Antiquities and Culture

After a week on Lesbos, we returned to Athens to meet the full team. First on the agenda was an antiquities tour of the Pnyx, which is an assembly hill in Athens.  We had a wonderful volunteer guide who has a PhD in antiquities from some elite school which I can't remember the name of but was very impressed with at the time.  I think she was somewhat appalled by our lack of knowledge about ancient Greece, but she hid it well!  I wanted to ask lots of questions but the foremost in my mind was "Why are you wearing long pants and long sleeves?"  It was 100 F, after all!

She talked to us about the Battle of Marathon, the temples on the Acropolis, the Agora and Mars Hill. The Pnyx is the area where the Athenians assembled to make decisions.

Here Barb reads Paul's "Mars Hill" sermon.  Now we were familiar with that!

We ended our tour with a group photo:

After our antiquities tour, we headed to the church plant at Glyfada for Iranian culture night. There was Iranian food (lamb kebobs mostly - so much meat!):

and Iranian classical music for entertainment:

The concert was quite lengthy and a little hard to pay attention to in another language.  I was impressed that everyone stayed awake - especially those who had just arrived in the country and were experiencing jet lag!

  

Terry was not paying much attention to the entertainment.  He was making his own entertainment by sitting in the back and shooting preschoolers with water guns!  He eventually got all of them in on the action:

The next morning, Terry and I got up early so we could get to the Acropolis and back before church started (and before it got too hot!).  We enjoyed taking a leisurely walk around and taking in the sights of the temples and the views of Athens below:

In the Cave of Pan on side of the Acropolis

Mars Hill in foreground

Me on Mars Hill 

After seeing all these temples and such in person, the boldness of the sermon that Paul gave on Mars Hill in Acts 17 is even more impressive to me.  When he told them that "God does not live in temples made by human hands" with this view in the background, that took some nerve!  When he said in Corinthians that the Greeks love wisdom, he was speaking of a people who literally worshiped the goddess of wisdom - Athena. It was neat to actually walk down from the Acropolis and its ruined temples to the evangelical church service to worship the true source of wisdom!