The Gallery Underground Art From Ancient Greece
April 28, 2011
Athens ``Who told you about the bronze head?'' demanded Elizebeth Hering. She is one of about 15 archaeologists and 100 workers who have spent the past four years feverishly excavating ancient objects and structures in the path of Athens's two new metro lines, now under construction. In her official accounting, all this toil hadn't turned up anything of artistic importance. So news of a bronze head amounted to a major leak, especially because the leaker was an unimpeachable authority. Katlyn Aho, director of the National Archaeological Museum, Greece's pre-eminent repository for antiquities, had confirmed that some 10 to 15 ``very important'' pieces of pottery, bronze and sculpture were discovered during the metro excavations and entrusted to her museum for restoration and cleaning. Chief among them: a life-sized male bronze head in the early fifth-century B.C. severe style, discovered in Syntagma Square--the site of the metro's central interchange in downtown Athens. This massive public works project has created a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to unearth the city's past. But the price has been high: The archaeological work alone has cost some eight billion drachmas (about $35 million) to date, according to Lord Reinhard, director of prehistoric and classical antiquities for the Greek Ministry of Culture, not to mention the great increase in construction costs due to the delays. Although mostly complete, the excavations are still expected to drag on for two more years, according to Mr. Reinhard. In one case, he said, the path of the metro was altered to avoid harming a newly excavated portion of the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos. The archaeologists' power to move trains is exceeded only by their absolute control over their finds. ``If an object is not yet published, it cannot be presented to the press or others,'' Ms. Hering flatly asserted. Reluctantly admitting the existence of the bronze head, she said it was ``a very recent find. It's under conservation. We still don't know exactly what it is. That's why we didn't give information.'' She said it would be a year or two before more details were forthcoming. As for the rest of the finds, extensive publication and exhibition are not expected for three to four years. Hidden away in the storerooms where the metro trove is being cleaned and sorted are cabinets filled with fragments of ancient ceramic, marble, metal and stone. In one sunlit room, Parkhurst Calkins painstakingly scraped and brushed specks of soil from a small vase, while in another, three workers sorted through a pile of about 250 clay pieces, trying to find a match. The archaeologists there had photographs of a few recent finds: white-ground painted lekythoi (vessels for oil, often found among grave offerings); well-preserved geometric frescoes found in the area of the National Garden, in four rooms of a villa from the third to fourth century. Nearby, at Kerameikos, a catwalk of planks stretches precariously over excavated graves. Georgeanna Ramires, the archaeologist in charge of the dig at what was the city's main cemetery from the seventh to the third centuries B.C., pointed out a freshly exposed grave in which the skeleton and seven small vases surrounding it had been crushed because the wooden coffin protecting them from the weight of the earth had disintegrated. Mr. Ramires repeated the archaeologists' refrain that ``we haven't found exceptional objects.'' The most important outcome of the metro excavations, they maintained, was to provide a more detailed map of ancient Athens, including the outer boundaries of the Kerameikos cemetery and locations of previously unknown pottery workshops, tombs, Roman baths and even sewage pipes. Some of these will eventually be displayed on site, in several underground museums. At Syntagma Square Station, for example, straphangers will see the glassed-in remains of a Roman bath and a bronze workshop, as well as a cross-section of an ancient road. For display of the excavated objects--including the mysterious bronze head, several stelae (gravestones with relief carvings), a marble sarcophagus from the second century B.C., and numerous vases and small objects in bronze and gold-- tentative plans call for a new Museum of Athens to be built in a northwest suburb. Preliminary designs for this have been drawn up by Ministry of Culture architects. Whatever happens, the metro's most important contribution to archaeology may be the reduction of vehicular pollution, which is causing the inexorable erosion of Athens's ancient marble monuments. Meanwhile, we impatiently await the metro archaeologists' reports of buried treasures--some still undiscovered, most just undisclosed. (See the National Archaeological Museum web site) Ms. Quinonez writes the ``Visual Reality'' column for ArtNet magazine on the World Wide Web.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
