Beautiful sunny day. Walk down Panayi Tsaidan on our way to see the Kerameikos, one of the most ancient sites in a city of ancient sites. The walk itself is interesting. We go past one Chinese store after another, most selling handbags and backpacks, some labelled import-export, some featuring clothing. Sometimes the signs are in Chinese and English, occasionally just Chinese. Most have no Greek. As in most of inner Athens there is a juxtaposition of lovely old buildings with modern graffiti decor; sometimes political, often very well executed, though no particular favour to the original architecture.
The area is in the northwest of the oldest part of Athens, and got its name from the word for potters. The inner area was the potters' quarter and the outer area was used as a cemetery as far back as the third millennium BC and became an organised cemetery about 1200 BC. In 431 Pericles gave a funeral oration there and he was later himself buried in the graveyard. It's now a rurally peaceful area of grass and ancient walls and sculptures, though some of the funeral markers are replicas, with the originals in the National Museum. It's a stunningly beautiful day and there are few others around. The signs are in English as well as Greek but there aren't many and they're almost classically unhelpful. Wandering the site is a pleasure though. Quite amazing to think of a community here over four thousand years ago. There's non-human life as well. We spot a number of tortoises, including one whose mission in life appears to be to attack its neighbour, unwilling to be diverted despite J's strenuous efforts.
There's a small but impressive museum, with a number of sculptures that remind one of the links between ancient Greece and Egypt. One of my favourites though, is a grave relief showing a woman holding her infant grandchild. The inscription is translated. "I hold here the beloved child of my daughter, which I held on my knees when we were alive and saw the light of the sun, and now, dead, I hold it dead." The memorial is from a grave enclosure near the sunny Sacred Way we have just been exploring, approximately 425 bc, the young grandmother and tiny baby as moving now as they would have been 2500 years ago. A more amusing reminder of mortality is a small "voodoo" type doll in a coffin shaped case, next to an ancient engraved curse. Not all deaths were unwanted.
Stroll down to Monastiraki, along Ermou, major shopping street filled with interesting shops, retro if not antiques, but also with people sleeping rough in mid-afternoon. A leg in an absolutely filthy cast projects, at one point, from underneath a quilt. At Monastiraki Square the bleacher type benches seem no longer to exist. Taken down to prevent their use as bunks? Home along Athina, past street stalls and the central market. J buys a bag of dried camomile flowers for making tea as his mother did.
Chat with the man on the desk at our hotel. Are things getting better in Greece? No, worse. He's quite moderate on most issues, and well travelled. Spent time in the US and lived for some months with his brother in Windsor, Ontario. An apartment in Athens that used to sell for €120,000 now sells for €50,000, so that a person who lost his job and can't make the payments also can't sell the flat for anything like what he owes. He himself is fifty years old and has a small mini mart in addition to this job at the hotel. He makes €25,000, half of which goes in taxes, which keep rising. It's not himself he worries for but his daughter, who's sixteen, as austerity takes jobs and taxes rise. He has sympathy for the migrants, but Greece has little to give.