The goal was to visit one of Athens’ ‘secret treasures’, and hopefully cast off the throngs of tourists already invading the Greek capital. To say that you know a city of four million people with a history dating back five thousand years is preposterous, but I have a long personal history with Athens that allows me to shun another visit to the Acropolis, and while sipping an iced nescafé in Kolonaki square, perusing the Plaka flea market, hunting for street art in Psirri were all possible activities, this short opening description on Atlas Obscura was more than enough to convince me that the Davelis cave was exactly what I was looking for:
“One of the most mysterious places in Athens is rarely ever visited. This is in part because there is so much superstition surrounding the mountainside of Pendeli that even modern people are hesitant to explore it.”
As luck would have it, I did end the day’s peripatetics boarding a train at the Acropolis metro station after watching the sun set under the giant Greek flag hoisted on the northern wall of the famous rock where king Theseus first united the tribes of Attica.
The journey began when my aunt, who insisted on driving, dropped me off halfway up Penteli mountain, at the intersection with the dirt road that leads to the Davelis cave. The place is fairly remote; we saw only one car on the narrow winding road for the last few kilometers. I was smiling. “Rarely ever visited” indeed. My aunt, more practically minded, worried about how I’d get back to civilization and offered to wait in the car. Google maps estimated eight hundred fifty meters on the dirt road to the cave, a short walk. An hour to explore. I’d be gone ninety minutes, I said, two hours tops. If it were up to me, I added, I’d walk back to the village–I could see many paths leading to it–and catch a bus home. I like being independent, and I don’t like knowing people are waiting for me, it’s too limiting. My aunt, however, was not to be dissuaded, so off I went, at a brisk pace.
There it was, the familiar sensation of working those ‘tramping’ muscles; feet crunching rhythmically over the rocky earth, a steady breeze bending everything that dares to grow in the semi arid climate, spreading the scent of pine over the landscape, and the satisfaction of feeling “on top of the world Ma!” that you get from gazing at expansive views. Walking along the southern slope of Mount Pentelicus, I had the entire Athens basin before and below me, stretching out to the Aegean sea and the port of Piraeus. It’s a recurring theme in my excursions, this search for heights, and I’m prepared to make quite an effort to reach them, far more than I had by the time the little blue spot on Google, me, lay next to the red “Davelis Cave” marker. The thing was, there was no cave in sight. I scouted around, deciding not to rely too strictly on the marker’s accuracy, and found a couple of deep quarries.
Penteli mountain is famous, I had learned, for its marble. It was first extracted, and transported twenty kilometers south to the heart of Athens, for the construction of the Parthenon, the iconic temple erected in the center of the Acropolis, to worship the goddess Athena. The quarries were closed in the eighties, if I’m not mistaken, and are now part of a protected park area that was once also a military zone. Visibly, the Pentelicus summit is still occupied by antennas, radars and other military installations. I spent a good twenty minutes looking for the cave in all directions when I zeroed in on a large cut in the mountain right below me. It had to be there, only I couldn’t get to it, not without retracing my steps about half way to where my aunt had parked, to circumvent the sheer cliffs left by the quarrying. Not a big deal, distance-wise, unless your aunt is waiting for you. I started walking back. I was resigned to not seeing the cave, but not disappointed, the marble quarries and the views had already made this a fulfilling outing. Then I ran into Spiro.
Clad in an all black uniform, black bandana covering his grey hair, except for the pony tail, dark sporty sunshades obscuring his eyes, full grey beard, well-worn hiking boots, Spiro is a volunteer for the Park service, a fire watcher. He patrols his own turf on the mountains surrounding Athens looking for any sign of smoke, any warning that could give fire fighters an advantage should a blaze erupt. As dry and windy as the climate is, brush fires are a big deal in these parts. Every year, by late summer the whole region is on high alert, fire danger needles in the red. I remember one summer in Cape Sounion, fifty kilometers south of Athens, forty three or four years ago, my aunt–yes the same one–piling five of us kids ages seven to twelve, two adults, and two large dogs into a Beetle, speeding along the scenic coastal single lane highway, dodging fire trucks, the pine forest exploding into a deadly inferno on one side of the road and the mediterranean on the other. We laugh about it today, but it was a narrow escape, and closer than I ever want to be to a forest fire.
Spiro kindly offered to act as a guide. He too was headed for the cave, though of course he knew exactly how to get there. I can tell you the whole history, he said. I was hearing echoes of Anthony Quinn as Zorba, the Mexican playing the Greek, exclaiming “the full catastrophy.” How could I resist? He told me about the marble, about his ancestors, about the ancient road that connected the quarries to central Athens, but I was focused on trying to call my aunt to give her a heads up, and suggest once more that she head home, I could find my way back. Unfortunately, being lower on the mountain, coverage was spotty at best, so after ten minutes of chasing signal bars I found myself screaming–as if that helped–a message into my phone, hoping she heard me.
This is the Lake of the Nymphs, Spiro pointed at an open area, the bottom of a bowl, an excavated portion of the mountain, unnaturally flat, with the corner of a slab of marble and a young pine tree sticking out in the center. The spot, back in the day, was where Spiro’s forefathers may have worshipped the half goat god of the wild, shepherds and ancient music Pan, also known as a companion of the Nymphs. Evidence of all this was found here and moved to the National Museum of Archeology. Someone evidently not too fond of the mystical aura of the place, or finding the small body of water inconvenient for the extraction of marble, had cemented over the lake. Like I often say, humans are not always the brightest creatures, especially when it comes to this need we feel to leave a stamp, a mark, on our environment. Further proof of that was found a few hundred yards down the road, where, in the seventies, the military had carved the beginning of a tunnel, or hangar into the mountainside, and cemented the ceiling. Only they neglected to reinforce the structure with rebar. Moisture and groundwater rapidly ate into the porous cement and the whole thing collapsed, leaving visitors today wondering what exactly those not-so-clever soldiers were trying to hide up here. The nymphs are giggling and singing, Pan plays his flute and Zorba exclaims “the full catastrophy!” I heard it. Not that I believed in the rumors of satanist cult gatherings, nuclear testing, creature sighting and other supernatural occurrences that may or may not have taken place in the area.
To be fair though, some of us bipeds are clever, very clever. Long before modern machinery, cement or rebar, Greek engineers had extracted, carved and transported blocks of marble weighing several tons to erect a structure that still mostly stands, twenty-five hundred years later.
A sextet of motorcycles that had roared past us preceded Spiro and I to Davelis Cave. Their silent engines guarded the entrance to the cave, parked next to the diminutive Byzantine orthodox church built into the rock that made me think of photographs I’d seen of the Palatki Indian heritage site in Arizona (To learn more about the church’s oddball history, visit this page, I did, sadly only after my visit and wished I’d done it before; I would have loved to see the carvings for example). The church, which has been added on and preserved since its 10th or 11th century construction, is actually two churches housing two sanctuaries that are still used today, and not just by tourists. I was told a couple of days later, by another hiker, oin another mountain, that one of those churches is exceptional because its altar faces West, unlike most orthodox churches. While there, I was struck mainly by the faded wall paintings and the many more recent icons and other pictorial representations of saints and Christ that filled the small interior. The smell of incense permeated from the censers hanging on the walls and the circular candle burning pit filled with sand.
I left Spiro at the cave entrance lecturing to our motorized friends and proceeded to explore the cave. There also, humanoids obsessed with marking their territory have spray-painted and carved all sorts of modern graffiti on the cave walls, but if you go deep enough, you leave much of that behind. I used the rope anchored to the rock to climb up to an opening I then had to crawl through, to land on the narrow top of a metal ladder that dropped twenty feet into a natural antechamber large enough for a maximum of four bodies. Armed only with the light on my smartphone I could go no further. So, if the Davelis myth is true, I wasn’t able to verify it.
Legend has it that a bandit named Davelis roamed in these parts and hid in the cave, where he might have stashed his bounty. He was a sort of Robin Hood, and his maid Marian was a duchess who also owned the quarry and lived in a mansion just down the hill. The galant Davelis is said to have visited his lover through a network of caves and tunnels linking his hideout to the mansion. Real or not, Davelis had his portrait painted on an ugly concrete structure at the entrance to the site by a contemporary artist eager to perpetuate the myth. Given their recent economic troubles, Greeks certainly could use a hero who steals from the rich to give to the poor.
After extricating myself from the depths of the bandit’s cave, it was time to relieve my aunt from the fear of having to call search and rescue. I bid Spiro ‘Yasou’, and ‘ef charisto poli’. But my excursion for the day was hardly finished. Having seen where the Parthenon marble originated, I had to have another look, through a refreshed lens, at the fabled ancient ‘wonder of the world’, despite the tourist hordes. I even heard there’s a ‘walk’ (the Peripatos) that circles around the whole Acropolis. Perfect.
Walking Project 122_marble story – davelis’ cave to parthenon from chris worland on Vimeo.
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