Athens Adventure part II: Votanikos Kypos

After leaving Dafni monastery, I doubled back to find the Botanical Garden, which I knew was right down the street.  I found a lovely (but expensive) cafe that looked like it was in the garden (had a ruined church and some overgrown paths around it), but wasn't.

The cafe.  I will bet it is used for weddings... lots more space, all very romantically decorated.

  I walked along the garden wall and found a locked gate, and then another.

This looked to me like the main gate.

I should have known by the address.  This is 403, and the main gate is at 405, about a half mile away!

I got mad at myself for not having asked at the cafe, so walked first to a periptero and got some water and asked.  The woman said it was directly across the street. I walked back to the locked gate.  Still locked.  I walked back to the cafe and asked there, wondering if perhaps the entrance was through the overgrown paths a the cafe.  The guy said that this wasn't the garden, that it was next door.  I said there was a gate, but it was closed.  He said maybe it was open on the weekends.  But I'd done my research, and it was supposed to be open daily for another week and then closed for the summer.  So I walked along the garden wall, in the opposite direction that the woman in the periptero had told me and was finally rewarded with the main gate.

In the end, a lovely place

Turtle piggy-back rides

Maybe it is just the Botanic Garden, but somehow both times I asked local people who live minutes from the two sites of the Botanic Garden (the old in the center and this new one) they had no idea where the entrance was.  And little interest.  They lived or worked literally across the street or next door to it but didn't know where the main gate was.  This story also illustrates the importance of persistence!

Phil pointed out that it also raises a lot of questions.  Is it just the Botanic Gardens that is so little used that neighbors across the street have no idea where the entrance is?  If so, why?  It is free, beautiful, and even has picnic tables and a few pieces of playground equipment.  Phil wondered if it was because botanic gardens are colonial expressions (plants gathered from around the world... many zoos were also botanic gardens; both exotic plants and animals in captivity for public viewing!), which perhaps don't make sense in a Greek worldview.  

I looked at last year's post, which included my research into the history of the old Botanic garden and the neighborhood named after it. Indeed the first, old botanic garden began as a colonial experiment, created by Greece's first queen, Amalia, who came from Oldenberg (now a part of Germany, but at the time its own independent duchy) and was born a descendant of the Danish royal house.  She created both the National Gardens and the first botanic garden in Greece.  According to wikipedia, "it was designed by the German agronomist Friedrich Schmidt who imported over 500 species of plants and a variety of animals including peacocks, ducks, and turtles" but many of the plants died as they were not adapted to the hot, dry climate. So not only was she herself a colonizer, the garden was envisioned in the colonial vein.  Interestingly, when Julia and Alexander Diomedes left money for the new botanic gardens in the 1950s, the mission was changed.  The current mission according to the website, is to care for rare, endangered and endemic plants of "the Hellenic flora." so the mission is now nationalistic rather than colonialist.  It also has a very modern mission to educate people about the need to conserve the environment.  And yet it does not seem to be particularly valued by those who would be in a position to enjoy it most.  More questions than answers.