Please Don't Stand on My Monument, but You Can Sit on Those Rocks

I am convinced there is no animal dumber than the tourist in search of the perfect photo. Well, maybe the sea cucumber, but it would be a tight race. Hence, the tourist herder. These brave souls, bane and boon alike to the tourist, are responsible for the protection of the archaeological monuments and the dignity of Greek antiquities. She (they are almost all women) has a badge; but most importantly, she has a chrome whistle, and she's not afraid to use it. Shrilly and repeatedly. Again and again.

At the Acropolis, I watched an older Italian man step over a cordon less than two feet tall--when he was already in front of all others--in order to take two steps toward the Parthenon. I'm not sure what advantage those two feet gave him, but he sure wasn't going to be stopped by the steel wire fence and the presence of two tourist herders.

"Please, stay on the other side of the cordon," one woman says. The man squints into the viewfinder of his camera and pretends not to hear.

Tweet! Tweet! Both women whistle and walk toward the man pointing at the wire cordon.

He snaps his photo, then looks up. "Oh, sorry. I didn't know," he says, adjusts his floppy hat, and steps back over the wire.

Didn't know . . . yeah.

Not surprisingly, the tourists and tourist herders were thickest in Athens. As I traveled farther from Athens, the tourists and tourist herders grew fewer, and there was much more freedom to explore the archaeological sites. Ancient Messene was my favorite site for a couple of different reasons. 1) I pretty much had the entire site to myself--I even had my own tourist herder. 2) The work there had been ongoing for some time and many structures at the site were beautifully restored.

In the museums the tourist herders primary responsibility was to ensure that people weren't touching the artifacts. Their second responsibility seemed to be preventing tourist from taking posed pictures in front of or with the statuary. Again and again, I saw them shake their hands and tell people not to pose in front of the life-sized and larger statues. (At least they didn't have whistles indoors.) Finally, in Olympia, I asked one of the herders what this was about. She said that it was about respect for the works and the Greek cultural heritage. It was the policy throughout Greece to allow photos of the works alone because that placed the focus on the artifact, its maker, and its place in Greek history; but when people posed for photos with the artifact, that changed the focus of the photo to themselves instead of the work. The Greek cultural bureaucracy had determined that goofy pictures were somehow disrespectful, and so they decided to enforce this rule throughout all the museums. As you can probably tell from my word choice, I'm somewhat suspicious of this move. While I certainly agree that when one screws off and takes goofy pictures, the emphasis of the photo is placed on the person instead of the artifact; however, it seems highly unlikely that one can enforce respect by restricting the kinds of photos taken. I'm not even sure how simply posing with the statues is disrespectful, though I can imagine certain interactions with the statues that would be objectionable to some (say, groping the "Aphrodite" of Praxiletes, humping the sphinx statues, or placing a Groucho Marx mustache and glasses and a cigar on the "Athena Promachos").

At the archaeological sites, the herders primary function was to keep tourist off the monuments and out of dangerous or unsightly areas. To this end, they employed the chrome whistles with ferocity.

Did I get whistled at? You bet.

The problem was that there was no consistency. Crossing a cordon would pretty much get you whistled at every time, but otherwise it was difficult to figure out what actions would gain you a rebuke from the tourist herders. In Athens and Delphi some rocks you could sit on, but if you stood on them, out came the whistle. This got me in trouble in the Stoa of Attalos in the Ancient Agora of Athens and along the Sacred Path at Delphi. At other sites (Olympia, Corinth, and Messene), you could wander all around, through, and on top of the structures. In Messene, you could enter buildings and touch the walls and sit in the stadium and theater seats, but in Delphi none of the above. Often I asked myself before sitting or standing, Just what is rock and what is ruin? It's not like there were clear markers, or in many cases, any markers at all.

Yet in spite of their obnoxious whistles, the tourist herders are absolutely necessary, as my story of the Italian man illustrates. Without them, I can't imagine that the sites would last more than a century of modern tourist trampling and pilfering.