty feet tall. And I wasn’t dreaming! But I wasn’t in Athens, either. I was in Nashville, Tennessee.

  At first, I didn’t know what to make of the Nashville Parthenon. I thought it was a joke. But, if so, why wasn’t everyone there shrieking with laughter? I tried to share the joke with the guard at the temple door, but he seemed to honestly believe that this replica Parthenon was better than the original, because it had all its parts and wasn’t crumbling, like the one in Athens. “Look,” he said, swinging one of the doors closed. “The doors work.” I was incredulous. Had no one noticed that the Parthenon in Athens is on top of a hill and this one was on flat land, surrounded by grass? Where were the rocks? Where was the sense of something built on a sacred height, the shape of the temple cut out against an azure sky? Instead of spotting it in the distance on your way into the city, you roll past it and do a double take. It reminded me of the time I saw the White House through the car window: instead of an awe-inspiring landmark of democracy, it was a long, low dwelling with a wide front lawn.

  At a wonderful bookstore aptly called Parnassus I met a woman named F. Lynne Bachleda. “You have to see our Parthenon in context,” she said. Nashville calls itself the Athens of the South, and it is full of colleges and universities—a locus of learning, like Athens, Greece. The Greek key motif is worked into the public library (architect, Robert A. M. Stern). (A library is, in fact, sometimes called an athenaeum, after Athena.) The city first constructed a plaster replica of the Parthenon in 1897, for the hundredth anniversary of the state’s entry into the Union (1796). It was one of several structures, including a pyramid and a Ferris wheel, that, Lynne said, were “meant to bring foreign cultures, and fun, to Nashville, showing the marvels of the age.” The exhibition was like the 1851 Great Exhibition in Victorian London, or the New York World’s Fair of 1964. “Our Parthenon has value,” Lynne said. “It speaks well of Nashville that we wanted it here.” She went on, eloquently, “It is the only place on earth where you can experience the architectural volumes and visual balance of the original, albeit with a very different ‘vibe.’ ”

  As a kid in the fifties, Lynne loved going to Centennial Park. There was a lake with ducks and a sunken garden and a fighter plane and a steam locomotive. Lynne’s father was a Latin teacher who had also studied Greek, so the family had a classical bent—their dog was a boxer named Psyche. Schoolchildren put coins in a collection box inside the temple to raise money for a statue of Athena. By 1982, thirty years later, they had enough cash to go ahead with the project. A local sculptor named Alan LeQuire won the commission, and a friend of Lynne’s, Annie Freeman, posed for the statue. “She had a beautiful strength to her physique, a real grounded strength to her,” Lynne said. Annie, an artist and songwriter, was in awe of LeQuire. Sculpting the Athena, she said, was “like trying to replicate the Statue of Liberty from a souvenir.”

  The best description we have of the monumental statue of Athena was written by Pausanias, in the mid-second century AD. “The statue is made of ivory and gold,” he wrote (in Peter Levi’s translation). “She has a sphinx on the middle of her helmet, and griffins worked on either side of it. . . . [T]he statue of Athene stands upright in an ankle-length tunic with the head of Medusa carved in ivory on her breast. She has a Victory about eight feet high, and a spear in her hand and a shield at her feet, and a snake beside the shield; this snake might be Erichthonios”—the man-serpent, sprung from the seed of Hephaestus, who is the mythological ancestor of the Athenians.

  LeQuire took eight years to complete the statue. He started by researching construction materials and then did historical research, contacting eminent classical archaeologists, like Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, of Bryn Mawr College, who had written several books on Greek sculpture of the archaic and Hellenistic periods. Rather than regarding the Nashville Athena as a folly, Ridgway chose to see it as a great opportunity to understand how Phidias built the original statue, around 450 BC. LeQuire went to Athens, of course, and measured the base of the place where the Phidias Athena had stood. He also studied a small Roman replica of the Phidias known as the Varvakeion Athena, from the third century AD, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. He drove around the Peloponnese, visiting sites associated with Athena, hoping she would appear to him. In a way, he was trying to apprentice himself to Phidias across the ages. He particularly admired the naturalistic poses and drapery of the Caryatids, on the Acropolis. A fifth-century BC head of a woman in Pentelic marble, which he saw in Brescia, Italy, and which might have been by Phidias, gave him the idea for Athena’s head.

  To make sure that the replica Parthenon could bear the weight of the monumental statue, builders cast four gigantic concrete pylons that went down to Nashville’s limestone bedrock. Athena is four stories tall. She is built on a steel armature, clad in panels of gypsum cement reinforced with chopped fiberglass. “The work went on behind a curtain,” Lynne recalled, so that when the statue was done, in 1990, it was “more of a magical reveal.” The head is oversized, because otherwise, from below, Athena would look like a pinhead. She is so big that the Nike she is holding—the winged goddess of victory, at six feet tall—is to her the size of a basketball trophy. When you stand at her feet, that is what you see: monumental toes. Annie Freeman is modest about having posed for the biggest indoor statue in the world, and quick to give credit to other models. LeQuire is said to have used the feet of another woman to get the toes right. “Those are not my breasts, I can tell you,” Annie said. She likes to think that something of her stance and energy went into the statue, along with her nose (“I don’t have a pixie nose”), and was gratified when the sculptor told her that he chose her for her “strength of character.” Athena’s lips are modeled on Elvis Presley’s.

  Lynne has been to Athens and seen the original Parthenon. “That was frankly disappointing,” she said. “You can only get so close. As someone who was raised with being able to walk into it—there’s an undeniable advantage to being able to appreciate the proportions of the building.” The erudite guide who took her around the Acropolis was not impressed when Lynne told her about the replica of the Parthenon back home. In fact, Lynne said, “She looked at me like I was a turd in a punch bowl.” Lynne’s favorite view of the Parthenon is from across Lake Watauga, in Centennial Park, when the doors of the temple are open and you can see inside to the gigantic statue. “There’s this huge woman, perceiving, assessing, inspiring,” she said. “To see her from a distance in statuesque majesty . . . Here is a woman with far-reaching power and the tools of war.”

  In recent years, the statue has been gilded. “I miss the naked simplicity of the form,” Lynne said. “The gilding looks kind of cheesy, to my modern eyes, but I am all for historical accuracy.” The sculptor liked it white, too, but he recognizes that the whiteness of the Parthenon has nothing to do with the Greek aesthetic. “They used as many different materials as they could get their hands on,” LeQuire said.

  I find the Nashville Athena terrifying, with her helmet and aegis and spear. Her face, since the gilding, is made up with lipstick and eyeliner. This is no mild Mother Mary. But the Nashvillians made a convert of me. Sculpture is one of the so-called plastic arts: it is all about shape. True, there is no substitute for Pentelic marble, for the original stones. That is why the argument between the Greeks and the British over the Elgin Marbles is so bitter. The City College of New York has a set of Parthenon friezes—plaster casts from molds of the originals in the British Museum—on display at the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. As shapes, sculptures can be appreciated, at some level, even if they’re made of marshmallows. Recently I
was delighted to see a mesh screen printed with the image of the Parthenon draping the side of a parking garage in Chicago’s Greektown.

  I was a snob about the Nashville Parthenon not being up high, but that means a person who uses a wheelchair or someone pushing a baby stroller can go inside. It’s within driving distance of Cincinnati. And it’s not tacky—it’s not an ersatz Las Vegas attraction or any kind of commercial enterprise, like the seedy hotel with an Eiffel Tower on top that you can see from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This Parthenon is not fake but sincere. I would lay a tribute at the feet of the Nashville Athena.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2013, I was invited on a press trip to Athens organized by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports to generate advance publicity for an exhibition of Byzantine masterpieces from Greek collections, which would be mounted at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Contemporary Greece was in a financial depression that threatened its membership in the Eurozone. The New York Times ran front-page articles about children being sent to school hungry and people scavenging for food in dumpsters. The national airline, Olympic, was no longer operating between New York and Athens. I had to fly an Austrian airline to Vienna and then to Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece—kind of like Chicago—and finally on to Athens. I missed being with Greeks on their own airline: the passengers always gave the pilot a round of applause when the wheels hit the tarmac.

  Two young diplomats from Greece’s foreign press office were shepherding us on the tour. Both were named Andreas; one was posted to Istanbul, the other to Lisbon, and they were known to their colleagues as the Turk and the Portagee. I asked Andreas the Portagee where he had learned Portuguese, and he said that he had studied at the Ionian University, in Corfu. I told him that my favorite teacher had taught in the translation program there—Dorothy Gregory. “You knew Dorothy Gregory?” he said, astonished. “I studied with her on Corfu!” We stared at each other, openmouthed. Dorothy—Dora, as she was called in Greece—had died in Corfu in March of 2000, just before I was scheduled to visit. It was wonderful to resurrect her between us. “It is so touching that you knew Mrs. Gregory,” Andreas said.

  When we checked in at our four-star hotel, I dotted the “i” in my name with such zeal that the pen popped apart in the lobby. I had been a little worried about traveling with a press crew until I saw my room. Because we were guests of the state, we had fabulous accommodations—my room had a balcony and a view of the Acropolis. I had binoculars with me, and whenever I was free I trained them on the rock, watching the way the shadows shifted. I might never have left the hotel. It was in the center of town, a district of Athens that I was unfamiliar with. I usually gravitated toward the Plaka, the slab of the city beneath the Acropolis, and stayed in small two-star hotels on its south side. This place was an art gallery unto itself, and a drink in the rooftop bar, where the view wrapped around to Mount Lycabettus—Athens’ other dramatic hill, calling across to the Acropolis—was a decadent experience, all flashing lights, like being at Studio 54 at the height of the disco craze. As I sipped my ouzo, I found myself thinking, I could get used to this. But it was an odd time to be treated like a rich person. On the streets there were angry demonstrations by the Greeks, protesting the austerity regime that the government had imposed to keep the country afloat in the Eurozone. People were facing the fact that they had been getting robbed by corrupt politicians for generations.

  We went to the Benaki Museum, which I had visited on earlier trips on Ed’s recommendation, and which was sending some of its most precious holdings to the United States as part of the Byzantine exhibit. A curator showed us a mosaic icon of the Virgin, dating to the ninth or tenth century, from Stoudios Monastery in Constantinople. Icons, of course, are a staple of the Greek Orthodox Church, and there are very strict guidelines for icon painters. St. Luke is said to have painted the historical Mary, the Theotokos (God’s birth-giver), from life. This piece was unique, a survivor. For one thing, it was stone, not painted wood, and it hadn’t shattered. The Virgin’s face is beautiful and expressive, with a small mouth, long nose, asymmetrical eyes, and smooth brow; her veil is outlined in dark gray, and the shape of her head is echoed in rings of gold and green-blue: a halo of polychromatic stones. The alphabet book that I bought that day at the Benaki uses the image to illustrate the letter psi (Ψ) for ψηφιδωτό (psephidotó), which it defines as “painting with small colored stones or pebbles.” I was surprised to find that there was another Greek word, a technical one, for “mosaic.” Greek also uses mosaicó (μωσαϊκό), a word I always associated with Moses, as if he had been responsible for putting something precious together from a lot of small parts. But “mosaic” is also related to the Muses and refers to something that has been given an artistic treatment and is worthy of a museum.

  We saw beautiful things at the Benaki—classical statues with Christian interpretations, like a stone shepherd carrying a lamb across his shoulders. In the Orthodox view, the Greeks did not miss the Renaissance, as Ed had said, but made the Renaissance possible by bridging the classical and the Christian during the many centuries of the Byzantine Empire. Across the avenue from the Benaki, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, a low sand-colored building, like a mission church in California, is devoted to this theme. It was lending the exhibition a thirteenth-century mosaic icon of the Madonna and Child called the Virgin Episkepsis (the Sheltering Virgin or the Virgin of Tenderness); the literal meaning of the epithet is “looking over,” as in “watching out for.” The Virgin’s features are the same as in the mosaic icon at the Benaki: small mouth, long nose, sad eyes. The face, contoured by the colored stones, has a delicate suggestion of rose in the cheeks. Her veil is framed in deep blue and striped with gold. It occurred to me that the halo might be an artifact of the mosaic process: the repeated outline creates an aura around the head. The icon has visible seams running lengthwise, along which it has lost some of its tiles, and appears to have been assembled in thirds. It arrived in mainland Greece from Tirilye in 1922, the year the Turks ejected the Greeks from Asia Minor, slaughtering people who had lived there for generations, burning Smyrna, and putting an end to the Great Idea, the notion that Greece would one day take back Constantinople and Asia Minor. Greeks call it the Catastrophe. Even disfigured, the Virgin of Tenderness was a supreme example of mosaic art.

  Ever since I saw the mosaics at Paphos, on Cyprus, and was denied entry to the monastery at Dafni, I have gone out of my way to view mosaics wherever I can. There are Roman mosaics in Fishbourne, in the south of England. Rome itself has several jewel-like Byzantine churches, including Santa Maria in Cosmedin (home of the Bocca della Verità, supposedly the head of Uranus, whose open mouth is said to close on the hand of anyone not telling the truth—an early lie detector). Venice showcases the exquisite work of mosaic artists imported from Constantinople by the doges. I particularly love the floors (pavimenti) of St. Mark’s Basilica and of churches on Torcello and Murano, with their swirling patterns of concentric circles made of triangular chips of gray and white and golden stone, or simple colored squares—deep blue, burgundy, green—locked together and polished smooth. Their cool beauty makes me want to prostrate myself, if only to get closer to the stone.

  I had been to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum, all near Napoli, which started out as a Greek colony; spent a week in Ravenna, an outpost of Byzantium (and Dante’s place of exile); and driven into Palermo (hair-raising), where on entering the Palatine Chapel I murmured to my companion, “I’m in Paradise,” to which he responded that this was exactly the effect the creators were striving for: a church should feel like Paradise. But I had yet to see the Holy Grail of Byzantine mosaics: the monastery at Dafni.

  Dafni had been on the itinerary of our press tour and then disappeared, a disturbing turn of events, confirmed by the minister of culture himself: “There is some problem with Dafni,” he said. The restoration was ongoing. But one of our diplomat shepherds, Andreas the Turk, had always loved D
afni and was moved that an American even knew about it, so he called an archaeologist friend. On a side trip to visit the last strongholds of Byzantium in the Peloponnese, our bus pulled off the Sacred Way fourteen miles outside Athens and stopped at the park in Dafni. I couldn’t believe it.

  Children suspended their play to watch as the foreign journalists were met at the door and welcomed inside the church. The scaffolding inside made it look like a trapeze school. Finally I understood that it wasn’t just for safety reasons that the church had been closed—by now multiple earthquakes had shattered the mosaics, which had collapsed onto the floor in jumbles of tesserae. The restorers’ work was of a magnitude I could barely comprehend: they were putting the Almighty together again. The mosaics, in various states of restoration, glowed from the walls and the vaulted ceiling. There was a Nativity scene with sheep and shepherds; a Baptism of Christ, with wavy lines to indicate water over his lower body, immersed in the River Jordan; a Last Supper, the Apostles crowded together around the Redeemer; and a Transfiguration. We were invited to ascend the scaffold ing into the dome. Short strings dangled from some of the tiles—a scientific test for humidity or stability—which did not detract one iota from the magnificent impression.

  Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had been here before the earthquakes and seen it whole, wrote in his book Mani about “the stupendous mosaic of Christ Pantocrator at Daphni in Attica”: “whose great eyes, dark and exorbitant and cast almost furtively over one shoulder, at total variance with His right hand’s serene gesture of blessing and admonition, spell not pain but fear, anguish and guilt, as though He were in flight from an appalling doom. The only fit setting for such an expression is the Garden of Gethsemane; but this is a Christ-God in His glory, the All Powerful One. It is tremendous, tragic, mysterious and shattering.” I was standing within inches of the Christ Pantocrator, beneath his right hand.