Searching for Ancient Greece - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 170

WHERE IS THE GREECE OF ANCIENT HISTORY?
Most of the antiquities of Greece lie off the tourist track. The Parthenon in Athens is the
conspicuous exception. This temple to Athena invites surprise at its modest size of 220 feet
long and raises wonder at its centuries of neglect. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire
until it achieved independence in 1829, and Turkish overlords had little interest in relics of
long-dead infidels. From time to time they “quarried” the building for use elsewhere and
sometimes ground up pieces of its marble for lime. They used the Parthenon to store gun-
powder, and it was badly damaged by Venetian shells during an attack on the city in 1687.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Greeks themselves showed scant
regard for the temple. As devout communicants of the Orthodox rite, they saw the temple as
a monument to pagan heresy. The most beautiful of the temple's sculptures, its monument-
al frieze, was a gift to the Earl of Elgin by an indifferent government in Istanbul. Shipped
to Britain in 1806, the Elgin Marbles were bought by Parliament in 1816 and have been in
the British Museum ever since. The Turkish gift, legal under the conventions of the time,
is today contested by the Greek government, which asserts that Turkey had no right to give
away Greek treasure; so, the Marbles are, in effect, considered stolen property.
With independence, the Greeks reclaimed their history. Doing so was a way of defining
themselves as other than Muslim Turks: a definition politically and culturally important to
a new nation, especially because there were large Turkish populations in Greek cities and
a large Greek population on the Turkish mainland (the father of modern Turkey, Kemal
Atatürk, was born in Thessalonika).
WHAT IS THE GEOGRAPHY OF MODERN GREECE?
Greece today has a land mass of 51,000 square miles. Its population is over 11.3 million,
one-third of whom live in Athens. Mountains, islands, sunshine, and water are the traveler's
usual description of Greece, and in that description lie travelers' delights: 2,000 islands,
with lovely beaches and crystal waters, and on the mainland, remote villages, high winding
roads, spectacular views, and deep, forested valleys.