The Marathon of Seeing Marathon
Those of you who know me well will be well aware of my fascination with History, so much so that I am actually able to call myself an Historian thanks to my credentials, so visiting Greece, for me, is something I have always wanted to experience. When I was little I used to fantasise about expeditions and digs and adventure among the columns, in fact, I had these dreams with Italy and Egypt as well. I’d daydream for hours about holding something so old in my hands that the last people to touch it were the very people that planted the seeds for what we know as civilisation. So Greece is a place I have always dreamed about visiting. In my second year of University I took Terry Ryan’s class on Sparta and classes on Greek History before and after the Battle of Marathon and I was so taken with the subject of Marathon that I chose to complete one of my essays on the topic alone. I can still remember sitting on my bedroom floor with every book that I could find that even mentioned Marathon in passing spread out in front of me, pouring through the information like it was oxygen and when Liz Baynham showed slides of her trip to Greece to class one day I almost keeled over with admiration and respect. I so looked up to my lecturers and I wanted to travel as much as they had if only to broaden what little knowledge I had on life.
When my time finally came and I was setting foot on Greek soil it was almost surreal and whilst the idea to visit Marathon didn’t come about until after I’d been in Greece for a while it was still an idea that seemed so great… at last… I would be getting to plant my feet on the same ground that was home to one of the most pivotal battles in history…. But not before I saw other areas of Greece first. Athens however was where I met my good friends Janna and Justin. It was a beautiful moment, me needing to shave, Justin offering his girlfriend’s razor to help a gal out… I find though that situations like these always have you meeting people you will keep in your life forever (RE: Olle and Cherrie in Spain) and the three of us got along so we decided to see Crete together (another important site I would gave given my left arm to see) and ended up having a great time.
So after I arrived back from Crete Janna, Justin and I decided we’d take a trip to Marathon and see where the Greeks sent the Persians running for their lives. For those of you who might not be aware, the Battle of Marathon is one of those decisive moments in history that people will forever talk about. You’ve often heard of people philosophise about what the world would be like now had Germany won the war, or if the A Bomb had never been dropped and the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) is one of those “what if” topics. The Persian forces, whom outnumbered the Greeks about 10 to 1, were gaining on Hellas and if they weren’t stopped, Athens would be raised and Greece would be lost. The Athenians sent a messenger to Sparta for help; Theidipides was his name because they could not foresee themselves winning such an outnumbered battle. But the Spartans could not come because they were in the middle of a sacred religious festival… they would help after it had ended but this would be way too late, the Athenian Hoplites would be crushed and all of Greece may well be lost. They had no other choice but to go it alone without reinforcements from Sparta. And so the battle ensued. Miraculously, the Athenians managed to triumph against the Persians and send them packing and when the Spartans finally arrived with help that was too late, all they could do was praise the Athenians (even if in a condescending way) on what a good job they had done, combed their hair a little and go back to their isolated city state. I actually like to think about what might have happened that day if the Persians had one. Maybe there would have been no Alexander the Great to fuse eastern and western cultures, and maybe we would all be writing in Arabic instead of English, which to me is a very interesting notion and even Christianity might not have developed in the way it has. History, you might say, would have been completely different, and as a result, I might not have even been sitting here writing this. So the importance of this battle to the very cradle of our civilisation as we know it is so great that I was overwhelmed with excitement at being given the opportunity to see where Archaeologists think it took place.
So all revved up and ready to smell the history the three of us hopped on a bus that left from near Victoria Station and settled in for what we thought would be a great day. It actually took quite a whole to find the right bus though because we kept getting the run around from every person we asked. It was like one huge communal joke in Greece to see how confused they could make the independent traveller, so it was a tiring experience just finding the bus! The journey to Marathon was fine though, but because there wasn’t even a hint of the town in Lonely Planet’s Europe on a Shoestring and due to the fact that none of us actually did any research on the town’s travel infrastructure, just navigating the tiny but widespread town seemed a feat even Herakles would huff at and we had so much we wanted to do. Justin wanted to see the huge marble dam, I wanted to visit the battlefield and the museum and Janna was just happy to do whatever, so we decided to pay a visit to the Marathon Museum, what a better way to start off in Marathon than learning about why the great race gets its name and all the different places, and distances it has been run.
The Olympic Marathon gets its name from the messenger the Athenians sent to the Spartans to ask for their assistance, which was a pretty risky business to begin with. The Spartans pretty much kept to themselves and were considered by the Athenians to be nothing more than barbarians. They did not consider themselves Greek, nor a part of mainland Greece, they were a war state unto themselves and their whole society was based around the soldiers’ life. From the age of 7 boys began training as soldiers and were taken from their homes and placed in barracks. They were encouraged to steal and pillage and only received punishment if they were caught and every Spartan male was forced to be sent out on his own with nothing but the one cloak on his back (which he had to keep for life) and his weapon and wits to keep him alive. Only when he proved himself as a soldier could he rejoin society, a sort of coming of age ceremony. Sparta was a place where it was survive or die, so for the Athenians to ask them for help, even though they were the toughest soldiers around, would have been massive, after all, the whole of Greece was at stake, and whether they liked it or not, Spartans were Greek. So when the Athenians sent their messenger they knew there would be a good chance the Spartans would say no, and say no they did… so all the way back Theidipides ran to the Athenians to tell them the Spartans would not be coming until after the full moon, and just as he did so, legend says he dropped dead on the spot, completing his journey of 42.195 kilometres. This, mind you, would have been no easy task for there were no time keepers, there were no water stations nor were there people cheering him on. This was done over very rough and rocky terrain in the harshest of conditions and most likely barefoot if not wearing sandals, so the enormity of the task he undertook is unspeakable in terms of the Marathon that is run today and when we found out about the museum we thought it the most fitting way to start exploring the town.
The exhibition at the Museum started with Sydney 2000 (the best games ever) and goes all the way back to the beginning and even has a section about Roberta Gibb and how they refused to let her cross the finish line for the second time and how she got in her car and headed home in protest. She was lucky though, another woman wasn’t even allowed to run the race at all so the next day with two other time keepers she ran her own marathon unofficially, along the same route the race the day before had taken. Overall it was a really rewarding exhibit and considering what it took to actually GET to Marathon itself, I’m glad that we stumbled across it, but it was still only the beginning of what we had planned to do. After we had finished walking through exhibit the curator told us that we should head to the corner to catch the bus to the Archaeological Museum which she said was 7 kilometres outside of town and we thought that fitting in another museum and seeing actual relics would be quite fitting. So while we waited at the bus stop a ticket lady told us to wait with her and pay 1.10 euros for the bus which would take us the rest of the way to the museum. This however, did not happen and we were told to get off just down the road from where we had actually boarded the bus. Confused as we were, we hopped off and shortly afterwards we realised we had been duped and were in the middle of nowhere! Janna and I were quite annoyed that the museum was 7 kilometres one way and the battlefield was another 7 kilometres in the opposite direction. So with about 15 kilometres between them and after failed attempts at flagging down a taxi and even trying to hitchhike for 3.8 seconds, we decided to abandon all hope of ever seeing anything but the highway in Marathon and try to flag a bus back to Athens. But nothing seemed to be coming our way in the form of a bus so we decided to walk along the highway for a bit and we came upon a service station where we were told that we could definitely walk to the battlefield but if we did, by the time we arrived it would be closed. I was utterly shattered. All we could do at that point was laugh and as we headed to the nearby bus stop it occurred to us how wasted the day had been and how ridiculous it was that there was no travel service available to see one of Ancient Histories most important sites, for who knows what would have happened if the Persians had have been fully successful in the invasion of Greece.
Apparently, not many people visit Marathon and the town itself does not rest on the original historic site but about 10 kilometres away from it for no one actually knows the exact site of the Battle of Marathon, only that it occurred in that narrowed down area, which explains why the Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring has completely zero information on it. I didn’t dare look at it to see if Thermopylae was mentioned because I didn’t want to be heartbroken twice in the same hour. We must have walked along the highway for about an hour, or maybe it wasn’t that long. Justin and Janna singing and me lagging up the rear looking behind me every 10 minutes to see if I could see the bus coming. I think the joke of the day was that we travelled all the way to Marathon just to get an ice cream, because even the search for souvenirs was hopeless. They didn’t even have one post card and to this day I am still amazed that no one is interested in going to Marathon. It’s a small town with a nice little police station and a few good places to eat.. but really, there’s nothing more. I am positive that you can only reach the Battlefield itself through organised tour operators and you will probably pay through the ear for it, which sadly, is probably the reason no one wants to go and see a patch of grass in the middle of nowhere.
When we got back to Athens we headed out for dinner at the Noodle Box in Appollonus Street in Syntagma, near Parliament and got to see the changing of the guard. It had been good travelling with Janna and Justin and I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I saw them, but they had been such great travel companions and it was still sad to see them go. While they headed to Thessiloniki I made my way for another of Histories most treasured places… Sparta! If I couldn’t see Marathon, I was sure as hell going to try and see Sparta itself.
posted by Lucyspeak @ 9:04 pm
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