Although I had been learning about Greek culture and history for almost a week, my weekend in Athens, Greece, transformed my perspective on the connection between history and the present, specifically in Greece, where history has been documented through so many eras. Throughout the first week, my group’s tour guide, Dimitri, taught us all about the history of Greece and its development through museums and cultural site visits within Athens, like the Acropolis. However, my day trips to Cape Sounion and Argolis displayed how important remembering history and connecting with the past are for the Greek people.
As my group rode the bus to Cape Sounion to visit the Temple of Poseidon, Dimitri, our tour guide, explained the culture of the Greek countryside. He knew about every village and ancient ruin we saw along the way, explaining in detail the history of each. As we approached the ancient ruins of the Temple of Poseidon, he detailed that the ruins have never been restored; they have been left to erode and change with the tides of the cape. We had already seen the Acropolis and the grand beauty of the Parthenon, but the Temple of Poseidon was something different entirely. I could clearly see the wear and tear on the temple, which Dimitri explained was due to both the sea air and history itself. The temple, being along the coast, has been conquered and pilfered time and time again by different empires through the ages, which can be seen in the missing columns in the temple. The Greek people are surrounded by deep history and culture such as this, and through my time in Greece, I have seen that they embrace this culture as an essential part of their lives, something that I feel the United States distinctly lacks.
Further emphasizing the Greek connection to the ancient world, we visited the best-preserved ancient theater in the world, Epidaurus, in Argolis, Greece. This visit was especially impactful for me, and for Dimitri, because Dimitri lived near this theater as a child. Since he lived so close, he grew up going to theatrical performances and live music at a real ancient Greek amphitheater with perfect acoustics, an impressive feat of engineering accomplished long before modern technology. The summers Dimitri spent at Epidaurus were an integral part of his childhood, and part of his connection with the ancient people who once walked the same land he does now. Things built an unfathomably long time ago, like the Theater of Epidaurus, are still used today, a union of ancient history and modern people who share the same land. I think it is a beautiful thing to have a connection with people who lived thousands of years prior to one being alive, a privilege that most Americans do not have. The nature of the United States is very different; we do not have a deep written history, and the people who established the country came from across the world. Unfortunately, we do not learn much about the history of the land we live on and its native people, like the Greeks do, but seeing them live harmoniously with ancient history is really interesting; perhaps something I would not have observed if not for Dimitri and his deep knowledge of Greek history. Dimitri and many other Greeks identify heavily with their own history and honor it through learning, tradition, remembrance, and passing on the stories of their ancestors to younger generations and people across the world. I am thankful to have learned about the culture of history within Greece from someone so passionate about it. This experience has made me all the more eager to learn about the world and how different cultures integrate their past with the present.
