It’s all Greek to me.

My first goal in Athens was to find Plato’s Academy.
On the origins of the phrase “it’s all Greek to me,” see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gre1.htm

What we did in the first hour of being in Athens was find the site of Plato’s Academy.
It was a revelation to me a few years ago that one could find the spot. I discovered that it was known by searching for pictures to use in teaching political theory in July 2005. (The last time I taught political theory was 1998.) I searched Google images and found photographs of the site. Wow! That precipitated a further search for specifics when going to Greece this year entered the realm of the possible. I found some details and asked Matt Barrett who confirmed what I found. This is a link to the ever reliable Matt http://www.greektravel.com/
I emailed him, as he suggests readers do, and he replied. Very nice and thanks again, Matt.
We arrived at the Hotel Adrian at about 8.30 a.m. Yes, there was a room for us, and no it was not available yet. Understood. So we checked in, did some ablution in the lobby restroom and stripped down a bit to clothes appropriate to the weather, left the bags at the desk after extracting the marked up map, though we learned soon enough that this map was not 100% exact. For example, it has the Hotel Adrian on the wrong side of the street in the wrong place, on the other side of Monasteraki Station.

And it sent us on an exhausting ”pursuit of the untamed ornithoid” trying to find Socrates’s cell, which like the Hotel was misplaced. (That is how Mr. Data styles a wild goose chase.) I kept using the map in preference to the other one I had because it had bigger print on the street names, but I kept grains of salt at hand.

We boldly went to Plato’s Academy venturing slightly off this map. Whoa! So our first venture went beyond the bounds of the known map. We plodded on to a square with a sign over a ruin saying it was the road to Plato’s Academy. Kate recognised the intersection since I had printed a photo from another enthusiast’s web site showing the interaction. In that web photo there was sign, but it is no more. This is the image she had in mind. The brown sign is long gone, and so are the women crossing the street!

While it is sacred site to me, those who live there it is home. Hence the laundry on the fence. More generally see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy

Anyway we orbited round the square and found this sign which I promptly stood in front of while Kate clicked away with both my digital snapper and her slide camera. We omitted the laundry.

In the shade of nearby trees some locals sat, passing the time, along with a dog. When we finished snapping and started to move on Kate stopped to pat the dog. The gentleman whose dog it was, I guess, smiled and told her that there was more Plato along the street about another ten minutes walk. I did not know this and had been satisfied with the sign. Lesson learned: pat dogs and good things happen. Note of thanks to Butch at World Dog Council.
It must have been about 9.30 a.m. by then, still too early to expect a room to be free at the hotel so we pressed on, and indeed he was right.
We came to a park that has within it the remains of Plato’s Academy. It has a sign on the fence saying that, but no further information of any kind. On the other had, admission was free. Here I am

(By the way, I am holding the red folder which is the travel plan, stuffed with downloads, pictures, marked up maps, hotel vouchers, and the like. Prepared, I am.)
Here are a few other pictures of what we saw inside the fence:




So I can say I have breathed the air of the Academy. We had the place to ourselves. I guess that is one advantage of its not being an official tourist site yet. The eidos are always with us whether we realize it or not. Eidos? They are the ideas in Plato’s theory of ideas: the conception comes before being. Or, in a more qualified way of saying it, we understand being through conceptions that exist apart from any example of being. The concept of chair exists apart from any existing chair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidos
Plato’s Academy was in the news while we were there:

Kathimerini, 23 October 2007, p. 3. Kathimerini is an Athens English language daily inserted into the International Herald Tribune. It says that the site of the Academy is on a (long) list of projects.
Here is Plato on a stele outside the new Greek Academy of Science.

Here is me at Plato’s feet.

Roberto Rosselini’s film Socrate http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210296/