Ancestral Thoughts

Appropriation of Statues

We fashion statues with materials
from statues fashioned
by other older craftsmen,
we fashion poems with words
from poems written
in other times by other poets,
we fashion lives with feelings, events
that other people before us
had experienced.
We appropriate works, modify
plans, change perspectives
invent something new
fashion things entirely ours
always leaving traces
of an earlier origin.
We go on putting our names
beside other names
even those
that we'd like to erase.

Titos Patrikios (1928 - )

I happened upon this poem in the book my father gave me this summer (A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000, Bilingual Edition). I was thinking of the statue of Makrygiannis (above) which I photographed close to the Acropolis Metro stop this summer after visiting the New Acropolis Museum.

Speaking of the museum, when the Persians sacked ancient Athens in 480 BC, the previous temples built upon the rock of the Acropolis were destroyed and their remains were later used by the Athenians to build the foundations of the classic temples and the defensive walls around the Acropolis. Pieces of many wonderful statues and earlier works have been unearthed and can be seen on display in the New Acropolis Museum.

Back to Makrygiannis (1797-1864) - he was a Greek merchant, military officer, politician and author, best known today for his Memoirs. Starting from humble origins, he joined the Greek struggle for independence, achieving the rank of general and leading his men to notable victories. Following Greek independence, he had a tumultuous public career, playing a prominent part in the granting of the first Constitution of the Kingdom of Greece and later being sentenced to death and pardoned (Wikipedia).

He was uneducated, yet he did some pretty amazing things in his time and the whole area at the base of the Acropolis is today called Makrygianni (hence the statue). He used his common sense and the bits and pieces he picked-up along the way; ancestral thoughts and works that were put to new use - a lesson well worth remembering.