Marble Carving

Well it has been quite a long time since the last update. I wish I had more to say. There are only few pieces of news. First, it's still September weather in November here (a sympathetic shout out to all the poor sleet-enduring people in Williamstown, MA and elsewhere). I'm in the process of NaNoWriMo (linked, if you're interested) which is eating my life, as always, but I'm trying to hit my word counts by typing inside museums and cafes so I keep myself immersed in Athens. Last, classes have essentially doubled in their workload, so I'm suddenly having to take care of that as well. As such, there has been very little travel as of late, and very little worthy of updating.

However, tonight, I managed to remember to take my camera to marble carving class, so I thought I'd share some of that. Class meets for 3 hours on Tuesday evenings, and consists of myself, 3 other CYA students, about 7 or 8 Athenian citizens (depending on the day) and two teachers. The first class, we were each given a slab of marble and a few sheets of paper and told to design a relief sculpture. We could carve anything we wanted, with only minor suggestions on relative size and complexity. I chose to base my piece on a sculpture fragment I had seen in the Acropolis Museum (where we aren't allowed to take pictures) that had really inspired me.

The basic design, with the progress that's been made up through today. It's really slow work. I've carved out maybe half a centimeter's depth of the background fully (this picture was taken at the beginning of class) and that has taken well over 7 hours. Still, it's rewarding.

JK working on his piece, which currently consists of two heraldic horses. We take the chisel and hammer and chisel out tiny pieces of marble one hammer strike at a time. After three hours, it can really hurt your hands and wrist if you aren't careful.

BB working on her marble (a cat)

The primary instructor (I think his name is Dimitri. He barely speaks any English, but I think he's learning for our sakes) helping me with my piece. One tap of the hammer in his hand does approximately 4x the work of mine. He's extremely good at what he does, and manages to be encouraging, even when it's obvious that we've messed up.

More of the class, all hard at work. The woman in the foreground speaks English very well, and we're starting to make friends with her as we're all at about the same skill level.

A very talented member of the class who speaks no English and is working on a 3-dimensional limestone carving.

Another man, who is also working in 3-dimensions. Not only is he amazing at carving, and does he speak English pretty well, he also baked brownies and brought them to the class tonight! I'm hoping to return the favor before the classes end.

DD, the third CYA student, working at his marble (his hand is almost as steady as the instructor's!) which is an octopus.

BB has to date used more different tools than the rest of us combined. She has used the regular chisel, a smaller, fine chisel, an enormous serrated chisel, and as of today, some heavy-duty sandpaper.

After the class, the two instructors always serve drinks and refreshments. It's incredibly sweet of them to serve wine to everyone after such a long, intense class. I wish I could stay and hang out with them more, but three hours is already a very long time to put off homework. The two instructors are in the blue shirt (Dimitri?) and in the white shirt (I think his name is Giorgos, but again, I'm not sure.)

Impromptu picture of the CYA group!

So, that's the scoop in Athens these days. The bombs you may have heard about in the news didn't really disturb the city at all. It seems that such protests are relatively run-of-the-mill here and no one gets too worked up about them. We were advised to maybe-possibly stay away from the embassy for a few days, but that was the extent of it. The incidents seem to have basically fallen out of the public memory already, or been reduced to jokes. 

I will try to update more frequently again soon. I have a friend studying in Istanbul coming to visit this weekend, so I'll be forced to go out and do things again, so updates should happen then!

Καληνύχτα!