Thermopylae Revisited

We visited Thermopylae much earlier in the trip, but didn't get a chance to say much about the beautiful Thermopylae museum we saw there.  It was closed when we got there (thanks to the ubiquitous 8:30am-3:00pm opening hours here in Greece), but we were able to take a picture of the outside.  It's actually a good thing we didn't even know the museum existed, because if we had, we probably would have tried to have made it there in time....and that would have been a mistake.

The Museum at Thermopylae

Why a mistake?  Well, from the outside the museum looks rather nice.  But take a look at the aerial view of the site, thanks to Google Earth:

Thermopylae from above.  Museum is in top right, Kolonis Hill (where the final last stand happened) is in the bottom left.  Top left is a memorial to the battle.

As you can see in the picture, this is a small museum.  Peering in all the windows, we were able to determine that the entire glassed in area is open.  The left-half of the glassed area is the cafeteria, the right is the entrance foyer, including ticket sales and a hilariously small gift shop.  The entire area to the left of the glassed-in area (where the building narrows, as you can see in the aerial shot) holds two offices -- the Director's office we guessed, and a secretarial office.  The tiny separate building you can see in the left side of the aerial shot is actually where they keep the janitorial supplies.  (As Lauren points out, this must be where any flammables are stored to avoid another Parthenon-type problem.)

So, that leaves just the right third of the building, which we were able to see is largely open, probably for some sort of video presentation about the battle.  Which makes sense, because, well, Thermopylae was just the site of a battle.  It wasn't a town with buildings and temples, it was just a good place to have a really big fight between a large army and a small one.  What do you have left after such a battle?  We finally saw the answer when we visited the National Archaeology Museum in Athens:

Arrowheads from the Battle of Thermopylae

So why build a museum in Thermopylae?  Probably because it sounded like a great proposal on paper and after you get the funding, you just go ahead and build something...