Chewing gum, high heels, booming amplifiers and other modern plagues are seriously damaging Greece’s 2,500-year-old outdoor theatres and should be banned, according to the country’s powerful archaeological establishment.

As the shows become more elaborate, with bulkier sets, highvolume speakers for acoustic shock effect, and high heels clattering on the ancient marble, experts fear that theatres such as Epidavros, built 2,400 years ago for men in leather sandals and relying on natural acoustics, are under threat.

Add the countless wads of used chewing gum that regularly stud the old terraced marble seats, requiring painstaking removal, and the Central Archaeological Council has declared war on modernity. “We find ourselves regularly cleaning kilos of chewing gum from the Herod Atticus theatre,” said Kathy Paraschi, an architect working on the Parthenon restoration. “It’s an amazing and awful situation.”

She added: “Speaking as a woman and an Athenian, I like my fashionable spiky heels.” But wearing them to Epidavros is “like taking a hammer and splitting the blocks apart”.

Times Archive, 1937: Ancient Greek microphones

Bell-shaped vessels of bronze were placed in niches about the building

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The Central Archaeological Council is considering a ban on chewing gum and high heels, though the Herod Atticus theatre on the south side of the Acropolis is made of tougher Attic marble and can better stand up to modern footwear fashion.

As if that were not enough, avant-garde directors are being blamed for damaging the sites where ancient writers once performed their plays. “Despite repeated warnings,” the council said in a recent statement, “stage sets seem to be getting bigger and decibel levels louder. This could inflict damage on the ancient structures.”

Some see the archaeologists’ complaints as part of a conservative campaign. At Epidavros last month Matthias Langhoff, a German director, interrupted his production of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, revamped as a modern antiwar play. In mid-performance he harangued his audience to denounce what he called “Greek culture-politics”. The council had previously objected to Mr Langhoff’s large set and avant-garde interpretation, which they said took unacceptable liberties with Sophocles’s original text.

Mrs Paraschi complained that many modern directors “don’t respect the rules about keeping the theatres safe and clean”. “Is Greece really protecting its antiquities?” wrote a reviewer in Kathimerini newspaper.

“We love them, of course, [but] in any other way, in all the other crucial ways that actually matter, we don’t really pay them that much attention.”

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