Athens and the Ancient Ruins of Greece

 

 

We left for the Tel Aviv airport at 7 AM.  When we got there it was chaos at the check-in.  There were hundreds of people milling around, probably because the airport had been closed yesterday.  We stood in line for 30 minutes at the Aegean Airlines check-in only to find out we had to go to another line first for a security check.  Fortunately we did not have to get back in the check-line as the reservation agent said we could just go to the front of the line and she would check us in.  After that security was a breeze.  We didn’t even have to take off our shoes.

 

We had a good 2 hour flight to Athens.  There was only one row of first class (4 passengers).  They served us a very delicious omelet breakfast.  We had no trouble going through Greek passport control.  After retrieving our luggage, we found our driver waiting for us outside the arrival terminal.  It is about a 45 minute drive from the airport to our hotel.

 

We are staying at the St George Lycabettus Hotel, a 5 start hotel located up on Lycabettus Hill – the tallest hill in Athens.  We had fantastic views of the Acropolis and the church on top of Lycabettus Hill.

 

Dinner was at a small café with outdoor seating.  You selected your dinner from pre-made dishes that were then reheated.  I had the meatballs with sauce and Bill had the veal.  He thought the pasta dish was a side dish so he ordered that too – it was another entrée.  We each had a ¼ liter of wine and the total bill came to 34 euros.  The food was really good.

 

Today was a beautiful day, sunny and not too hot.  We took a taxi to the Temple of Zeus and began our walk around the center of Athens.  The Temple of Zeus was the largest temple in Greece.  Near the Temple was Hadrian’s Arch built by Athenians to thank Hadrian for completing the Temple of Zeus.  The Temple of Zeus was started in the 6th Century BC and finished 800 years later by Hadrian.  Also around the temple area were ruins of Roman baths and other buildings.

 

We then walked up a street toward the Acropolis.  It was a hike and we initially took a wrong turn.  We finally found the entrance and walked up to the Acropolis.  There is a lot of reconstruction going on in the Parthenon, but we were still able to enjoy the ruins.  At least it wasn’t raining like the last time we visited Athens.  After walking around the Acropolis, we descended and tried to go to the Acropolis Museum.  However, there was a long line to enter, so we decided to do it another day.  We walked down the street to the area behind the Museum where we found a little street café. They had meat cooking on a spit, so I had the pork and Bill had the lamb.  They really give you a lot of food.  My pork was delicious, moist and tender.  Bill said his was very tasty but he got a lot of skin with his meat.  We definitely did not go away hungry.   Later that afternoon we found a Starbucks about 3 blocks down a hill from the hotel and I bought my Athens/Greece mugs.  Everything is down the hill from our hotel, which is good except when you have to climb back up the hill and stairs.

 

For dinner we ate at an Italian Restaurant called Marconi which was in the same neighborhood as Starbucks.   We had wonderful Focaccia bread with Rosemary and the sweetest grape tomatoes – our waiter said they came from Santorini, and split an order of crab raviolis with shrimp.  We were able to sit outside and enjoy the wonderful weather and the crowds of people walking and driving by.

 

A little word about cars.  Pedestrians do not have the right away.  Even when you get the green walk signal at a light, you need to wait a few seconds for the cars to stop and then very quickly cross the street.  Intersections without a light are a challenge – cars come from all directions, usually very fast.  It is amazing there are not more accidents.  The streets are very narrow, people park on both sides, and although the streets are two-way, there is barely enough room for one car.  We had an amusing incident at our hotel today.  They had a diplomatic reception at the hotel, and as the diplomats were leaving, one car apparently became disabled or involved in a minor fender-bender.  Either way it was stopped in the middle of a three-way intersection.  There were cars trying to go in all directions, but they were basically stopped.  All you heard were the horns from the impatient drivers (which all Athenian drivers are!). 

 

This morning we start our Three Day Classical Tour of Greece.  We had to take a taxi to another hotel to catch our bus as the roads around the St. George Hotel are too narrow and steep for a large tour bus.  We joined 15 other travelers for this tour.  Our tour started with a drive down the Greek coast line to the Corinth Canal, a narrow, steep-sided canal that links the Saronic Gulf with the Gulf of Corinth. We made a short photo/bathroom stop here.  I will discuss more about the Canal on the third day of our Dalmatian Coast Cruise as we will be actually sailing through the canal, not just driving over it. 

 

We then headed for our next step – Epidaurus – located within the Sanctuary of Asklepios, one of the most extensive sacred sanctuaries in ancient Greece.  Here we viewed the Theater of Epidaurus, one of the best preserved theaters and famous for its remarkable acoustics.  The Theater owes its excellent acoustics to its geometrically perfect design.  As we were driving, it started to rain and by the time we got to Epidaurus it was pouring.  Fortunately we had brought an umbrella so we slogged through the rain to the Theater.  Its construction dates back to the 4th century BC.

 

After viewing the Theater and getting thoroughly soaked, we climbed back on the bus for the ride to Nafplio, a small port with three Phoenician fortresses.  We made a short photo stop in the harbor area where we could view all three.  The largest fortress, built in the 1700’s, has 1000 steps that lead up from the town to the fortress.  The smallest one sits in the harbor and is the oldest, built in the 1500’s.

 

Leaving Nafplio, we drove to Mycenae to visit the archaeological site there.  Mycenae is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the country. It is located in the region of Argolis, between Argos and Nafplio. A very prosperous town in the ancient times, Mycenae gave its name to an entire civilization, the Mycenaean civilization that flourished from about 1,600 to 100 BC. Although this civilization eventually encompassed the entire country, the center and most powerful town was Mycenae, the kingdom of the legendary king Agamemnon, ruler of the Greeks in the Trojan War. The ancient town was surrounded by gigantic walls, while the most famous spot is the Lion Gate, the entrance to the town with two female stone lions above.  We first visited the Museum where our guide gave us an explanation of Classical Greek Sculpture.  When he started talking about how the ancient Greek sculptors used mathematical equations to create the perfect human form, I lost interest.  Personally I could not see the difference between the “perfect” body and sculptures created years later in the Neo-Classical period.  While our guide is very knowledgeable about the Classical Greek Era (he was almost through his doctorate in Greek history), he tended to bog us down with a lot of minutiae that we couldn’t possibly remember. We walked up to the Acropolis but there was nothing but stone remnants of its once glorious existence.  By now the sun had returned and we were able to dry out.

 

 As we drove out of the ruins, we made a stop at a The Tomb of Agamemnon, the best preserved of nine “beehive” tombs found in the vicinity of the ancient site of Mycenae.  The tombs consist of a passageway, or dromos (path to the entrance), which leads to the entrance, usually a massive doorway.  Inside is the tholos, or round room with a domed roof.  The tombs were constructed between 1510 BC and 1220 BC.  The Tomb of Agamemnon was the largest/tallest such tomb from 1400 BC until the Romans built a bigger one in 200 AD.  It is estimated to weigh about 120 tons.  After leaving Mycenae, we drove through Central Peloponnese to the town of Olympia where we spent the night at the Amalia Hotel.

 

On Sunday (27 Sep) we visited Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic Games and the location of the Temple of Zeus, – one of the original 7 wonders of the world. 

 

The first Temple of Zeus was erected in the8^th Century BC. In the 3^rd Century BC, the Greeks built the new temple.  This temple was the largest temple in Peloponnese.  Inside the Temple was the 12 meter (42 feet) high Statue of Zeus. All along the sides of the Temple were the monuments to winning athletes.  In the front of the Temple was a platform where the winning athletes receive their wreaths.

 

The Statue of Zeus was built by a sculptor names Phidias who did the statue of Athena in Athens’ Acropolis.  The sculptor asked that a workshop be built near the temple so he would be close to where the statue was going to be placed.  It took him 12 years (430 to 422 BC) to complete the statue.  The statue was made of a wooden frame and covered in ivory and gold panels.  The statue was destroyed by fire in the 5^th Century AD.  The workshop is the only building at the site to have baked bricks. The bricks were added when a basilica was built on top of the workshop in the 6^th Century AD. The temple was eventually destroyed by an earthquake.

We toured the ruins that included the gymnasium, bath houses (Roman era), the workshop, a building that housed the dignitaries that came to the games, the boxing and wrestling rooms, the walk of shame where the names/statue of athletics who were caught cheating were placed on pedestals, the stadium where the games where held, the Temple of Hera, a round temple that appears only in the 4^th Century BC, and a “temple” to Phillip II.  He was a chariot winner and the father of Alexander the Great.  Inside the temple were golden statues of Phillip and his family, instead of statues of gods.  According the Greeks today, this was a Monument to ‘hubris,” (arrogance committed conscientiously against the divinity), everything that the ancient games were against.

 

Gymnasium means “Place of the Naked Man” and the gymnasium was where they came to train.  There were two kinds of nudity in ancient Greece.  Heroic nudity was where the soldiers were naked and their bodies rubbed in olive oil.  This was to prevent the enemy from grabbing hold of them and also if their side was defeated, it robbed the victors from taking any spoils of war from the dead soldiers.  These soldiers only had their sword and a shield.  The officers, on the other hand, where completely dressed in armor that weighed up to 90 pounds.  Athletic nudity referred to the athletes who participated in the games completely naked.

 

Ancient games were held from the 3^rd Century BC until 337 AD. In 337 AD Emperor Theodosius I of Rome banned all pagan activities including the games. The ancient games were only for Greek states.  Only Greek men, who were free citizens and not criminals, and whose city states agreed to participate in the Olympic truce of the games, were allowed to compete.  The truce was written on a bronze discus kept in the Temple of Hera. It stated that all states taking part in the games were forbidden to go to war, carry on a dispute in the court of law, or execute criminals.  To participate, you had to prove that you were Greek on both your Mother’s and Father’s side.  You had to come to the games 3 months prior to the start of the games.  This was to preclude doping and to train for the games without distractions. “Maddox” was an herbal root with tendencies like cocaine and it was prohibited as well as was wine.  The athletes would come to the temple on the first day of the games to take an oath of fair play.  On a few occasions an athlete was found to have cheated in the games (basically he deliberately lost so another athlete could win).  The cheating athlete was barred from ever participating in any future games and his portrait was placed on a pedestal along the walk that the athletes used to enter the stadium.  The city-state from which he came was also heavily fined and also barred from sending any athletes to the games for a set period of time.

 

Women were not allowed to participate in the games nor were they allowed in the stadium to view the games.  Only the priestess of Demeter was permitted to watch the games seated by the altar in the stadium.

 

However, Kallipateira, from the island of Rhodes was considered a semi-goddess as she was the daughter, sister, wife, and mother of Olympic winners.  She was very highly respected, and when her husband died, she became the trainer of her youngest son.  To enter the stadium for his contest, she dressed like a man.  When her son won, she was so excited that her robe fell off and people realized that she was a woman.  The penalty for a woman entering the stadium was death, but the priest spared her because she was so highly respected.  After that, spectators entering the stadium to see the games could not wear any clothes.

 

Women had their own special competition known as the Heraia. The competition honored the goddess Hera and took place in the non-Olympiad years. The official organizers and athletes were unmarried women.

 

The stadium itself included a track that was 200 meters long.  Around the track were little cement basins for holding water for the athletes.  There were no seats in the stadium, the spectators sat on the grassy slopes around the stadium.

 

The Romans wanted to participate in the games, but there was the obstacle that they were not Greek.  So a Roman emperor started a myth that Trojan (a Greek from Mycenae) was allowed to leave Mycenae with all his possession’s and went to live on land that would one day become Rome.  Some generations later, twins, Romulus and Remus, were born into his family line. According to the legends, Romulus founded the city of Rome, so the Roman emperor reasoned that Romans were actually Greek and therefore could participate, which they did.

 

At the site is also the burial mound of Pelops, one of the founders of the ancient Olympic Games.  There are also the remains (two columns) of an 8^th Century BC temple.

 

The original Temple of Zeus (8^th Century BC) is now the Temple of Hera.  When the new temple to Zeus was built, his old temple was dedicated to Hera.  Today, 6 months before the modern Olympic Games are to start, they place a mirrored cauldron in front of the Temple of Hera.  It is set toward the sun and filled with a hydro-carbon “guz.”  When the sun catches the “guz” on fire, they light a torch and send it to the host nation and it becomes the Olympic flame.

 

When we left Olympia we had to drive over the Rio-Antirio Bridge, considered an architectural icon of 21^st Century Greece, which connects Peloponnese with the mainland.  It is the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world.  The bridge is widely considered to be an engineering masterpiece owing to several solutions applied to span the difficult site.  These difficulties include deep water, insecure bottom materials for bridge foundations, seismic activity, the probability of tsunamis, and the expansion of the Gulf of Corinth due to plate tectonics.  The bridge was started in July 1998 and completed in August 2004.  Although the bridge shaved about 30-60 minutes off the trip (by ferry) from Peloponnese to the mainland, it is also a very expensive bridge to use – the cost for our bus was 45 euros and the cost for a car is about 14 euros.  As a result, many ferries still carry cars and, mainly, large trucks that have the time for the transit and can save significant money versus the cost of the bridge.

 

Tonight we stayed at the Amalia Hotel in Delphi. It was a beautiful hotel, and the beds were softer than last night, but the pillows were like stone.

 

The last day of this tour was to Delphi and the Temple of Apollo.  This site is located on the side of Mt. Parnasus 1833 feet above sea level.  For many centuries this was the religious and spiritual center of the ancient Greek world.  This was the place on earth where man was closest to God.  In Mythology, Delphi was where two eagles, released by Zeus and sent in opposite directions, met. Where they met indicated the center of the earth. The first traces of culture here go back to the Mycenaean times (4^th -11^th Century BC) when the main deity worshipped here was Ge (“Earth”) and her sanctuary was guarded by the terrible serpent Python.  From the 11^th-9^th Century BC, the cult of Apollo, son of Zeus, who embodied moral discipline and spiritual clarity, became established.  Legend has it that Apollo killed the Python, the snake that guarded the oracle of Ge.  Apollo's sanctuary was built here by Cretans who arrived at Itea, the port of Delphi, accompanied by the god in the form of a dolphin.  The first stone temples were built towards the end of the 7^th Century BC, one dedicated to Apollo and another to Athena.

 

Delphi was also home to the most famous oracle of ancient Greece, Pythia (High Priestess), who while seated on a tripod above a deep crevasse, would pronounce her prophesies while the priests wrote them down and translated them to the people. The mythology is that when Apollo slew Python, its body fell into this fissure and fumes arose from its decomposing body.  Intoxicated by these fumes, the Pythia would go into a trance, allowing Apollo to possess her spirit and spoke, with the priests translating or interpreting what she was saying.  It was later discovered by geologists from Colorado State University that the fumes emanating from the fissure were gases escaping from deep within the earth.  The Sanctuary sits on a fault line from whence the fumes came, but over centuries the fissure was naturally closed so that today there is no evidence of it.  The life-expectancy of the high Priestess who pronounced these prophesies was about 10 years (you had to be at least 50 years old to become a High Priestess).  The daily ritual of taking a cleansing bath in fume-infused water and inhaling the fumes from the fissure would cause these premature deaths.

 

We first visited the ruins of the Temple of Athena located about a mile below the Temple of Apollo.  Also located in this area was the Tholos, a round temple (not common in Greece) that was made of marble.  No one knows what the temple was used for or who it commemorated. In this area are also found the ruins of the Gymnasium and the Palaiastra which were used to train the athletes who competed in the Pythian Games, held every four years to commemorate Apollo's victory over Python. These games were second only to the ancient Olympic Games in importance. The Castilian spring is where pilgrims washed themselves before consulting the oracle and the crystal clear water still flows as it has for thousands of years.

 

We then drove up to the ruins of the Temple of Apollo.  We walked the Sacred Way that leads to the temple, passing the ruins of treasuries and monuments that commemorate great events.   The Treasuries were built to house the statues and gifts brought by the Greek city states in tribute to Apollo in thanks for victories in battle. Only the treasury of the Athenians has been reconstructed.  We viewed the ruins of these treasuries and the actual Temple of Apollo.  There were three chambers in the Temple.  The first one, closest to the entrance, was where the pilgrims brought their gifts.  The middle chamber was where the priest would sit and record and interpret the words of the Pythia. The priests would escort the Pythia into the temple, but they were not allowed to enter the third chamber.  Only the Pythia was allowed here and this is where she would sit, sniff the fumes, and make her prophesies.  Most of the time they were just ramblings and made no sense, but the priests would interpret them as they saw fit.

 

Our trip ended here and we went home on the same bus that had brought us here.  The rest of the group (who were on a 4-day tour) was moved to a bigger bus because another group was joining them.  We picked up another group that was also headed back to Athens.  However, as soon as they got on, their guide announced that we were going back to the Amalia Hotel to have lunch.  The only problem was that we had already eaten (lunch was not very good and was expensive), so we had to wait in the lobby for about an hour.  Then as soon as we boarded the bus, the guide announced that they were making another 20-minutes shopping stop in the next town.  We were not very happy as it was already 3:30 and we had been told we would be back in Athens by 5 (it is a 3 hour drive).  When we finally reached Athens it was raining and traffic was a mess.  We finally got to our hotel about 7:30.  After checking in, we went to the rooftop for Happy Hour and ate their snacks and drank our dinner.  The view from there is amazing.  The Acropolis is all lit up at night.

 

Today was a free day for us.  After breakfast, we walked about 3 blocks to the funicular that takes you to the top of the Lycabettus Hill (908’ above sea level) where the 19th century Chapel of St. George is located. Lycabettus which means “Hill of Wolves” is the place to be on “Clean Monday” which is the first day of Lent according to the Greek Orthodox Church. On this day Athenians gather here to fly kites and the sky is full of colors.  Mythologically, Lycabettus is credited to Athena, who created it when she dropped a mountain she had been carrying from Pallene for the construction of the Acropolis after the box holding Erichthonius was opened.  The peak affords a spectacular view of Athens and the Acropolis.  For lunch we found a little Greek restaurant that serve sandwiches.  They were quite tasty.

 

Tonight we had a taxi take us to Cape Sounion to see the Temple of Poseidon at sunset.  It was a beautiful sunset.  On the drive home we stopped at a small village by the sea and had a fish dinner – red snapper.  Our guide then took us to a fresh-water lake (Vouliagmeni Lake) near the seaside and near Athens.  It is a thermal lake and it was all lit up at night.  What a spectacular sight.  Tomorrow we met the rest of our Dalmatian Coast Cruise and start our journey to Croatia.