COLUMN ONE : Saving the Glory That Was Greece : In Athens, digging a subway vital to the shabby city’s future has unearthed treasures from its past. Despite a giant rescue effort, some fear the ancient trove will be lost in the push to keep the Metro on track.

Archeology has taken massively to the streets of Athens, combing through the splendid Greek past in search of a more livable future for a now-ramshackle capital literally gasping for breath.

The harvest is bountiful--and bittersweet.

Construction of a $2.8-billion underground Metro for Athens is imposing a delicate and painful balance between the demands of modern urban life and the legacies of history.

Metro excavations have opened archeological digs the size of 22 football fields along major streets in the heart of the city.

Artifacts in dazzling array, from toys to sarcophagi to sexy bedroom lamps, are being recovered as part of the largest effort ever undertaken to mine and rescue the underground treasures of a metropolis whose majesty beckons across 25 centuries.

“The scale is indescribable. In pieces, there are hundreds of thousands. In bulk, tons. We are talking large trucks and heavy cranes,” said William G. Stead, the American engineer overseeing Metro construction. “Scholars will be writing their theses on this material 25 years from now.”

The bad news is that large numbers of newly seen landmarks from Athens’ past--walls, foundations, wells, aqueducts--will be bulldozed goodby in another few months to keep Metro construction on schedule. Not everybody is sure that there will be time to fully digest the trove.

One recent morning, a worker digging a few feet beneath street level near Syntagma, or Constitution Square, uncovered a broken pocketbook-sized terra-cotta brick bearing the image of two prancing panthers. Archeologist Costas Saris hustled over.

“A mold from a metal-working shop; about the time of Christ,” he told a visitor above the rasp of a No. 136 bus trapped in traffic a few yards away on Amalias Avenue before the national Parliament. To the fury of motorists, the Metro digs have institutionalized gridlock since tunneling began in earnest in November, 1992.

The panthers, duly documented, by now lie in one of the fast-growing artifact warehouses of the Greek Culture Ministry. They will be studied--eventually. There is no time for that sort of scholarly luxury right now.

“Usually we don’t excavate all year round, so winter offers a chance to study and to reflect. Here, we don’t have that chance,” said Saris, one of a dozen archeologists overseeing workers at what will become the Metro’s biggest station. “A site this size would normally keep us busy for many years. But we have only six months. I wish we hadn’t found so much.”

Stead, who ran San Francisco’s Municipal Railway for five years and also worked for New York and Boston transit systems, is himself a trained archeologist.

He sympathizes with the yearning to linger over the past. But time is money, in this case European money: about 1 million marks for every day of delay--nearly $600,000.

“Slow archeology is not necessarily good, and fast archeology is not necessarily bad,” said Stead, chief of a Bechtel International team providing management and engineering services to the Greek company responsible for the Metro.

Originally planned for completion in 1997, the project is already more than one year behind schedule because of the archeology. Now, Stead said, Athens must avoid the mistakes of Rome, where standoffs between builders and conservers repeatedly delayed subway construction.

“Unfortunately, features like wells, walls and foundations will be destroyed. Once they are measured and recorded, we’ll have to bulldoze them out of the way,” Stead said. “But the glass is also half full. Except for the Metro, these sites would never have been excavated to begin with.”

That there is any excavation at all is because 80% of Metro financing comes from Greece’s concerned partners in the European Union.

It is the largest contribution that the EU (formerly the EC) and the European Investment Bank have made to any single project.

To put it bluntly, their European partners--like the Greeks themselves--are alarmed at Athens’ decay.

Classical Athens was the most wondrous city on Earth in the 5th Century BC. Modern Athens is the most polluted and choked capital in the EU, 12th of 12 in livability and efficiency, by most reckoning. Greeks believe that it is time the past moved over to make room for regeneration.

Uncounted false Metro starts across 30 years of explosive urbanization have left Athenians disbelieving that anything good could ever emerge from any new hole in the street.

Still, most people tell pollsters that while they do not want archeology sacrificed for the Metro, neither do they want the Metro sidetracked by archeology.

It is not hard to understand why. In 1961, there were 39,000 cars in Athens, where a third of Greeks live.

Today, there are 1.4 million cars in a metropolitan area with almost 3.5 million people. Despite Draconian traffic restrictions, little moves downtown in the historic, commercial, financial and governmental heart of Greece.

A century ago, a wide-eyed Mark Twain could see the Acropolis from his ship docked at the port of Piraeus, five miles away. Today, just peering across the street can be an eye-searing event. A noxious smog damages people and monuments alike.

Greece was mortified to have been bypassed as the site of the 1996 centennial Olympic Games, but anybody who has navigated the streets of Athens--or tried to use the telephones--understands why.

Metro to the rescue: Planners say that by century’s end it could be carrying 450,000 passengers a day, reducing daily auto trips by 250,000 and the city’s exhaust pollution by 35%.

“The Metro is an environment and quality-of-life issue,” Stead said.

The 11-mile, 21-station, two-line underground will link with the upgraded version of an existing surface line that runs from Piraeus to the northern suburb of Kifisia.

Planners promise the result will improve not only capital life, but also the international image of a city that now leaves tourist hordes as transport-despairing as Athenians. A functioning Metro system, who knows, might even restore credibility in government--customarily as hard to encounter here as a parking space.

“There’s a lot of skepticism. But even with fences two feet from buildings and businesses, I think we are gradually winning public acceptance for the idea of short-term pain for long-term gain,” said William G. Margaritis, a Greek American spokesman for the project and one of 26 Bechtel employees representing the Greek client Attiko Metro before a construction consortium of 25 Greek, French and German companies.

“It’s hard to imagine any other issue on which there could be a political consensus to allow major thoroughfares to be dug up for long periods of time,” Margaritis said.

If the need for the Metro is persuasive, so is the case for preserving a legacy of history that belongs not just to Greece but to all of humanity.

The long-sought underground railroad, one of the largest public works projects now under way in Europe, will include five stations within the walls of ancient Athens, some of them in the shadow of the Acropolis.

It is some of the most fertile soil for archeology on Earth: One trench surrendered a neolithic obsidian blade at its bottom and a 1920s coin near its top--the detritus of 7,000 years in 15 vertical feet. In all, about 767,000 square feet of city streets are being systematically laid bare for archeological scrutiny.

“The digs are very important for understanding the history and topography of the city. But we didn’t expect to find material in such good condition right under the street pavement,” said Olga Zachariadou, supervising archeologist for the Greek Ministry of Culture.

One recent morning, 100 workers with shovels backed by a dozen archeologists with fine brushes pored over the site at Syntagma, where two Metro lines will cross.

It is precisely the Syntagma archeology that is delaying construction. Despite detailed research with sources ranging from ancient travelers’ journals to old city maps, test trenches and ground-penetrating radar, archeologists are finding the unexpected.

“This site was a cemetery outside the walls of the classical city beginning around the 4th Century BC. Later, it was incorporated inside the much larger Roman city. We found ruins of two metalworking shops we had no idea existed,” Zachariadou said. “A big Roman bath was built here under the Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138) that lasted until the 5th or 6th Century. Above that are some ruins of Byzantine Greece.”

There was great slaughter amid much destruction when the Roman general Sulla conquered the city in 86 BC. And as the wellspring of Western civilization, Athens has been subsequently pawed by vandals and enthusiasts alike.

As a result, much of what is being uncovered now was disturbed long ago. A lot of the artifact pieces are just that. But some of the finds have been fresh, surprising and of museum quality.

One sealed tomb contained the 2,000-year-old remains of a young boy and the toys laid to rest with him. At the Pentagono station, a marble sarcophagus the size of a conference table protected a 20-something woman and myriad vials left by her mourners.

One round, stone room for which there was no obvious entrance held never-used marble tabletops and at least 100 terra-cotta oil lamps in mint condition, each painted with erotic scenes, Stead said.

At the Larissa station, archeologists discovered a Roman drain. Elsewhere, they are engrossed in newly visible city walls, workshops, aqueducts, cisterns, ancient roads and the bed of a dried-up river.

Along with the artifacts being stockpiled for Culture Ministry safekeeping are many bulky architectural features: chunks of wall and aqueduct, a nine-foot-tall stone storage jar prized out of the digs by cranes. Some of the fragments will go back underground as displays in new Metro stations.

While the stations, de facto, need access to the surface, the tunnels between them will be dug in bedrock around 60 feet deep to avoid disturbing whatever lies above. Workers manipulating huge, jet-engine-shaped mechanical diggers will use boring techniques perfected in construction of the “Chunnel” that connects Britain and France under the English Channel.

To minimize damage to known archeological sites, several stations--Olympion, Monastiraki and Akademia-- will be built by underground tunneling rather than surface excavation.

Elsewhere, though, many features will be destroyed, particularly at Syntagma, the system’s only two-level station.

“Every station hides its own secrets . . . baths, a market, the ruins of a Byzantine church at Monastiraki. In some stations we can move things slightly to preserve archeological features, but here at Syntagma a lot will be lost,” Zachariadou said.

She’s not one to vouchsafe Athens’ thirst for better transportation, or the need to keep Metro construction moving. Still, Zachariadou said, on the day this spring when the bulldozers come to Syntagma, she intends to be far, far away.