World’s earliest erotic graffiti found in unlikely setting on Aegean island

The erotic graffiti on Astypalaia also highlighted the extent of literacy at a time when the Acropolis in Athens had yet to be built. Photograph: Helena Smith

 

Racy inscriptions and phalluses carved into Astypalaia’s rocky peninsula shed light on very private lives of ancient Greece

 

Helena Smith in Athens, The Guardian, Sunday 6 July 2014

Caryatid Statues, Restored, Are Stars at Athens Museum

 

Using specially developed laser technology, conservators at the Acropolis Museum stripped centuries of grime from the Caryatids statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece.

Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

Acropolis Maidens Glow Anew

By LIZ ALDERMAN JULY 7, 2014

 

ATHENS — For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping in the night.