What does it take to reconstruct the past?

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Jesse Stanchak

The Palace at Knossos, possibly.

As a kid I read a book called “Motel of The Mysteries,” about an archeologist from the distant future who finds the preserved remains of a 20th century American motel called the Toot N’ Come Inn*. The archeologist mistakenly identifies the motel room as an important tomb and he goes on to make all manner of fractured guesses about what 20th century life was life. In the future, they think the bathtub is some sort of sarcophagus! Hilarious.

I hadn’t thought about that book in something like 20 years, but it came rushing back to me as I wandered through the Knossos archeological site on the island of Crete. In Greek myth, King Minos builds a labyrinth at his palace on Crete to confine the Minotaur. Sadly, the bronze-age palace ruins at Knossos contain neither a maze nor a man/bull hybrid. But they do contain a mystery.

The ruins of Knossos from above.

The ruins are lousy with double-headed axes. There are huge ones, tiny ones and even little carvings of them all over the stones. It’s believed that they were religious symbols, used in sacrifices and to ensure divine protection. The Greek word for a double-bladed axe is possibly related to the word “labyrinth”. When the palace ruins were rediscovered in the early 20th century, an archeologist named Arthur Evans looked at the axes and a handful of Roman-era coins with Minotaurs on them and decided that what he’d found was the legendary home of King Minos.

I’m not saying Evans was wrong. In case it’s not painfully obvious, I should point out that I am not an archeologist**. But the leaps of intuition here at pretty grand. A little razzle-dazzle with folk entomology and Roman understanding of Greek oral tradition and a pile of lost rubble — a suddenly a ruin that would have been pretty impressive in its own right becomes a fragment of legend.

I’m not the only person who casts a skeptical eye at Evans’ work. The ruins there are filled with signs that very carefully qualify his descriptions. For example, the site doesn’t directly claim that a certain room was the throng room — only that Evans suspected it was because he found a bench in it.

Even the ruins themselves are now educated guesses. Large sections of walls and even whole rooms were rebuilt, sometimes based on context clues, and sometimes based on logical assumptions. In an earlier post, I talked about how much fun it is to walk through a ruin and try to imagine what it was like when it was whole. The discovers of the Knossos ruins just took the next logical step — rebuilding the lost world around them.

This is the painting Knossos.

The most striking examples of this are the frescoes. The discovers of the site found a handful of brightly colored plaster shards. The shards were then used to create massive frescoes that these shards could reasonably have hit into, which were in turn based on popular motifs that appeared elsewhere during that period. It’s the equivalent of finding the Mona Lisa’s left eye, deducing that it from an early 16th century court painting and then using other court paintings as a model to try to reconstruct the rest of the lady and her surroundings. You could probably create a pretty nice painting using that method — but it wouldn’t be the Mona Lisa.

The paintings actually on display at the Knossos site contain no elements of the original frescoes. They are complete copies of the “original” reconstructions — as authentic as a dorm room poster.

The reconstructions now hang in a nearby museum, complete with the hunks of plaster salvaged from the ruins. They are as much as product of the modern mind as the ancient, developed by an artist named Piet de Jong. Their creation isn’t the science of reconstruction but the art of rebirth. It’s marvelous to think that the 20th century saw the birth of some of the ancient world’s most beautiful art.

This is the original painting, which is just barely original.

This is the original Ladies in Blue fresco, which is just barely original.

Staring at the those tiny shards of plaster in the museum,** it was possible to see the entire ancient world as a modern invention. The guesses are reproduced over and over and then they’re put under glass and hung in the original’s place. If you could do that with a painting — or even an entire palace — what else could you reinvent?

* I could remember the name of the motel off the top of my head, but not the name of the book. We don’t get to choose what we keep.
** I’m just barely a travel blogger.
*** It reminded me of the day I realized my 7th grade science teacher didn’t know how many phases of matter there were, because she was using an out of date textbook. Most people don’t know anything. They just repeat what they hear.

How long does it take to know a place?

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Jesse Stanchak

It’s a trick question, of course. You never know everything about a city, no matter how long you spend there. You can bore down into the secret heart of a place forever and never hit bedrock.

But the question must have meaning, because we make a distinction between places we’ve been and places we haven’t; between places we’ve lived and places we’ve visited; between the places we explore and the ones we pass on through. At some point along the way, a person learn enough about a place that it stops being a part of the Terra Incognita and becomes just another part of the Known World.

So I’ll ask again: How long does it take to know a place?

One of the best things about living in England is you can hop on a train or plane for just a few hours and emerge immersed in a new culture. It’s a real shock coming from the U.S., where you can can drive for 10 hours and have nothing to show for it but a slightly different selection of fast-food restaurants. Blair and I take advantage of our geographical advantage whenever we can, taking short “city break” vacations on the weekends. Most of the posts I’ve written for this blog are based on trips that were less than 48 hours long. I figure if it’s good enough for The New York Times, it’s good enough for me.

I don’t plan elaborate itineraries. I don’t study guidebooks. I step off the plane, say “Surrender your mysteries to Stanchak*” and I go. I usually bring a travel app on my smartphone, but that never gets deployed until we’ve already in the thick of it. And even with a complete disregard for research and proper planning, I always manage to come away with the flavor of the place on my lips.

Maybe I can’t know a place in 36 hours, but I can at least develop a nodding acquaintance. Or at least, that’s what I thought until last weekend’s excursion to Malta.

We only had 24 hours in Malta. But we were only exploring the region around Valletta, the capital city located on the country’s main island. We’re talking significantly less than a square mile of mysteries here. It should have been a cakewalk.

Instead, we found that many of the things we wanted to see were either closed or on the wrong side of the harbor or simply very, very difficult to find. We spent much of our visit trying to figure out where we were or where we were heading next, only to be lost, blocked or turned away once we got there.

The Valletta area is famous for serving as a stronghold of the Knights Templar. The harbor is still protected by imposing bulwarks dating back to the Great Siege of 1565. It is a place built to keep outsiders firmly on the outside. And so it surrendered very few mysteries to us that day.

Here is the bulk of what I can tell you about Malta:

There were 3 things I expected to see in Malta, but didn’t:

There were 3 things I didn’t expect to see in Malta, but couldn’t avoid:

I left the island knowing what it looked like, what it sounded and smelled and tasted like. But not how it felt. I did not know it. Blair may have come closer to understanding the island than I did, saying it could boast both Italian culture and British infrastructure***. But I can’t help feeling like there must be more to it than that.

Fortunately, we’ll be coming back with Blair’s parents later this year, so I’ll get another shot at getting to know Malta. Who knows — maybe I’ll even do a little planning first.

* I literally say this every time. Like many aspects of our marriage, Blair thought it was cute at first but lately has begun to suspect something may be wrong with me.
** We got dessert a cafe and managed to cut the average customer age in half by walking in the door. It’s not hard to see why Malta would be popular with older British folks though. The weather is lovely, the food is good and everyone speaks English, since Malta is a former colony.
*** I saw an ad for an Italian realtor trying to convince people to buy homes in Sicily on the cheap and take the ferry to Malta for work. And it wouldn’t surprise me if some people actually did that.

What everyone should know about runners

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Jesse Stanchak

I always feel nervous before a race starts.

It’s not because I’m worried about the pain to come or about my performance. It’s because before the race starts, all of the runners — sometimes thousands and thousands of us — are jam-packed together into a space called the corral. We stand front-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, bouncing on the balls of our feet to stay limber and breathing lungful after lungful of each-others’ stress pheromones. In the contorted seconds before the starting gun, the oldest part of our brain comes back online. We remember what it is to be part of a pack. And packs don’t like being kept in corrals.

Then there is a bang, followed by panic and, finally, freedom. And then there’s nothing left to be nervous about.

***

Marathon running is a strange sport. It takes months of training to do it at all, years to do it well. Everyone who does it knows there’s a 100% chance of pain, a good chance that they’ll experience a minor injury, a small chance that they’ll seriously hurt themselves and very very slim (but still very very real) chance that their heart just won’t be able to take it. About two million people a year shrug at all those risks and do it anyway.

It is the only sport where simply being able to compete in the event is an achievement. It is the only sport where the victors will turn around and cheer for the vanquished. It’s the only sport where people routinely compete to raise money for the needy or to honor the dead.

***

I started competitive distance running when I was 12*. I am not especially fast or strong or dexterous, but I can take a lot of punishment. Most people wouldn’t consider that a gift, but the Good Book says to use whatever you’ve got** and so I ran. This never enhanced my social standing or improved my life in any way that anyone else would ever notice. But it is one of the things that me myself.

When I run I stop being a neurotic train-wreck of a travesty of an excuse for a parody of a person***. In fact, a large part of me stops being altogether. Then I am just sweat and footfalls and indomitable will. I wish I could be that man all the time.

When I run, everyone I see on the trail with me is my brother. We wave and smile at each other and acknowledge that what we’re doing is a little crazy, especially given how hot/cold/windy/rainy/sunny it is today. I don’t know of any other group — religious, ethnic, political, vocational, whatever – that instinctively, universally recognizes and accepts its members this way. There are no tests or qualifications or membership forms. To do it is to be it.

***

I was in Washington D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. I stood on the National Mall and looked out across the Potomac as the smoke billowed up from the Pentagon. Four days later, I got an airplane and flew to California. I wasn’t afraid.

I am not uncommonly brave. I am not naive enough to think no one would ever want to harm loveable old me. I am not delusional enough to think that I could stop evil in it’s tracks if I saw it coming. But I do have a lot of faith in other people. The people doing the baggage screening and security checks were low-level, poorly-paid government bureaucrats — they are not paragons of our society. But they were irrevocably on my team and they wanted me to get where I was going safely. That was enough.

***

I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt runners. It doesn’t matter.

I don’t want answers or vengeance or closure. Because I have what I need: The knowledge that this changes nothing. Running is and was and will be. At the back of our minds, under a trap door in the cellar of ourselves, there is the place where runners remember what it is to be a pack — to run with each other, watch each-others’ backs and pick one another up when we fall. Danger does not diminish that; it feeds it, pulling us closer together until we break free. And then there’s nothing left to fear.

*It was a 5K called The Great Pumpkin Chase that involves running after a priest in a pumpkin suit.
** I Corinthians 12 4-6
*** For example, I would be incapable of saying that sentence while running — in part because I’d be all out of breath.

Should I be afraid?

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Jesse Stanchak

Did I accidentally put the most beautiful woman in the world in danger by bringing her here?

The staff of the Louvre went on strike for a day this week to draw attention to the massive gangs of pickpockets that are plaguing museum visitors and employees alike. Staffers say the thieves aren’t just larcenous. Now they’re increasingly aggressive, even violent.

I went to the Louvre last summer — on a day when admission was free, no less — and I never felt like I was at risk of being robbed or harmed. I know major tourist attractions carry certain risks, but I didn’t see anything at the Louvre to indicate the museum was especially dangerous. I didn’t notice any rough customers or Dickensian hordes of children with sticky fingers. It’s possible the problem has gotten dramatically worse in the past six months. It’s possible that all the city’s thieves took the day off. But I doubt it.

I didn’t expect trouble and none found me. This worries me. In some ways, it worries me more than if someone had lifted my wallet that day. Because it means I’m losing my edge.

Between the ages of 9 and 16, for reasons we don’t need to get into here, I was an unwilling participant in a large number of fistfights. Most of them involved people I did not know and were the result of me being in places I wasn’t supposed to be*.

Say what you want about it; violence is wildly instructive. First, I learned to see a fight coming, then I learned to identify places where danger was likely, then I learned to carry myself in a way that did not invite confrontation and, finally, I learned how to repay aggression in kind.

It is likely that whatever ability I had in that fourth category has atrophied to nothing. I haven’t been in a fight in almost 10 years. I cannot kick your ass. And so I rely on my acuity in the first three categories. I am aware of my surroundings. I know what trouble looks like. I can project an air of “more-trouble-than-it’s-worth” that is convincing enough to make anyone looking for trouble look elsewhere**.

At least, that’s what I tell myself. Because I never felt like I was in danger at the Louvre, not even a little bit. So maybe I’m not the danger detector I thought.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt my training fail me. When I was in Marrakesh, most of the rules I have for determining if a neighborhood is safe or not simply did not apply. You can’t track the number of churches and liquor stores in a city that has neither. In Lisbon, the signs of economic downturn were so widespread that, at first glace, almost every neighborhood seemed at least a little dangerous***.

What if all of my Spider-Sense training is so hopelessly routed in the cultural norms of 1990s Harrisburg, Pa., that I can no longer effectively evaluate what constitutes a dangerous space? What if I come to a place where my you-don’t-want-a-piece-of-this glare sputters, like a U.S. plug in a European outlet?

I don’t know when to be afraid anymore. That terrifies me.

*A rapidly fluctuating boundary determined by the internal atlases of less refined persons.
** The problem is that the don’t-mess-with-me field is hard to turn off. I’ve been told I look angry when I’m not or that I’m difficult to talk to at first. Sometimes I wonder what that’s cost me.
***On the plane back from Lisbon, I overheard a former resident of that city tell a pair of British women that the city is actually much more dangerous than it appears. I think some of that may have been bravado meant to impress his seat mates, but that theory doesn’t make me feel better.