Zeus be praised! There are two great anniversaries for Hellenistic fans to celebrate in Athens this year. First, it’s 200 years since Lord Byron, the devilishly attractive poet, died fighting to free Greece from the Ottoman yoke – a gorgeous portrait, lent by the British ambassador, is on display at ’s Benaki Museum and shows precisely why the Old Harrovian cut an erotic swathe through Europe. Second, more hedonistically, it’s 150 years since the Greek capital’s most haute luxe hotel, the Grande Bretagne, opened its majestic doors.
Fling open the swagged curtains of your suite at the Grande Bretagne, with its tapestried headboard, its stratospheric thread count, and its Willy Wonka-like profusion of free confectionery, and you’ll at once have bagged one key component of Greece’s feted Sacred Triangle: the Parthenon, shimmering in atop the Acropolis since 432 BC and smack-dab in your eyeline. Couple that with Byron’s adoration of the 5th-century BC Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, some 65 kilometres away – ‘Place me on Sunium’s [sic] marbled steep/Where nothing, save the waves and I/May hear our mutual murmurs sweep,’ cried the poet. Then mix both with the numinous glamour of the ravishing Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, an island name-checked by Byron and itself just a 50-minute whizz across the wine-dark sea from Athens.
And voilà: you have the three lodestars of a spiritual isosceles triangle that mystic geometers revere. And that I was there to rev.