Hadrian’s Library

Mango dress
J. Crew sandals
Ellen James handbag
RayBan sunglasses
Maris Pearl Co. necklace (c/o)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o)
Keltie Leanne Designs ring (c/o)
Linjer ring (c/o)
Location: Hadrian’s Library – Athens, Greece

For me, reading is like breathing – I can’t stop. Books are essential to my survival. I’ve had a library card in every city I’ve lived in, and never leave a visit to my parents’ house without at least one borrowed book in hand. I love to visit libraries on our travels – the New York Public Library is a long-time favourite. And I never miss a chance to walk up the marble staircase at the National Library of Greece. But I don’t think I’ve ever loved a library the way I love Hadrian’s Library… which is funny, since it’s the only library I’ve ever visited where there are no books.

There is something about the character of Hadrian, the last great Roman emperor, that captures my imagination. From Hadrian, we learn why building walls only serves to hold people in, not to keep them out. We learn that fearing what is unfamiliar is a path to destruction, and that holding on to what we love too tightly eventually crushes it. Hadrian was, in many ways, a genius – not just an emperor, but an art enthusiast, an avid traveler and a poet. But he remains most memorable for his failure, of which he was most certainly the architect. Rome was bound to fall. But it was the building of the wall that accelerated its inevitable decline. And that wall, called Hadrian’s Wall, was not given its name for nothing.

Hadrian loved Athens. And he left indelible marks on the city, which he devoted years to beautifying and glorifying as a centre of cultural life within the Roman Empire. If you turn down the right street in Plaka, you find yourself facing a row of houses with a perfectly aligned view of what remains of Hadrian’s Arch. What remains of his library is, in essence, a pile of beautiful ruins near Monastiraki station. The buildings were first erected in 132 AD, and they have sat on the same spot ever since, slowly crumbling and decaying. But such is their magnitude that they have never fully reintegrated with the landscape. Nature is a powerful force, and yet it cannot overtake fully quite so much marble, it seems.

Restoration of the remains of Hadrian’s Library is recent, and the site opened to the public again only in 2016. There is not much to see, really – just fallen columns, sections of broken staircases and a few remaining walls. It is mostly just an open field in the middle of a city where something remarkable used to be. These days, local stray cats and other wild life make it their home. And yet, despite all of that, there is a kind of haunting romance to it. You can almost feel Hadrian’s presence at the library. And what you can feel is how much it meant to him – that he loved Athens, and probably loved his library in the city best of all.

It is Hadrian’s love of Athens that draws me to his character, I think – because I share that love, for reasons I have written about at length but still cannot fully put into words. Hadrian’s Library, like Aeropagus Rock, is one of the places in Athens where I feel my love of the city most acutely and profoundly. At Hadrian’s Library, I feel like I am home. Which is why I saved these photos as the last to share from our Athenian holiday, even though they were not the last week took there. There is so much of the world I’ve still never seen. And yet, I would happily keep going back to Athens again and again, leaving the rest of it undiscovered.

Shop the Post