The Acropolis Museum and The Holy Trinity Church of Philhellinon

After we dragged our stuff from the first VRBO to the second one, we found the cleaners still in the middle of cleaning our new crib, so we left our luggage there and took off for a walkabout. We were told the place would be "ready in one". One what? We had no idea.

Our new place is on Tripodon St. It's been named that for the last 2500 years!

We decided to wander and tripped across an old church, The Holy Trinity Church of Philhellinon that had a sign outside advertising tours of the catacombs. How could we resist? Catacombs? Sign me up! And Clara loves cats.

The site was some sort of building like a bah-jillion years ago and then was converted to a Roman bath house. In 420A.D., a small monastery was built, then expanded into a larger church - the present one - was built on the site before 1044, and dedicated to Saint Stephen. There are pictures of him around everywhere.

An earthquake damaged the church, then it became a nunnery.  The Ottoman Turks fired a cannonball through it in the 1800s, murdered all the nuns, and threw them in a mass grave. 

The church was repaired. It's a real survivor.

There are still many parts of the original Byzantine building left in the church. It's got the welcoming Jesus at the top of the dome too.

At one point, the head of the church tried to figure out why so many of the murals were suffering from humidity damage but couldn't figure where the humidity was coming from. Until he discovered a trap door and catacombs underneath. 

Our guide opened the trap door to show us the catacombs and I had a feeling this might be the last time we saw daylight as free people but it turned out to be a really nice, private tour. We were not sold off to work in a coal mine somewhere. 

Old Roman bath waterworks.

Christian symbols. 

Relief sculptures.

It's a new tour and we had very friendly guides.

We left the church and headed back to our new place and went out for lunch next door at a rooftop restaurant, overlooking The Acropolis.

Oh my gods. There are so many fantastically ancient churches here in Athens - built for God, and then there's the Acropolis museum - full of the stuff of other gods. This is one of the most amazing museums I could imagine. It's a pristine new building (2009) built to house every artifact found on the rock and on the surrounding slopes, from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece. The Acropolis Museum also lies on top of the ruins of part of Roman and early Byzantine Athens. They even moved a bunch of stuff they found while digging the subway line beside it into the museum.

We started in the outdoor, underground part of the museum, viewing parts of the old city they have excavated. Dating back to 3500 BC, there are houses, workshops, tombs, and streets.

Upstairs, it was wall to wall Greek gods. Zeus, Nike, Athena. Aphrodite, even Baal. Oh - and busts of the mortals Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great.

Then on the next floor, more Greek gods.

And spectacular views of the Acropolis on the hill.

We got to the museum with just enough time to visit all the displays before they closed. By the time we were "evacuated" I think we were all overwhelmed.

I saw something in this museum I'd never heard of before: the Lapiths. I noticed a bunch of reliefs from the Parthenon that depicted centaurs and lapiths fighting. 

The Lapiths were a group of legendary people in Greek mythology who lived in Thessaly. Folks say they descended from the mythical Lapithes, brother of Centaurus. The Lapiths are infamous for their involvement in the Centauromachy, a mythical fight that broke out between them and the Centaurs during Pirithous and Hippodamia's wedding. That sounds like a bride and groom's worst nightmare. Food fight gone wrong? Or were they just angry drunks? Who knows.

- Rik