It was in June 2023 that I embarked on my first trip to Greece, unaware that I would return less than five months later. This article will not distinguish between the first and the second journey, as both events appear in my memory with little interlude and even overlap until total assimilation as the waves of the ocean dissolve into a single flow when the tide is high. I would even believe that, regardless of the geographical position of my material body, my spirit has not left the land that inspired Lord Byron with these few excellent verses:
THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set.
I cannot proclaim that Athens is the most beautiful city in the world because Venice exists, nor the most vibrant because of Paris, but it is perhaps the most spiritual and breathable. The vicissitudes of daily life flow with indisputable ease, and the lifestyle is summed up in one word: pleasant. Yet, it often touches the sublime. It is perhaps relevant to establish a detailed study of its composition. Let’s go forward, then.
As we know, or maybe as we do not know, the Acropolis Hill dominates Athens. In the evening, illuminated by its yellow spotlights, it gives the effect of a tremendous ship floating upon the clouds. Each interstice of columns seems like a porthole and invites us to fantasize about what Cyclops would be the sailors of such a fleet and what strange land they are sailing towards. Let us picture Athens as a fierce ocean, its white waters a frothing swarm of marble and concrete, convolutions of narrow streets like a billow of waves, and above these waves, two opposite islands emerging from the tide. These points are the Acropolis and Lycabettus. Let us dive further.
The streets of Athens are narrow, sometimes lined with low houses of pastel-colored plaster as in the old district of Plàka, sometimes with tall, gray apartment buildings riddled with balconies, whose weather-beaten concrete façades seem infested and leprous, and which rise, it would appear, infinitely, like formidable ramparts. The winding of the streets is particular and, in its narrowest places, cars cannot enter. This cramped space, which so tenderly awards its favor to the pedestrian, is the shelter of many a charming picture: A mother cat helps her babies climb into a gutter, or an old man sells antique trinkets from the hood of his equally antique white sedan. In the pastry shops, pistachio and honey cakes rotate on tiered trays operated by small mechanisms and diffuse their scent in the air. Their sweet smell mingles with the grape-juice-sticky fragrance of myrrh that the priests perpetually burn in the Orthodox churches. The accord concludes with the aromatic scent of olive oil and minerals emitted by the marble walls. The pedestrian looks about, and a thousand unending visions cycle through; everything twirls. Temporalities are blurred, and the torrent makes us porous.
What penetrates us is history itself, as Athens is history in its microcosm; its walls bear the stigmata of a thousand wars; five thousand years of epic action superimposed on the modern city in the manner of William Blake hallucinating the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate on 18th century London. The guitars of the street musicians respond to the echoes of Orpheus’ lyre, Nikos Kazanstakis dialogues with Homer and Zorba the Greek fraternizes with Ulysses, Diogenes purchases his “featherless biped” at the municipal marketplace, the scaffolding used for the restoration of the Acropolis parody the magnificence of the original structure, the waiters smoking their cigarettes leaning against the walls of the tavernas act as living caryatids for the city’s architecture, marble assimilates to concrete, the pitiful Byzantine Christ changes water into wine, and the ephebe Dionysus consecrates it, Athena dominates Xerxes as much as Mahmoud II, the minaret and the Ionian column are entering a beanpole competition. One would hardly be surprised to see Socrates enjoying a caffè freddo in one of Victoria Square’s kafenions. These metamorphoses are intoxicating.
Let us part with these visions momentarily, however rousing. A few hours from Athens is an even more divinely impregnated space worth mentioning: Delphi. One can get to Delphi by car or tour bus, Greece’s most important archaeological site. On my journey to the site, the sky was the bluest it ever could be, and the heat was arid. The sun had the dazzling quality of washing out all colors and blurring all contours, giving the impression that every material form was glowing with a white aura. One could picture Apollo himself above their shoulder, his scorching breath upon their nape, his golden hair clouding their vision. At the entrance to the site, children were playing with a kitten and making it chase the shadow of a string. Two large white dogs that belonged to no one and seemed to inhabit the place, one male and the other female, were running amongst the tourists and letting visitors touch them with the docile familiarity of house pets who recognize their owner. Enormous fleas and ticks crawled upon their fur, and the tourists petting them seemed blissfully oblivious to the dogs’ frightful infection. Mirage and mystification loomed ahead.
The site of Delphi, where ancient oracles once prescribed their prophecies, is a narrow plateau located in the pit of high rocky mountains shrouded with the typical flora of this region, which tends towards the grove more than the forest and which is always fierce and virginal. This plateau is tiered; on its first level are the remains of the temple of oracles dedicated to Apollo, and the upper floor is reserved for the theater of the cult of Dionysus. According to Nietzsche and others, we often understand Dionysus and Apollo as the reverse, the inverse, the complement of one another; on one side, civilization; on the other, debauchery, the luminous and the arcane. It’s this exact chasm that most aptly explains the topsy-turvy nature of Delphi. Delphi is multifaceted, and its plural identity inspires derailed fantasies. I sat on a fallen column (the Greeks have the generous discretion to let you touch and interact with ruins, something you would never see in Italy) for over an hour thinking about these games of vice versa. I suddenly had the silly impulse (perhaps the clarity) to entertain the idea that if the gods have not gone, an offering should be consecrated to them. I left a small polished rose quartz stone that I had the habit of carrying in my bag (consider it an obvious heritage of New Age spirituality, nothing more common for a Montréal native) at the foot of a Laurel tree — the tree of Apollo. I do not know if these neo-Platonic demonstrations have borne fruit, but I like to think of them from time to time when I feel particularly divinely inspired.
However, there was a somewhat superficial reason for my pilgrimage. Although immersed in the intangible and the penetrating, I embarked on a quest for beauty. I wanted to see the Antinous of Delphi.
There is an extraordinarily touching photo of the discovery of this statue, dated 1893. In complete focus, we see him in the center, silver-white, sublime, barely covered with earth, and emerging pure and coruscant from the ground like a vein of gold in the rocky mountains. On both sides stand, lined up like disciples, made indistinct by the camera's exposure, swarthy-complexioned men, old, young, men of all kinds; at least one child. From their dress and tools, a small number of them are archaeologists or researchers, but most are peasants. They embody the severe attitude of men witnessing something formidable and incomprehensible. One of them has removed his hat.
The love that the Roman Emperor Hadrian had for this handsome youth some two thousand years ago pierces through time, seizes, and possesses. Love remains. These emotions persist and, latent, haunt the space that inhabited them and can suddenly execute complete sovereignty of the psyche. To lay my eyes on his eyes, slightly forlorn and as if chastely lowered, these slothful lids which have indeed been loved and kissed so much, and to be a little bit in love with him in my turn, to be a vapor that embraces a specter, to love because love there was, to me, was the most irrefutable proof of the immortality of the soul that I have had to date.
Florence Quirion is a stylist, writer, perfumer, and traveler who lives in Montréal, Québec. Her interest in the porosity of temporal connectivity inspires her spiritual point of view on her frequent travels to Greece, which she considers a passage into Ancient times.