Anyway, the last thing I remember before the flood of familiar faces, I was in Athens, at the Acropolis, looking at the Parthenon. In case you don’t know, this is an amazing, amazing site in Greece! A must visit if ever within striking distance. Good times around there.. So, looking at the Acropolis, its one, huge, blemish is that there is a giant crane in the middle of it. This crane, of course, detracted greatly from the beauty and ancient-feeling of the Acropolis. And it has been there for over 20 years. This disheartened me as I thought back to how many famed ‘historic’ sites and structures I have seen across Europe that are constantly behind a cloak or under a scaffolding due to reconstructions. At first thought, this always grinds my gears. Why do they need to constantly replace the marble on the Parthenon or clean and repaint St. Peter’s Church in Vienna. Just leave these wonders as they are so we can see them as they were created and not refurbished with new materials or updates. Stop painting over history! Or I used to say.
Then in Athens, I kinda started to put realize the obvious. Without these updates, protective fencings/coverings, renovations, these monuments would likely no longer be here. The Parthenon may have long ago crumbled under its own weight, if left alone. Or it could meet its demise at the hands of those who built it, or at least their ancestors, as the once magnificent Temple of Zeus did and be deconstructed to build surrounding apartment buildings. By either hand, nature or man, monuments such as these would likely not last nearly as long without their governments pumping in money to preserve them as necessary. So I am thankful and a bit less irked.
But why should it bother me either way really? Why do we want to see these historic monuments preserved in their original manner? Why would we want to keep them around at all? Why not let them fall as just part of the natural order of things? Well, aside from drawing in tourist dollars, these monuments bring us closer to those that built them, to the age when they were built. Closer to the far distant past, closer to immortality. Monuments like the pyramids of Giza or the Parthenon are so engraved in our minds as SO old, that we cannot help but feel as if we are transcending time by witnessing them. Hell, even Chris and I, being Americans (where nothing is more than 300 yrs old) seeing buildings in Italy that were nearly 1000 years old made us in awe. People tend to gravitate to historic monuments out of a feeling that they can almost feel what it was like to be around back when this thing was built. That small taste of traveling through time is enough to spark natural urge to be long-lasting, to be immortal.
So fix them up and put make up on the Mona Lisa, or let nature take its course and let them fall.. It’s not an easy decision and of course there are shades of gray, where most historic monuments are today; restored to resemble their original selves to further the illusion that we are really there, at that time. I appreciate the effort, I do, but really just do it and get outta the way! I’m trying to see the Parthenon without a giant white machine in it some time in the next 20 years.
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