An Athenian Diary

31

On the Road with Kids, Part 2

Back to the Argolid

Not all that long ago, Edie and I took the kids to the Argolid. With Nauplio as a base, we explored Mycenae, Epidauros, and the great castle of Palamidi. When trying to figure out where to take Edie's sister Ellen and her family (husband John, kids Will and Emma) to give them a taste of Greece outside of Athens, the Argolid kept coming back to mind. It has everything -- hillsides of olives, acres and acres of orange trees (all gravid now with ripe fruit, which we have been devouring greedily in Athens), archaia, mediaeval castles, mountains, and the first capital of Greece, today a thriving and proud provincial town. So, with a slap of plastic, we rented a van -- the "Jumpy" -- and headed out of Athens, south into the sun.

Brilliant sunshine greeted us as we swept out of Athens down the National Road toward the Isthmus of Corinth. If you cross the isthmus on the new road, you'll never notice; so we peeled off the multi-lane concrete just before the crossing and joined the old national road, which in a matter of meters arrived at the crossing. We stopped and walked out on the bridge to look down into the deep angled cut that joins the Gulf of Corinth on the west to the Saronic Gulf on the east. Before the canal, you had to sail all the way around the Peloponnesos, passing Cape Malea, which has a bad reputation among sailors. (In antiquity there was a dragway, the Diolkos, by which ships could be dragged by mules from one side of the isthmus to the other; the Corinthians, who built the Diolkos and controlled the isthmus, naturally charged a fee.)

Back in the car, we headed for Ancient Corinth. This town is famous on the Christian tourism circuit, as one of the places St. Paul visited, and to whose nascent Christian community the "Epistle to the Corinthians" was directed. But first -- lunch, in a delightful (but rather expensive) taverna in the old town, where we were feted with smoked fish and gigantes beans, and sent on our way with a bottle of ouzo, gratis. Note all the decorations -- every surface was covered with something, and behind us (not visible in the photo) a rack of antique guns. The fresh-squeezed orange juice, no doubt made from oranges picked that very morning, was exquisite.

The archaeological site features a great temple of Apollo of sixth-century BCE date, with columns and entablature still partly standing. Most of the site is of Roman date, including a great main street and the Fountain of Peirene, which supplied much of the public water. I was here in Corinth nineteen years ago last time, as a student at the School; I excavated (not very successfully, I confess) like most students, explored the ruins, and climbed Akrokorinthos, the great brooding mountain just beyond the city, which served as its akropolis and fortification.

The kids really seemed to like Corinth. It's full of partially preserved statues, those missing the top half providing the perfect opportunity to pose as a Roman emperor; while the disiecta membra of ancient buildings lying everywhere invite the beautiful youths among us to pose as goddesses -- three, like the Graces, or to worship at the Temple of Apollo -- something that perhaps would horrify the standard Christian tourist, of whom luckily there were none in evidence the day we were there.

Corinth was an important town in antiquity, especially after the emperor Augustus permitted it to be rebuilt (the Romans destroyed it in 146 BCE as punishment for taking the wrong side in a war), and the remains reflect its prosperity under the empire. Because it was resettled as a Roman colony, it's one of the few places in Greece where Latin was used as a living language; you'll find great monumental inscriptions lying around in Latin -- something that doesn't happen much in Athens.

The great Corinthian akropolis was, as I've said, the Akrokorinthos. We explored it too -- not by walking up from the dig house, as Edie and I did so long ago, but by driving up to the car park. Still, it's a stroll through the gates of the fortifications and into the massive fortress itself.

Akrokorinthos is a kids' paradise -- no guards to tell you "no," no railings, just a massive plateau covered with snow, rocks, and ruins. We strolled up the hillside, through the gates with their doorways and moats (yes, moats), and up to the first level area, whose chief feature is the minaret of vanished mosque -- you can climb to the top on winding, slippery stairsin pitch-blackness, to emerge at the top playing muzzein to an empty citadel, Ottoman troops long since dead and gone.

From the top of the citadel you get an extraordinary view, standing on the ruins of a temple of Aphrodite (chief goddess of Korinthos) to whom, some ancient sources tell us, were dedicated sacred prostitutes and human sacrifices (at least, in the deep, dark past). We saw neither on our visit -- only endless vistas of water and mountain, under a setting Greek sun.

Next day at Nauplio, we set off for the usual sites -- Lerna, with its great mud-brick building, and Mycenae. The kids loved Mycenae -- Alison and Caroline had both agreed that their cousins had to see that -- if only because this time we remembered flashlights ("torches" to their friends at Byron College) so that we could go all the way down the cistern. (Back to the womb!) Followed, of course, by another delicious Greek lunch at a taverna just down the road.

Our attempt later that afternoon to present ourselves to Hera, the goddess of the Argolid, was met with disaster -- a locked gate, the remains of her sanctuary barely visible beyond a stand of olives. Instead we wound through the redolent groves of olives and oranges on narrow roads to Dendra, a little village nestled up against the hills, to look at the burials of horses. The cemetery is Mycenaean, with some early tholos-tombs and what-not. The horse burials are the main attraction, for they are buried alone, not with a person, and it's not clear whether they were sacrificed or simply died. But here too the gods were not with us (perhaps Hera exacted her revenge?), for the Archaeological Service had sealed up the tombs with heavy plastic, and we could do no more than glimpse the bones.

We stopped at the church at Agia Triadha that had so impressed me last time -- Edie seemed to like it a lot too. But the kids I think found the sheep quietly dining in a nearby yard more enthralling.

The next day we spent mostly in Nafplio. Ellen and I took the kids on a long walk up the heights of the Palamidi, the great fortress that overlooks the town. last time we had to turn back at a great chasm -- partly quarried out for building stone for the fort -- but this time we went farther, over walls, into the great open spaces of the fort. Recent as it is, it's nevertheless ruinous (captain's headquarters something of an exception) and has a strangely incomplete feeling, for there are few remains inside of buildings. One supposes that, full of soldiers, it presented still the same appearance of craggy rock, disorderly vegetation, messy walls. Edie and John chose instead to hang out a kapheneion; when we came down, lunch.

Then it was time to head out, for Epidauros, our last site before the return to Athens. On the way we almost zipped past the famous little Mycenaean bridge, but Edie yelled out in time, and we pulled the big van off the road to have a look. There's something really quite exciting about standing on a bridge built 3500 years ago, which still serves the function for which it was designed -- to suspend you above a river, however dry.

And then, Epidauros. It's one of those classic Greek sites -- not in the sense of "dating to between 500 and 323 BCE" but in the sense that it defines ancient Greece. So we dutifully trudged up to the top of the steps, listened as folks whispered in the orchestra, marveled at the preservation. We were virtually the only people there. The kids put the orchestra to a use which its designers did not anticipate but for which it is eminently suited -- bullfighting.

No account of this trip would be complete without reporting on our most important discovery. For days in Athens, Ellen had been asking, "Where are the fire stations?" And it's true -- they're just not very apparent; in fact, I couldn't take you to an Athenian fire station if my life depended on it. Ellen's skepticism grew to the point where she refused to believe they existed at all. Then, coming down from Palamidi and making our way to the kapheneion for lunch, what should we spot on the big main street but a big old fire station, with trucks parked outside and everything.

January 18, 2004

To return to the Table of Contents of the Athenian Diary, click here.