By collecting long-forgotten archeological data, a new project reveals the researchers who toiled unrecognized.
can’t quite bring himself to visit its most iconic monument. “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” he says. “It daunted me, that somber rock.” He prefers “to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring”; when he catches sight of the Acropolis from odd angles, he finds its exalted reputation forbidding. “The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations,” he observes.
On a sunny morning last fall, I joined a wall walk led by Annita Theocharaki, a founding member of Dipylon. A tall, curly-haired woman in her early sixties, Theocharaki runs a family business by day; Dipylon, which now has a full-time staff of six, is a lasting passion project that she helps run on nights and weekends. We met at Kotzia Square, a pedestrian plaza fringed with leafy trees and charming neoclassical buildings.
Dipylon originated in the early two-thousands, when Theocharaki met another archeologist, Leda Costaki, in the stacks of a research library in Athens. Both women had recently finished their dissertations: Theocharaki’s on Athens’s ancient walls, Costaki’s on the city’s ancient roads. “Dipylon” was the name of the main gate in classical Athens—a place where walls and roads meet. They thought that they’d combine their interests by creating a map of the roads and walls of the city.
In the seventies, Voyatzoglou said, she supervised rescue excavations near the site of Plato’s Academy. Athens was in the midst of a construction boom, and landowners had to pay the costs of labor for the teams of excavators that she supervised. “This was a very big problem,” she recalled with a sigh. “Because the owner is paying, they don’t want to lose money, so they are always saying, Go faster.
Dipylon’s newest project is a guided walking tour through some of the neighborhoods where Voyatzoglou once worked. Launched in May, the free Walk to Plato’s Academy app starts on a busy street near the original Dipylon gate and traces the route of an ancient road, which winds through the modern city to the site of the Academy, today a sprawling park. Before the launch, I joined a small team for a test-walk. The first person to arrive was Pavlos Habidis, a well-known Greek artist.
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