Art?

We started off today with an early wake up call to head to the Acropolis for round 2, but this time we looked at it with a more educational lens (we had our own guided tour by Dr. Arafat, our British professor at Deree). My job was to take pictures of all the things that the professor explained while my friend took notes (thank goodness I brought my camera or else I would've gotten stuck with notetaking!). Here is a fun fact that I learned today, the theme of the East pediment (that's the triangular shaped structure on the top) of the Parthenon (pictured) is of the birth of Athena, and the East metopes (that's the square shaped scenes above the columns) contains images depicting a battle between the Gods and giants. Bet you didn't know that!

We learned even more fun facts about the Parthenon and Acropolis throughout the 2 hour tour this morning (yeup, 2 hours in the blazing hot Greek sun...thank goodness there was a nice breeze to cool us off!).

Other than learning an immense amount of information about the Acropolis, I found the walk back to the metro station (I've almost conquered the system finally, and I'm the one giving directions now!) to be quite interesting...

No matter where you go here in Greece, there is always, always, some graffiti to be seen and at times, even admired.

My very first impression of Greece included an explosion of graffiti. When I first stepped out of the bus to head up to our temporary homes here in Greece I was greeted by what I learned to be an abandoned military base that now seems to used as a canvas for local graffiti (left picture).

As Americans, I feel as if we are raised or taught to look at graffiti and think something along the lines of "dirty," or with negative connotations. When I first saw this, I remember thinking to myself "this can't be where we are staying," but indeed it was, I've even got a nice view of it from my balcony (it's growing on me)!

As my time here in Greece has increased, I've become more accustomed to the continuous expressions and images spray painted onto the surfaces around town. I've even come to like them to some extent (it can be quite entertaining during a stroll back from class).

But there is a question I can't seem to figure out. Why is there such a substantial amount of graffiti and what is the purpose of it (if any)?

7 no, 13!

I've heard a couple different approaches to these questions. Our professors first suggested the reason for the massive amounts of graffiti could be due to the high unemployment here in Greece. From what I gathered, I'm guessing that since people are not being productive in the work force they instead spend their time creating and executing plans for defacing public surfaces (see, even that comes with a negative connotation!).

Multiple "13s"

But what is the graffiti trying to tell us? While exploring Greece, there is on thing that I've noticed repeatedly, the numbers 13 and 7. One of the ways we walk back from class include lots of instances of these numbers, but for the most part you see instances of a 13 written purposefully over a 7 and vise versa (as you can see in some of the pictures). The first opinion I heard about these rivalry numbers was that they represented competitive political parties marking their territories. But today, I heard from someone else that represent something else of different importance, conflicting soccer teams. From my non-Greek perspective, either of these could possibly explain the combating graffiti.

"the green says 'Gate 13' maybe this has something to do with
the 13/7's even though it's on a different island?"

Also I've noticed a slight difference between the residential graffiti near where I'm staying (mostly numbers and expressions) and downtown graffiti where there are additional, I would say, more artistic graffiti (some are really intricate and interesting). I've yet to figure out why this may be, so please let me know if you can think of any reasons!

So from an American perspective, I think the majority of us see it as a more of a negative or unwanted sight. But what do they think about graffiti here in Greece? Have they just become accustomed to it (kinda like I have with my stay), do they see it as a nuisance, and do they partake in any of it (if so, when, where, why?)?

 I've included some additional pictures that I've taken over the course of my visit here in Greece. They are taken from all over the place. Some of them I just found pretty and eye catching and others where just interesting to look at and provoked some thought.

Taken downtown

Statue clown?

This one was actually taken on Rhodes Island

Another downtown example