Greece: The Dogs of Athens (April 26-28)

Each day that we walked around Athens we noticed medium-sized dogs of mixed breeds and mild scruff sleeping in the archaeological sites and other public places. Many had collars but not all, and they looked too well-fed and accustomed to human activity to be feral. They didn’t appear to move around much until about rush hour. It took us nearly the entire week to formulate a hypothesis: deputies. The first evidence was how the dogs dealt with cars at Syntagma Square. During the rush hour we saw the dogs hanging around a major pedestrian crossing. When a car would stop with its front inside the defined walkway, the dogs would bark at it like crazy. We observed this more than once, and even saw some dogs cross the street there several times as if on patrol. As we walked from the Acropolis to the Ancient Agora along a road still within the archaeological site, we observed a (mostly) boarder collie keeping pace with us, about 10 yards back. When we stopped to look at something along the road, it stopped for a bit of a lie-down. It followed us until we left the site. We came to expect see two or three dogs at pretty much any public spot where people gather and where one might expect police or security guards to patrol.

We began Sunday, April 26 with Mass (in Latin) at St. Denis Church and learned some new customs. Many of the faithful, upon entering the church, walked to the front, touched an icon set upon an easel, and crossed themselves. The other custom was the Communion free-for-all. When it was time, the communicants rose almost all at the same time and headed for the front. Because they mostly returned by reversing direction it first looked like we would be stuck in a sacramental traffic jam for the rest of the morning, but somehow it sorted itself out.

That afternoon we visited our final museum in Athens, the Byzantine Museum. By then we had become very interested in what we could learn about Christian communities prior to Emperor Constantine’s Edit of Milan in 312 AD, which legalized Christianity as a religion. One description of the museum lead us to believe that we might find artifacts leading to the Byzantine period, but there were none to speak of. On our final day in Athens we headed back to the city center one last time to arrange for transportation from Athens to the port of Patras on the 28th, where we would travel by ferry to Bari, Italy. The ferry office was across the street from another site of subway archaeology, this time a bath house dating from about 500 AD. Nearby was the final site we visited in Greece: Hadrian’s Gate, which marked the entry to the new construction ordered by him. This included the Temple of Zeus, which at the time was the largest in Athens. Only a few of the more than 140 columns remain. One of these was blown down by a storm in the 1700s.

The following day, Tuesday April 28 we headed for Patras, and in the late afternoon boarded the ferry Blue Horizon to settle into our cabin for the 15-hour crossing of the Adriatic Sea to Bari.