“We came to Greece to do things”: A Look Back on Summer Session 2010
Kelly Ryan, Sean O’Neil, and Joanna Edstrom at the final evening garden party
The gray cloud cover stretched thinly behind the imposing columns of the Temple of Poseidon that dove upward from their foundations on the rocky promontory of Sounion. That cloud cover and a steady breeze also made for an abnormally cool June afternoon on the beach below. This beach, the last stop on Summer Sessions II’s day trip through Attica, was also the first of the many stops we would be taking for a swim that summer. After changing into their swimsuits, a couple members of the Summer Session waded in ankle deep, only to discover that it was chillier than expected. As Kelly Ryan debated whether to join a few undaunted swimmers in the bay, Joe MacDonald, Brown graduate student and professional nice person, sauntered up in his swimwear. Still tentative and seeking perhaps reassurance, but probably an excuse, Kelly turned to Joe and asked if he would be getting in the water. “Of course I’m going swimming,” said Joe. “We came to Greece to do things.” Joe’s remark became a directive and a slogan as we moved around Greece, traveling across and through the country’s islands, mountains, open waters, and olive orchards. At Joe’s behest, we did things. We climbed down and through the dusty Gorge of the Dead (or “Dead’s Gorge” as the sign on the side of the road read.) We performed Housman’s “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy” on the modern stage in the ancient theater of Epidauros. We ran the Olympic stade. We swam the warm, bright waters of Matala Bay, clambering into cliff-cut Roman tombs, reciting poems as we dried on the rocks. We circled Gla, crossed the Isthmus of Corinth, and lined up inside the courtyard of the palace at Phaistos. We visited temples that had been destroyed, temples that had been pillaged, temples that had been rebuilt, and even a temple under a tent. We ate and drank well, filling our bellies on koriatiki, tzatziki, psomi, and kokino krasi. (Gavros, too, when the moon was right.) Yet as we moved around, there was much to give us pause: a tipsy statue in the sunken Temple of Isis in watery Dion; an illustration of the Nazi menace on wartime propaganda in the museum of Meteora; an opalescent bug crawling along the ash altar at the summit of Mount Lykaion. We saw much, heard much, and learned even more. The griffin is the only Bronze Age monster to be depicted with a family. The earliest extant musical notation can be found etched into the outer wall of the Athenian treasury in Delphi. A surfeit of yellow paint in Munich made for a yellow Athens. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Learning comes as much in the form of new questions as new facts, however, and the journey also gave us much to ask. Did Cretans really make a wholesale retreat into the mountains during the Dark Age? Were the columns of the Temple of Nemesis at Ramnous left unfinished for a reason? Why is it that Greece could invent democracy, abstract mathematics, and a writing system that notates vowels but not a toilet that flushes paper?  On the evening of August 3rd, as we celebrated the trip on our last night together in the garden of the Blegen Library, two things seemed quite clear; we had indeed come to Greece, and we had succeeded mightily in doing things. It would not have been possible to do those things, however, without the help of many gracious people: Bob Bridges and the kind staff of the American School, who gave us a home away from home; the archaeologists and professors who shared their time and expertise; and, of course, Clayton Lehmann and his then-fiancée, Angela Helmer, whose wit and wisdom were the rock on which we built Summer Sessions II. The ending of a trip is always bittersweet, tinged with the sadness of the departure but the anticipation of the return. The day after the garden party, the members of the Summer Sessions moved on, leaving each other, leaving Greece. The inevitability of moving was perhaps one of the lessons Greece had taught us most consistently, though. Sailing to Crete, we had found that a moving ocean and the seesawing island have left the ancient harbor of Phalasarna dry and landlocked. Scurrying after John Camp, we had learned that the wandering Temple of Ares stood strong and tall elsewhere in Attica before moving to the Athenian Agora. Listening to Bob Bridges’ lecture on the history of modern Greece, we had discovered that large populations had been forced to move between Greece and Turkey after a failed Greek invasion following World War I. Indeed, Clayton Lehmann’s brief lectures on the geological past and present of Greece had reminded us that even the very earth and rock we tread were on the move. Perhaps the Romantic poets of earlier times who imagined a Greece of static, ruined landscapes haunted by faded glories misunderstood this important lesson. Whether it be the members of Summer Sessions II, the Doric column drums that found themselves in the walls of later Byzantine churches, or the lumbering tectonic plates upon which these Karst landscapes rest, nothing and no one in Greece stays still. Sean O’Neil currently teaches freshman English at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis. Watch the slideshow: (Photos courtesy Clayton Lehmann)