Athens, the Agora and Hadrian


Our first full study day with Avi, and my brain hurts.  So much information.

We started out at 8:00 and walked to the nearby Athens Cathedral, where we sat on a low wall and had a lecture from Avi on the comparative historic timelines of Greece and the Jewish presence in Greece, starting in pre-history and going to the present day.  We referred to a comprehensive handout of all the important dates. 



The location was not random, as at the other end of the square stands a statue of Archbishop Damaskinos who was a prominent defender of the rights and freedoms of Jews during the German occupation of WW II.  He was one of the very first to be honored as Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. 



 We then walked to the beautifully reconstructed Greek Agora.  The building is very large by our standards!  The long hall, open to the air, held stalls and behind the doors were stores.  The walls between a number of the stores have been removed to create a museum of artifacts found on the site.



Here’s a piece of tomb pottery dated to 1400 BCE:



Here’s a stemmed kylix also from the same time:



And a pyxis and lid from about 700 BCE:



On the grounds of the Agora is a wonderful Temple of Haifestus (Vulcan), the God of Fire, who was thought to protect the shopkeepers:


We then had our first study session in a lovely corner of the garden of the Agora.  The topic was “How is National Catastrophe Understood” and we broke into three groups.  My group read from Thucydides and Sophocles for the Greek view and from Jeremiah and Ezekiel for the Jewish view.   The passages from Jeremiah were exactly those we’ve read in Torah study in the past couple of weeks!  After discussion, each group presented their summaries to everyone, which led to much wonderful discussion.

We then split up for lunch, and after lunch walked to Hadrian’s Arch:



Hadrian was a Roman who conquered Greece during his reign from 117 to 138 CE, and he admired the Greek civilization enormously.  As a result, despite ruling Greece, he allowed privilege and invested in Greece which flourished under his aegis.  Less well known is his hate for the Jews and the genocide over which he presided.  The Bar Kochba rebellion occurred during his reign, and Hadrian had 2/3 of the entire Jewish population of the Middle East murdered—some 600,000 people as best as we know.  He renamed Judea as Syria-Palestina.

We had another study session in a lovely park just beyond Hadrian’s Arch, and read from Pausanius and from two Talmud passages.  We then had a vigorous discussion about how the same person can be seen as hero from one perspective and as villain from another (we avoided comparisons to today’s USA politics).  It was very challenging.  I had been unaware of the enormity of this, the first major Jewish genocide.

Tomorrow we leave Athens for Volos.  More when I can.

Comments

  1. Ralph P. LockeOctober 11, 2018 at 1:53 PM

    Thanks for this information. I had heard that "the Romans" renamed Judea "Palestina"--so that is now fleshed out by what you learned (which is more specific). I had no idea how devastating Hadrian's rule was for Judea.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ralph P. LockeOctober 11, 2018 at 1:53 PM

    Gorgeous pottery, by the way!

    ReplyDelete

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