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| Epidaurus and Mycenae |
We were excited to have a slightly later start and enjoyed a little more sleep, another scrumptious breakfast overlooking the acropolis, and were in the lobby by nine ready to check out more of Greece. We were promptly greeted by our guide Vassi who was warm, but very down to business/no-nonsense in her mannerisms and we soon were assured that she was not going to stop talking until we were almost back to Athens. We learned lots from her, enjoyed her stories, were sometimes lost by her side tangents, and occasionally were able to interrupt to ask questions, but really, she was an incredible wealth of information.
There are a list of tidbits that don’t necessarily go with anything else that we picked up on the Sounion tour, or on this tour to Mycenae.
Here’s a few things we’ve learned:
When someone on our Sounion tour asked about the current state of the Greek economy, this is what we learned:
-The average salary in Greece used to be 800€ a month, now it is 500€ a month.
-1 in 3 people can’t pay their bills
-1 in 10 can’t feed themselves. The gov’t is currently providing assistance, but is beginning to struggle to meet everyone’s needs.
-for a ton of fuel to heat your home, which in the winter lasts only a month, it costs 700€, so most people bundle up and do without. Lucky families sometimes use their heat 2 or so hours a day.
I also found it interesting that when our guide (for the Mycenae tour) mentioned countries like Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, FYROM, etc, she referred to them as the “ex-Yugoslavian democracies”
-During the era of Venetian dominance, which lasted over 800 years, there were times of intense Venetian-Ottoman conlifcts over Mediterranean dominance. The Ottomans hired Algerian and Tunisian pirates to sink Venetian ships, but the Venetians usually won because they hired mercenaries and boasted a fleet of over 1,000. As the Venetians won each major conflict, they steadily gained Greek isles from the Ottoman Turks, including the Cyclades and Crete. Crete and Venice have an extremely good relationship and currently Cretien ships are the only foreign ships allowed to traverse the Grand Canal of Venice.
-Pre-World War II, Athens was a city of only 150,000. Since then, it has become a city of millions. Greece is a country that has never stopped receiving refugees – it is possible that there are over 2 million refugees in Greece. One of the predominant refugee ethnicities were Albanians.
-Half of Greece’s population lives in Athens.
-85% of Greece is mountains
-In size, Greece Is slightly bigger than Alabama
Okay…back to the trip
During our drive we passed many interesting sights and stopped at several significant places.
We passed the islands and Strait of Salamis (which encloses the Bay of Eleusis, goddess of Agriculture).
Which is the site where the Athenians defeated Xerxes (the Persians beat the Spartans and then headed for Athens, the Strait of Salamis is where the Athenians defeated them using battering rams and fire). So cool!
We stopped at the Corinth Canal – which is an impressive, incredibly narrow, man-made canal that connects the Ionian and Aegean Sea. There’s even stoplights to manage the traffic.
Then we were onto Epidaurus which is famous for two key things – the medical center and the theatre. The theatre of Epidaurus is the last intact Greek theatre in the world and is has incredible acoustics. We sat at the top row and were able to hear our guide drop coins, light a match, and shred paper from the center of stage hundreds of feet below – it was amazing! The theatre also had beautifully worn marble seats and a fantastic view of the mountains. Our guide claimed that for the Greek people, by attending a play, you could learn more about life and psychology and human nature in a few hours than you could in several years of formal education.
Epidaurus also was a medical center that had many hospitals and doctors, the most famous of which was? You guessed it Hippocrates. The Greeks developed two main cures for their patients – snake venom and herbal mixtures – hence the medical symbol of a snake wrapped around a chalice (from which you would take your herbs. People traveled from all over to seek cures from the doctors of Epidaurus and would often wait several days for treatment. When diagnosed, you would be given a specific diet, exercise regimen and “potion” (medicine). They even kept a snake house to be able to administer medicine when necessary.
We also learned that when the Roman’s made Christianity the official religion of the empire, while the Greeks did convert, there were three locations that they chose to maintain. Not for pagan purposes, but because they found them to be three centers that were very precious for other reasons. Delphi was the source of wisdom, Epidaurus was the site of medicine and healing, and Olympia held the Olympics every four year united the Greek people for healthy competition. An especially harsh Roman emperor was outraged that the Greeks were still worshipping pagan locations and ordered Epidaurus to be utterly destroyed, so unfortunately there is not much left of the snake hut, hospitals, or other monuments.
From Epidaurus we charged onto Mycenae to visit the civilization of the earliest mainland Greeks – the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War! I have to say…while the Mycenaean city was smaller than I anticipated…it was pretty spectacular. I think Emily and Daniel really just saw it as a pile of rocks, but I found it truly enchanting. Not only did you have the impressive massive rocks that they believe were brought in from “Cyclops quarry,” but there was also the stunning Lion’s Gate – which is a carving that predates any other Greek sculpture by 700 years! And the Lion’s Gate carving is beautiful! Smooth, distinctive, realistic, absolutely beautiful! As we climbed up through the citadel in a spiral, it was fun to envision the walls of the homes rising up and creating a the different rooms of the fortress and to look beyond the citadel at the foundational walls of people’s homes. I should also mention that the scenary was gorgeous! There was even a set of hills that you could look at, knowing the Spartans had lived 60 kilometers over that hill. I finally managed to lag behind enough that I was able to stand at the top by myself, soaking in the view, sensing the history, and delighting in the fact that I could hear birds chirping. And then, on one of the upper levels, was the most picturesque of all the sites – a lone olive tree timelessly growing in the shadow of a majestic mountain peak.
I finally caught up with everyone and found Daniel in the fortress area. When I asked where everyone else was, he pointed to a big, cavernous black hole. ? We headed in to find them and were almost instantly thrown into complete darkness. I soon found myself inching my way into the depths of a cave, hands feeling the smooth, Mycenaean-created-water-proof-stucco-walls (Pam and Gary wanted to know why this wasn’t the type used to do their house the *first* time), toes cautiously outstretched, feeling for each step. They finally realized we were there and rounded the corner with a flashlight – and showed us a cistern, the Mycenaeans had created. After visiting the ruins, we headed to the famous tomb of Agamemnon, which was also amazingly sophisticated. The inside is a giant, 14 meter beehive, stone made tomb with an adjoining, smaller stone conic tomb that contained the actual graves. Daniel’s favorite part – it had a tremendous echo…and we embarrassed ourselves greatly playing with our echo capabilities.
After all of this we had lunch at a local restaurant, enjoyed some of the best oranges any of us have ever had in our lives – freshly picked from the orange groves that are all over, and headed back to Athens. We spent our evening walking up to a neighborhood called Psiri and eating in a more modern, hip, part of Athens for dinner. We ended our day laughing through the photos we had taken and headed to bed early to rest up before heading out for Cairo!
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