Our last day of antiquities. I had originally thought of these three days as the Peloponnesus loop, but in reality it is the “Antiquities Tour 2021-Lonely Hearts Tour.
Day 1 - Mycenae
Day 2 - Olympia
Day 3 - Delphi
With the lowest attendance of any event since Antiquity!”
As you recall, we shared Mycenae with about 10 people. We had Olympia to ourselves. Day 3? Crowded. Must have been 50 people at this site. Is it the proximity to Athens that made the difference in crowd size? I doubt it since Mycenae is an hour closer by car. Maybe the time of day? Who knows, but it just gave Sally more people to chat with. Germany. Florida. Israel. France. We met them all. :-)
As we threw our bags together this morning, we both wished we had scheduled two days here instead of one. What a perfect B&B. And with a beach. We put our stuff in the car, but before we left I bought a small jar of honey from Nikiforos. He seemed sad to see us go. We wove through town noticing again that Apple Maps doesn’t particularly care if a road is a highway or a dirt road through an orchard, if it is the fastest route, that’s where it takes you. We passed through the downtown area of this sleepy town, then through a few olive orchards until we hit the highway and began climbing the 3000’ up to Delphi.
We followed the GPS as it took us up switchbacks, climbing the hill and then through the very narrow streets of the hillside town of Delphi, then around to what it called the archeology site and museum. We could see the museum but not the archeology site. There was no parking lot, just some places to pull off the road. I became suspicious that the GPS had led us to the wrong spot, especially after the narrow farm roads it took us on. We checked with Rick and found, no, this was the right place. There is just very limited parking. He suggests you park in town and walk over to the museum and site. Of course, being a COVID spring, we found a place to park off the side of the road very near the entrance.
We opted for the archeological site first. See what they uncovered as far as layout and structures, then to the museum to see the artifacts: statues, dinnerware, helmets, etc that they uncovered.
Rick says this the most impressive of the sites. We are still partial to Olympia, but don’t let that make you think we were unimpressed or disappointed. This place was spectacular. This is the site that held the Oracle of Delphi. People traveled from all over the Greek world, the island, Athens, where ever, to ask the Oracle their questions.
They all brought some kind of tribute-statues, gold, they built shrines, etc to thank the Oracle. This whole site is on the side of a steep mountain at about 3000’, with rocky cliffs above. The temple and all other buildings were built on platforms made by leveling parts of the hill. A winding path, called the Sacred Way, weaves between the building foundations (all that is left) up past each, past the theater dug into the hill up to the top where the stadium is. Unlike the Olympia Stadium, this one has seats and houses about 4500 spectators, whereas the one in Olympia held 45,000, standing.
There is one building that stands again, thanks to patient people carefully piecing the stone block walls back together. That is the Treasury of the Athenians.
With that one constructed, your imagination can begin to see what the whole area might have looked like. The amphitheater cut into the high side is especially impressive. Unfortunately, they we setting up for a big musical concert with massive lights, microphone and cameras everywhere, so we could not go into the theatre. We could only view it from above.
As we passed the Treasure of the Athenians we struck up a conversation with a elderly couple from Florida. They were well traveled and were in Greece until the end of July, just kind of floating from place to place.
Once we climbed the 700 vertical feet the the stadium we met a German couple (we called him the Jolly German because he was so . . . well, jolly). The Florida couple made it up about 20 minutes later (we were still talking with the German couple) and soon the conversation went three ways for a bit. It is fun to meet people from all over the world. We realize the people we meet are a select few that can afford to travel and have a desire to do so. It does skew the population, but in a good way.
We hit the museum after descending from the stadium and marveled at all the statues and other artifacts that were excavated from the site. Amazing.
When I was a kid, between the ages of 8 and 13, we would go to San Juan Island every summer and stay in cabin my dad’s best friend, Rod, had built. Rod had two daughters the same age as I and my older brother, and we would play together. One thing we did each summer was pack a lunch and walk the shoreline (high about the cliffs that made up the shoreline) south from the cabin on Small Pox Bay about 5 miles to the lime kiln Light house. It was called the Lime Kiln Light House because they used to mine limestone from there, ship it up to Roach Harbor to the cement factory and reduce the lime to calcium oxide, the hardening ingredient in cement. The mine had been abandoned for 20 years by the time we were trapesing about (1967), but the house that the miner bunked in (or was it the foreman’s house) still stood very intact and still quite furnished. It had a piano in it, plus other furniture and household items-an archeology site, albeit, only 20 years old. We had no respect for these “antiquities”. We would play with the stuff, play the piano, mess around, etc. I don’t recall any intentional destruction, but it was an abandoned building and we were kids, so who knows what we did. Now, the Limestone Lighthouse is a big tourist attraction. The orca whales summer in the area and are nearly daily seen near this promontory. The mine is also of some historical significance, especially due to its ties to the Roach Harbor cement works, also a tourist attraction for its history in the development of the islands.
Every time I see the destruction at an archeology site such as Delphi I think, “Why did people deface this place over the years? Didn’t they realize how important to history this stuff is?” Then I think of my callus disregard for the piano and other artifacts in the limestone mine and I begin to understand.
One other aspect enters this topic, and that is religion. The ancient Greeks worshipped a whole host of Gods, Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Athina, etc. They did sacrifices. Then, along came the Christians. They scorned these people of multiple Gods (think the seven Gods of “Game of Thrones” compared to those that had but one God. So the Christians had not only a disregard for these items left by the Greeks, but an animosity toward them. They chopped the heads of the statues, chopped the penises off the male nudes, broke them apart, pushed them off buildings and cliffs-generally and purposefully destroyed them. They toppled the columns in the temples. We are lucky to find anything close to intact. Mycenae, Olympia and Delphi are a look back at how people lived and worshipped. Lucky for us, they worked with stone so that much survives. If it was plastic and iron, it would have disappeared long ago, much like the piano in the limestone mine house.
We left Delphi about 1:00pm and headed for Athens to return the rental car. The drive is about an hour and a half. We stopped a few times for food and potty breaks and made it to the Athens airport about 3:00 or so. We took an Uber to our apartment for the night, a roof top affair.
It was amazing. Full living/dining room with two couches, bedroom and bath. It had a massive window wall with 4 - 8 foot sliding doors. We plopped on the couch and called home, talking to the kids and the Sanfords. I ran down the
stairs to the street level (3 floors) and bought dinner at the grocery store down a couple blocks. Roast chicken, fresh green beans and tortalini. Yum. We went to bed fairly early because we had to get up at 4:30 to catch a 7:30am flight to the island of Corfu, over on the Ionian Sea side of Greece, to begin phase four of our trip, hiking the 100 mile long Corfu Trail.
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