alone in athens

and how i learned to love my body at greece's national archeology museum

I’m staring at the Aegean Sea from a hilltop in Athens through a thicket of olive trees. The Acropolis and Parthenon sit in the distance to my left, and I switch between staring at these ruins and the Port of Piraeus in loose intervals. The ocean is a blanket of pale light and shadow, bordered by a densely-packed expanse of blocky white buildings and the outline of faraway mountains. Ruins are sprawled across dark-green hilltops like a miniature city of marble, its prestigious edges scrubbed by indiscriminate time. 

I am in awe of the surrounding beauty. I couldn’t convince myself, if I readily tried, that these views were not beautiful. Yet, my appreciation was mostly due to each site’s significance. The fact that this was the scenery surrounding five thousand years of Western civilization was impossible to grasp, and I could only sit and stare at these sights in amazement.

I was reminded of a favorite poem from my moody teenage years:

“I met a genius on the train / today / about 6 years old, / he sat beside me / and as the train / ran down along the coast / we came to the ocean / and then he looked at me / and said, / it's not pretty. / it was the first time I'd / realized / that.”

The me from a decade prior loved Bukowski’s poem, titled ‘I Met a Genius’. At the time, I’d wondered why should we all find the ocean beautiful? Just because we’re supposed to think it’s beautiful? I appreciated how it acknowledged the subtlety of human conditioning, and it made me truly evaluate what I deemed ‘pretty’.

On the first of four days of my Greek jaunt, I walked from a rented room near Monastiraki Square to central Athens, stopping for a street-stand koulouri and a latte, greeting smiling vendors with a sheepish “Yiassas!” I headed on my leisurely way to the National Archeology Museum, where all I knew to anticipate was beauty. 

In one regard, I was right to expect it. Artifacts like jewelry, plates, and vases were handmade and hand-painted, and somehow endured journeys of over two thousand years. I was highly enchanted by the notion that humans have always made art and beautified their surroundings, if only just for design’s sake; relishing the simple pleasure of being around visually appealing things. Some vase drawings told stories, some illustrated religious scenes, and some were unexplainable to our time.

I liked to imagine that the unknown pottery painters were free-styling; depicting people, animals, and squiggly lines however they found pretty. The significance of someone from thousands of years ago designing such intricate works made the sights extra beautiful to me.

I couldn’t ignore the allure of the many marble and iron statues, either. The talent it takes to shape stone into flesh is unthinkable. Humans have created art in their own image for thousands of years. The artists are lost to history, but their products reflecting the human form are highly celebrated. Just as I was on a hilltop overlooking Athens, I was in awe of the power behind such artworks.

But can they rightly be called ‘beautiful’?

Bukowski (or a contrarian teenage me) might argue they could not be. Time has worn them away, whittled some of them down to mere discolored limbs. Some of them look genuinely scary. A lone, giant arm exists as the sole proof of its lost gargantuan body. A reclining woman, whose exterior is riddled with stains and brown splotches like craters on the surface of the moon, has a crack running through her back and is missing her calves and feet. Faces are obscured by fractures and pockmarks left by centuries of water and wind. Perhaps they are not traditionally pretty, or at least as pretty as they were centuries ago.

Confronting the human form in stone forced me to consider what the models must have looked like, how they inspired these testaments to their likenesses. I thought of my grandma, whose smile is incredibly beautiful, no matter how much she feels age has hijacked it. I thought of my fiancé, who I’d only found more attractive the deeper I fell in love with him. I thought of my best friends, who would always complain about their bodies, but always looked perfect to me.

I remembered an old colleague I’d worked beside at a hotel in Colorado, who insisted that every twenty to thirty-year-old woman who entered the gym was so beautiful, but never realized it. “All they have to do is realize it,” she said.

I wonder if we see beauty most in the things we love; if beauty, due to its subjectivity, is the word of choice we ascribe to all that falls under the umbrella of personal significance and value. Our preferences are overtly and subconsciously shaped by family, friends, and society. Bukowski addressed this as a warning, but it stands as a glowing reminder to me how interconnected we all are.

For instance, I felt predisposed to loving Athens based on how I recognize some of my favorite aspects of Southern California. The cloying scent of citrus trees hung in the gentle breeze, stray cats stretched and sunbathed before storefronts (my Glendale-based Grandma always had cats), I caught whiffs of cigarette smoke while wandering down side streets (that same grandma loved to smoke) and they both offered so much historical significance. I came to love the modern murals, regional vegetation, and the locals. Every woman over fifty looked like my future mother-in-law, and even seemed to share her fashion sense. I was given helpful directions by talkative strangers on the train who knew their way around. I listened to a man playing bouzouki for a small crowd of locals, drunk on Ouzo and dancing with vigor. I stopped into the coolest thrift store and found three pre-loved items that, despite how difficult it was to stuff it all in my Ryanair carry-on, soon became staple pieces in my wardrobe.

The owner gave me a coupon card and a free tote bag after telling me she lived in California for fifteen years of her life, and agreed with me on the similarities I found out between the two regions. We both found the distant yet similar regions beautiful. 

I appreciate the notion that we shouldn’t consider things to be pretty just because the status quo tells us to, but I find beauty dependent on meaning. It’s the value within these things, the signified meaning, that enriches an appearance. A human’s intrinsic, sacred worth, is incredibly beautiful despite whatever factors may alter it. Factors such as age, disfigurement from outside forces, and ultimate design may limit ‘aesthetic’, but it doesn’t limit the true beauty inherent in one’s value.

When someone complains about their appearance, family and friends will be quick with a “No, stop, you’re beautiful!”. Louder than this, I’ve always heard, “Stop it, I love you!” in its place. Whether or not it’s ‘correct’ to reject the ‘truth’ of aesthetics, I appreciate how a loved one either can’t see, or firmly rejects, the notion that I’m not beautiful.

While aesthetics and beauty are nearly one and the same, we are not statues, and will not last forever. Natural beauty may be indicative of health, but how much greater is the beauty underlying life?

I could easily spot the beauty in these forms, and I could study their details for hours. Possessing a form myself not very different from the ones on display, why couldn’t I see the beauty in myself?

Looking around at the amalgam of marble limbs in the National Archeology Museum, I understood why my body was beautiful: like the impressions of the human form, we, too, are links in the chain of human creation and influence. The life-sized statues created with such intense care and meticulousness reminded me that I am a member of a beautiful species, made in the image of God.

Eckhart Tolle discusses the ‘life energy’ in A New Earth, noting it as interchangeable with the ‘inner body.’ For those struggling with body issues, he asserts that if a woman with body dysmorphia were to “look at her body without the interfering judgments of her mind, or even recognize those judgments for what they are, instead of believing in them – or better still, if she could feel her body from within – this would initiate her healing” (pg. 25).

We all possess an inherently valuable life source, one that’s innately beautiful to behold. The consistency of this inclination throughout time made me feel as if I too could be cast in marble just by the merit of possessing a body.

This museum, as well as Athens itself, felt like a testament to the power of collective human effort. Wandering through it solo was a delight for the eyes, as well as the mind. It must be why the ruins scattered throughout the ancient city are so incredible to visit, why we flock in droves to archeology museums, art exhibits, and significant sights. They host a beauty that surpasses aesthetics.

Until next week,

Constanze