Arts & Lifestyle

The remains of the neighborhood on top of which the Acropolis Museum was built. Credit: Acropolis Museum More than 1,100 artifacts from an ancient Athens neighborhood, discovered during excavations in the area of its modern Acropolis museum, are now showcased in a permanent exhibition.
Artifacts unearthed from the foothill of the Acropolis Hill that hosts the Parthenon temple, have been restored and are part of a site Greece calls “the museum under the museum” that opened recently.
Exhibits include statues, children’s table games, and everyday items from storage vessels and cooking pots to weaving tools and needles.
They are a testament to residents’ daily life over 4,500 years, the culture ministry said.
The exhibition includes everyday items, from storage vessels and cooking pots to weaving tools and needles. Credit: Acropolis Museum Ancient Athens neighborhood museum is like a giant exhibit
The remains of the neighborhood on top of which the Acropolis Museum was built reconstruct a complex of streets, homes with spacious rooms and courtyards, and baths and workshops, and have been accessible to visitors since 2019.
Visitors are allowed to wander through the archaeological excavation which stretches underneath the museum like a giant exhibit.
The ancient Athenian neighborhood. Credit: AMNA They can walk on the ancient neighborhood’s streets, take a closer look at the houses with their courtyards and wells, enter the heart of the impressive mansions with the private baths, and examine the workshops with the water reservoirs. They can also take a magical stroll through time and the daily life of the people who lived in the shadow of the Acropolis’ rock for over 4,500 years.
The Athenian neighborhood was occupied from the 5th century BC to the 12th century AD.
From the 4th millennium BC to the end of the Archaic era, the area was inhabited but not very populous.
After 480 BC, when the city of Athens expanded, the site was incorporated in the ancient city and started to develop rapidly.
“Placed on the southern fringes of the archaeological site, (the exhibition) fits harmoniously into the visitor’s journey, contributing to the understanding of people’s everyday life,” said Culture Minister Lina Mendoni.
The museum under the museum. Credit: Acropolis Museum Acropolis Museum seeks to host the Parthenon in its entirety
More than 1.5 million people annually visit the 14,000 square meter (16,743.86 square yards) Acropolis Museum, which is meant to visually connect with the Parthenon and other temples on the Acropolis Hill.
About half of the 160-meter frieze from the Parthenon temple is in the British Museum, while 50 meters of the carvings are in the museum in Athens.
Greece has repeatedly urged the British Museum to permanently return the 2,500-year-old sculptures that British Diplomat Lord Elgin removed from the temple in 1806, during a period when Greece was under Ottoman Turkish rule.
Mendoni said the new museum was the ideal venue to host the Parthenon frieze in its entirety. “This museum constitutes the optimal physical and conceptual framework for highlighting, interpreting and understanding its masterpieces,” she said.
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Two Romeyka speakers in a traditional house on a summer meadow in Çaykara, Trabzon Province, Turkey. Credit: İhsan Deniz Kılıçoğlu / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 Romeyka, an endangered dialect of Greek spoken in the region of Trabzon (Trapezounta) and Pontus in northern Turkey, may get a new lease of life.
Ioanna Sitaridou, a professor of Spanish and historical linguistics at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying the dialect for years, has launched The Crowdsourcing Romeyka project inviting native speakers across the world to upload a recording of themselves talking in the language.
With its remaining speakers aging, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading  Sitaridou to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.
According to UNESCO, the Greek dialect it is “definitely endangered” and the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages lists it as “severely endangered”.
How many speakers of the Greek dialect Romeyka are there?
The precise number of speakers of Romeyka is hard to quantify. It has no written form but has survived orally in the mountain villages near the Black Sea coast.
Its speakers are Muslims but many also trace their lineage back to the Pontic Greeks, who mostly left Turkey for Greece during the population exchanges of the early 20th century.
“There is a very significant diaspora which is separated by religion and national identity [from the communities in Turkey], but still shares so much,” Sitaridou told the Guardian.
Sitaridou has established that rather than having developed from modern Greek, Romeyka descended from the Hellenistic form of the language spoken in the centuries before Christ, and shares some key features with ancient Greek.
The Greek academic has concluded that “Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of modern Greek”, a finding she says disrupts the claim that modern Greek is an “isolate” language, meaning it is unrelated to any other European language.
Modern Greek and Romeyka are not mutually intelligible, says the academic; she suggests that an apt comparison would be speakers of Portuguese and Italian, both of which derive from Vulgar Latin rather than from each other.
Though the history of the Greek presence in the Black Sea is not always easy to disentangle from legend, the Greek language expanded with the spread of Christianity.
“Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka,” Sitaridou told the Guardian newspaper.
In contrast, Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew closer to modern Greek, especially because of extensive schooling in Greek in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Related: ‘Romeyka’ The Ancient Greek Dialect Spoken in Northern Turkey
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