Assorted photos from the Peloponnese

These don't have much of an overall theme - I just thought I'd share them here.



This is Mistras - a Byzantine city/fortress near Sparta, on the slopes of Mt. Taygetos. It has a strong fortress on top (barely visible). The large building is a convent. There are several 13th and 14th century churches on the site.








This is one of the frescoes inside one of these Byzantine churches. The scene is the raising of Lazarus, especially notable because the figure on the left is covering his nose. Stinky Lazarus.
















This is Nafplion - modern Greece's first capital for a year until it was moved to Athens. It's a charming seaside town with an imposing Venetian fortress. The climb up is over 1000 steps - a lot for a hot day. This photo was taken about 15 minutes before an enormous thunderstorm hit.









When the storm hit, we took refuge inside the ruins. These stairs descended into a great room filled with rubble (and garbage). The drop-off to my right was about 30 feet. Don't slip.
















This is the theater at Epidauros, a major healing sanctuary in ancient times. We went to a play here - a version of Aeschylus' Persians. The acoustics are amazing - I was on the second-to-top row and could hear the actors breathing after a vigorous scene, but I didn't really follow the action. I've read the play, but I'm guessing this version (in modern Greek) took a few liberties with the text.






Homer refers to Pylos as "Sandy Pylos." The lagoon to the far right is modern. The bay in the center is called "ox-belly bay." Sandy Pylos is great.











I snapped this photo from my hotel room in New Pylos. In the background is the island of Sphacteria, where the Athenians captured over 200 Spartan soldiers in 425 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. Everyone was surprised that the Spartans surrendered. This was a huge disaster for the Spartans - so many men were captured that they were willing to end the war permanently. Although an uneasy truce was concluded, and the captured Spartans released, war broke out again a few years later - which the Spartans eventually won with help from the Persians. (There's no evidence that the Spartans who surrendered were castigated or ostracized; since there were so few Spartan citizen-warriors, perhaps Sparta recognized that surrender was the best option for the city's continued viability.)





Good times in sandy Pylos.













The temple of Apollo at Bassae. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by steep mountains, it has survived better than any other temple in Greece. So, the Greeks erected a 'temporary' tent in 1985 to protect it. In 2000 years, archaeologists will excavate this area and have animated discussions about why the 'car-people' re-built the temple with a tent . . . .

Nothing against my good buddy bonezman, but archaeologists are funny creatures. Like all of us, they tend to get a little caught up in their worlds. I sometimes have to chuckle when I hear sentences like, "Fortunately, the destruction was violent, sudden, and complete, allowing us to excavate lots of material goods and bones." -- uh, fortunate for you, perhaps. . . . or "Unfortunately, later people seem to have re-built on top of the ruins." -- yeah, too bad these people put their lives back together.

To each his (or her) own, I suppose, but sometimes it's a challenge for me to find overall meaning in some of these excavations. Although it's important to gather data, data by itself is useless unless it's interpreted. I get a lot of strage looks from the site archaeologists when I ask questions like, "Who do we think paid for the construction of this temple?" or "Why did this site become so important and the neighboring one did not?" They're much more comfortable explaining how far apart each column was and how many square feet the precinct measured in phase 3B.

To be fair, not all the scholars I've heard from are like this, but many are. It's fine, as long as they publish their findings so others can do the interpretations. The only problem is, many of them are very territorial about the findings, keeping them secret and taking decades to publish what they unearth - as if the broken trinkets from antiquity somehow 'belonged' to them.

That cross belongs to Coronado!

One site that's doing a good job of counteracting this is Nemea, under the supervision of Stephen Miller and Kim Shelton from UC -Berkeley. They publish, they invite the public, they have revived the Nemean Games, they allow anyone to photograph or see anything. They're all about dissemination. It was a nice change of pace.

---End of Tirade---



The Frankish fortress at Chlemoutsi


The Shire still stands.