By Scott Shephard

I am sitting on a little porch outside the living room of our AirBNB apartment in Athens, Greece. I am enjoying both the cool and the quiet of this setting. In a few hours it will warm up and the empty street below will be crowded. The restaurant will be filled with tourists talking in many different languages about the food and the many amazing sights and experiences in and around the bustling, noisy city of Athens.

Today we will visit the remains of a Greek civilization that flourished 3800 years ago. Imagine that! In the US an antique is something that might only be 50 years old. In Greece some locals would only smile at such a foolish notion.

Anyway, here I am and I feel at home. I graduated college with a degree in Classics, which included 4 years of classical Greek language. After 60 years I still know the Greek alphabet and I am surprised when a Greek word jumps out at me. But modern Greek is . . . Greek to me.

But you don’t need to speak the language to be awed by being in what some would call the “birthplace of western civilization.”

(See Van Gogh’s much, much better version here.)

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