Rest and peace …

…  A. E. Stallings: Movement and Stillness —Quarantine and sculpture in the First Cemetery of Athens. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A working cemetery, it is also essentially a statue garden, including works by famous Greek sculptors from 19th-century neoclassicism to the present. Not only human and angelic figures in the round and in bas-relief, in marble and bronze, but owls and lions, Greek and Egyptian sphinges. My favorite sphinx is a brazen one perched like an umlaut atop Adolf Furtwängler’s grave-plinth. She’s about the size of a lynx. Her muscular haunches, her coiled tail, make her look ready to pounce, while her verdigris camouflages her among cypress boughs.