There’s a particular reason shades of red are named after wine: burgundy, marsala or claret. The glass on the kitchen table is either half full or half empty. I can see my reflection. More than that. The past is drowning in a glass of red wine.

It’s been a year since the first lockdown. Two lockdowns, a year almost completely lost, the sense of time long forgotten and a bit distorted, as the reality in which we have been chosen to live. Sometimes I lose hope. I’ve experienced lockdown in two different countries, and I’m advised not to travel to my home, to Greece. I follow the rules because this is me, it helps me stay organised. I like rules, at least most of them, but never those that constrain me. I keep thinking of Jane Eyre declaring passionately I’m no bird and no net ensnares me. I could always relate to this quote. I don’t like feeling caged, trapped, captured, confined. I am no animal and even animals don’t deserve to be constrained not even the domestic ones – tell this to my cat. Yet, the pandemic regulations and restrictions sometimes make you feel exactly like this. An animal in a cage. In Ancient Greek, ζώον used to referred to both animals and humans. You may have stumbled across Aristotle’s popular quote Ο άνθρωπος είναι ζώον πολιτικόν. Humans are social beings, they need interaction to thrive, they need to feel the bond between them and somebody else, family, friends, a lover, their birth country, culture. By denying people the inalienable right to interact you deny them their existence. Does this sound relevant? No? Let me tell you a lockdown story. After all, we are not only social human beings: stories are what makes us humans too.

The story dates back centuries ago. Let’s travel to Greece of the 5^th century BC. The golden era of Pericles. Ο χρυσός αιώνας του Περικλή. I will not bore you with too many details. The peak of Greece hits this exact time spot. The clock fingers meet and everything flourishes, blooms: philosophy, democracy, architecture, the arts, drama, rhetoric, politics, everything spreads fast as fairy dust. But this isn’t faery magic, it’s reality. It is during this era that the gem of Athens is polished and engraved. The citadel has another reason to be proud, as the Parthenon, the temple of the Olympian goddess Athena, stands at the top of the Acropolis rock. Pericles asks the sculptor Pheidias to use his gifts to curve the Parthenon and the Erechtheion, the old temple of Athena. Pheidias uses marble from the mount Penteli and the Athenians carry it all way down to the citadel. Temples need their guardians though. Before Notre-Dame had its gargoyles, Erechtheion had female guardians to protect it. Six maidens stand in the entrance of the temple, one hand holding their dress, and in the other, a jug to pour offerings to the gods. These kóres are called the Caryatids.

The kóres, the daughters, the guardians can be found in various archaeological loci, but it is these Caryatids that this story is about…

Time passes by, flows like the river waters, blows like a summer breeze to your salty hair and without noticing, you are in the 1800s. The remnants of Pericles’ golden era stand in the Acropolis. Even the Turks see the Parthenon as a sacred place. You don’t have to pray to a god for a place to become sacred… A British ambassador, a Lord has this amazing idea of decorating his house with something similar to the pieces of these Athenians marbles. Oh, the Marbles, Pentelic, Parthenon, simply the Marbles but never Elgin’s marbles. Never. When he discovers that it will cost him more than expected to pay the sculptor, he comes up with a Plan B. With bribery, cunningness, manipulation, deceit and the aid of the Turks, he steals the Marbles. The plundering of the Parthenon. If he could, he would rape the whole Parthenon and everything from Athens and load his precious cargo to a ship of Her Majesty. But he couldn’t do that. His wife and he catch a glimpse of the kóres. He has invaded their sacred ground. They can do nothing to protect the citadel anymore. They have lost hope, but Lord Elgin hasn’t. He decides to take one of them, just one. He’s no more a Lord. He becomes a butcher in disguise. And with this decision he broke their bond – or at least he thought, or maybe he was never capable of understanding the bond…

Now we travel back to the present. The Caryatid stands alone in an empty chamber at the British Museum. The room is full of trophies, the whole museum is full of relics and stolen artefacts. But this κόρη, this marble woman with no hands to hold her ornate yet simple dress, this Caryatid, the sixth sister with one foot a few inches in front of the other is ready to make a move, a step forward, a stride to freedom. She has experienced lockdown long before we did. For more than two centuries the lost sister lives in a lockdown state. There are no Covid regulations or restrictions that can be lifted to allow international travel for her, are there? She stays there motionless and yet ready to make a move, to return home, to her sisters, to her brothers, to Greece. Ready but unable to walk. The Caryatid knew what lockdown means before we did. She relates to our pain and to our longing for freedom, she yearns for nostos, for reuniting with her family and loved ones, she prays to Athena to come and rescue her, but gods are more humane than we picture them – as Homer portrayed them; they forget. And Athena may have forgotten her, but we didn’t.

The lost sister doesn’t have a name – the same goes for her other five siblings. It’s the sixth  Caryatid. The other five sit on the new Acropolis Museum. I’m wondering, do they feel her absence? Do they sense that their sister stands alone with no hands to hold her dress and the jug just like they do? Do they suffer and if so, how do they endure this pain of knowing that their sister is forbidden to come home, to return? This particular piece – not that I refuse to assign the value to the other pieces that Elgin stole – this particular statue is life. How do you refuse life without refusing hope? Life could be a synonym for  everlasting hope. They say hope dies last. Doesn’t this quote include life? Life and death, eros and thanatos, these opposing forces always battling against each other. Remember Elpis was the last item in Pandora’s box. Elpis is supposed to save us. If the lost sister is slowly and painfully dying alone in this chamber that people come and view her standing still ready to take a step forward, why do they cage her? Why is it that she’s trapped and told that going back to where she belongs is out of the question? Why do they refuse life? It’s not only about the lost sisters. I imagine the other five trying to catch their breaths every time they think of her. They’re slowly dying too, but the difference is that each one of them has the shoulders of four other sisters to cry, to lament for it is a part of their soul that it’s missing. How can you deny life? How can you deny hope?

I feel this connection with the lost sister even though I haven’t seen her yet. I don’t care if she’s kept well preserved, if they don’t let anyone touch or take a photograph of her, if the lights are not blurring her existence. I feel like I have lost a sister too and mind you, I’m an only child. I feel like someone has violently and deliberately chosen to torment me, me and the other sisters, eradicating our sisterhood. Every time I think of the sixth Caryatid, I feel drained, drained from hope, hope that she will return to her birthplace not just to pay a visit to her long relatives but to whisper to everyone I’m finally here, and the gentle Athenian zephyr will sing this line to every house big or abandoned in Greece that she’s back. I feel like they kidnapped my sister, and they don’t want ransoms to let me get her back. They kidnapped her because they could when the circumstances were in their favour, when the Greeks were subjugated to the Ottoman empire but now, why hasn’t she returned? Why is she still locked in? Why have they taken my sister? Why have they taken my hope?

Trying to explain the interdependence I feel with a piece of marble might seem obscure to you. It’s not entirely about history, about origins, it’s more than that. I somehow discovered a relatedness with a statue that I have never seen – only its replica. So many have tried in the past to ask for the Marbles to be returned, politicians, activists, people from all over the word that love Greece and what Greece represents. Το ελληνικό ιδεώδες. Honestly, I’m not sure whether I know what this means, I don’t know what a country represents. I only know and feel that I have been deprived of feeling whole again because a Lord, who wanted to decorate his home and didn’t want to pay £400 per year to a sculptor, decided to roll the dice and take them under the guise of helping the Greeks. Can you imagine how someone who doesn’t have siblings feels like they have lost a sister? Can you conceptualise how a not-so-shiny-anymore piece of marble, curved to take the form of a woman, is the stimulus that produces all that I have written and more that cannot take the form of words? Can you envisage how you would possibly feel if something from your home was stolen from you and now you can see it standing in another’s room asking you for help? They let you see, they let you admire it from afar, they let you acknowledge the existence but simultaneously they deny you agency. ’Cause this is how I feel. I have no power to do anything. I’m powerless and left in a state of having to stay and wait for someone to change their mind, to understand how I feel destitute, impoverished, and underprivileged, until I can get my sister back.

I haven’t felt more lost until today. But I can’t lose hope. Hope isn’t lost. The sixth sister, my long-lost sister will not be forever lost; her posture symbolises amongst others the Elpis. She has her foot extended ready to escape and when the time comes, when the world will finally be ready, she will return back to her sisters, not to me, to the world. The Caryatid gives me the sense of hope that I need in my life to continue, to believe that my existence, my alethic truth is intertwined with a piece of Pentelic marble that took the form of a young woman. The Caryatid was never a commodity to be admired, she was, is, and will always be a symbol of hope.

Hope that if we get through this pandemic – and we will – she too will manage to go out of this perpetual agonising state of lockdown and her ordeal will end.

To hope! Cheers!

© Chara Vlachaki, 2021

About the Author: Unofficially, Chara is a bookworm, who sniffs book in public, but officially, she goes by ‘PhD student’, who loves linguistics and hidden meaning in literature and art. The Marbles have been her personal source of inspiration. You can find her strolling as a flaneur in Hove – actually!