Born-Again Cities
How Easter Builds On a Classical Foundation
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I live in the Athens of the North, Edinburgh, and I recently visited the Athens of the South, aka Nashville, Tennessee. It is actually further south than the real Athens and has a full-scale Acropolis, complete with a towering Diana idol, all accessible for a few dollars. Americans seems to love fake old stuff and theme parks, so it makes sense, but this relates to something far deeper.
Until last week, I had never been to the actual Athens. Turns out there is a direct flight from the Athens of the North to the Edinburgh of the South, as I like to call the Greek capital.
Cities As Models
Each Athens shares a profound commonality. All three are internationally famous as intellectual and creative centres. The original Athens for, well, everything we hold dear. Nashville is the Music City but it also boasts a dozen universities plus even more colleges within the metro area.
Scots invented the modern world within a few square miles of post-Reformation and Enlightenment Edinburgh. Today, the city is centred on the largest writer’s monument in the world (the Scott monument) and the art collection housed in behind the neo-Classical pillars of the National Gallery. Above you is Calton Hill and it’s Parthenon folly. These buildings speak of the culture’s deeper foundations.
A lot of people will happily give credit to the Classical world’s role in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, these eras of rebirth into the ancient world. Yet Historian Tom Holland has noted that the culture we love today was not present in the Classical world. Life was short and brutish, often by design. There were nice structures, sure, and impressive engineering, but many values of the Classical world were utterly alien to us moderns. Others are familiar: power was king, like in nature, but that order was accepted by all as the standard. Today we think that is dangerous because the Roman Empire was subverted by the self-sacrificing love of an apparent weakling, Jesus, who was enthroned on a cross that first Easter.
Through the spread of that Christian faith through society, cities were then born again by education, justice and empathy for the downtrodden. As well as fixing long held beliefs into creeds, the council of Nicea (325AD) requested hospital be built in Cathedral cities to care for the sick. Learning was central too. Their cities were to be models of the future heavenly city, new Jerusalem, and this vision for the rebirth was built on the foundations of old, fallen Rome and crumbly Athens for that matter. This vision is also seen clearly in the skyline of Enlightenment Edinburgh and the current religious life of Nashville, often given the name the Protestant Vatican.
Building on the Past
I was in Greece last week briefly to document an 11th-century monastery in Hosios Loukas, now a World Heritage Site, as part of an ongoing commission about the New Jerusalem*. Athens is known from the Classical period before Christ but it also spawned more recent wonders as part of Byzantium. Compared to the acropolis site (circa 440BC) this place was a new build yet there is continuity.
The paperwork to get a photography permit was, well, Byzantine, but that felt right and someone else did it (thanks Erin!). I have come to realise, though, that the insult that something is Byzantine is an unfair representation of Byzantium, which was a civilisation as great, or greater, than Rome or Greece. To be fair, you need some decent admin to last 1,000 years!
The Middle Ages to which this monastery belongs did not cast out the Classical world but retained the best of the past and then reformed the rest. We moderns might learn from them and do the same, putting aside cultural (or political) prejudice and drawing the best from both cultural wells and city cultures.
Light in Our Dark Ages
Enlightenment thinkers called the Middle Ages ‘dark’ after it was used by 14th century Italian historian Petrarch, in contrast to their great new age of light, yet many today have been duped into believing it was actually dark and ignorant. Judging by what remains now, medieval folk, it seems, were also obsessed with light, harmony, wisdom and beauty. The poor were elevated, and money was expended on beauty for all to see. Wickedness was still present of course, as these mosaics show: that’s part of the human story – the new city is only new because it has that specifically Christian redemptive arc, a new Easter-shaped society.
Our culture can look like a mess today, and I wonder what we will leave behind. What do our buildings say about our values and ambitions? What is the vision for our cities today? Do they draw on the great wells of the past?
*I made a book of a pilgrimage as an embedded artist on a journey, and the project has continued since then. I published another book on the role of Ethiopian Orthodox churches in the preservation of forests. Last month, I witnessed a new Byzantine wonder, in L.A., of all places, at an evangelical university campus. In June, I am off on another journey in Europe.
All photos © Kieran Dodds 2026 unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.