Yay!! To Greece!!

Greetings:

Mitesh and I headed out on our Greek trip a few weeks ago. A lot of cool things. Immediately one of the coolest was renting a car in Vlora for the trip south to Sarande to catch the ferry to Corfu. 

Yeah, a car! Well, it had been almost a year and a half, but hey, like riding a bike. It was great. This was my first real trip exploring a bit of Albania; I had spent most of my PC time in my site except for breaks to Tirana meetings and a couple of conferences and relocating to Vlora last spring. So this was my first excursion of any measure outside of Vlora and Elbasan (ahh, Elbasan…).

It was nice to pull off the road and inspect, instead of things whizzing by on a bus or furgon. We passed this bee-keeper and I pulled around for a closer look. Philandro’s family has lived on this hillside, along with the bees, for generations. Of course he and I spoke mostly with the benefit of my expert shqip sign-language and – with Mitesh’s help – I told him my brother Daniel, in addition to having a buffalo ranch (!), was also a bee-keeper. Well, Phil wouldn’t let me pay for the honey, “This is a gift to the brother of a good man! Tell your brother the world needs bees and bee-keepers!” Quite the interesting visit.  

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We met up with one of my favorite Peace Corps Volunteers in Himare. Because the car was such a novelty we immediately took off to a beach Diane was rarely able to visit. And the beach attendants were so glad to see Diane again that they comped me, the old guy, the typical 500 leke ($4) for the chair.

I think I just told the guy to hurry up because my muscles were cramping!

The next evening we connected with another PCV for a dinner in Ksamil. We met Catherine’s boyfriend, Joni, and had another great meal with some great conversation.

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We took one day to do some more exploring. One of the spots was this incredibly preserved settlement in Butrint – Buthrotum; in succession: Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, and Ottomans. What an amazing place. Virgil wrote that Aeneas stopped here on his way to Rome after the Trojan War. It’s set on a peninsula off the straits between Albania and Corfu – a strategic spot for trade and defense.

Mitesh still won't tell me how he got the overhead.

Basilica and Baptistry

Theater and ramparts

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We dropped off the SUV the next morning and hopped the Corfu ferry.

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As soon as we hit the port we grabbed cheeseburgers and fries at an outdoor and lined up – wait for it – for a manicure-pedicure! I may have mentioned that years ago my youngest, Abby, has expressed her disgust at the shape of my toenails (I know, disgusting even to bring it up). I explained to her that my toenails were always difficult to get to on my own and she made me promise to have the experts take care of it. Been pretty good at this – in the states of course, and then a little shop across from my condo during my time in Guatemala. In Elbasan one of the locals pointed me in the right direction. But when I moved to Vlora, you would think this cosmetic request was so massively inappropriate that now when I walk down the boulevard to school I make sure I walk on the opposite side of the street of the little shop! Hmmm….

It was a thirty euro cab to the hotel, away from old town on the opposite side of the island. Nelson had booked the hotel – and then unfortunately had to cancel his getaway because of business requirements (bummer, the demands of capitalism). Well, the place was a bit like an on-going spring break. Mitesh and I kept to the beach and the pool (we passed on the toga party and the booze cruise) – by the second full day we needed a break from the kids and took off for some exploring. We didn’t join in the populated “ATV Safari” but headed south on our own.

And for inquiring minds, Mitesh always wore his helmet!

ΠΕΡΙΑΛΛΟΝΤΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΣ & ΦΙΛΟΑΔΑΣΙΚΟΣ ΣΞΤΑΥΡΩΜΕΝΟΥ 2006

The ATVs were perfect and cheap – 20 euros for a full day. Just amazing country and equally amazing small Greek villages – beautiful. Since the old city was a bit of a trip I’ll have to check that out on another visit – looking forward to it. On our way back to the hotel we made a side-trip to the beach and a nice cooling-off. 

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The flight from Corfu to Athens was about an hour – about enough time to buckle and unbuckle. Athens! We hopped a train – almost as good as the ones in Amsterdam – and navigated our exchanges to the Acropolis station.

Offices - all over!

The Hera Hotel was outstanding – close to everything we wanted to see. Plus, it had an office right next door! We explored the area, market places, outdoor eateries, walked around the Acropolis and crashed for the night. I needed to get some “grown-up” shorts – been wearing nothing but cargoes for ten years (!) and had zip luck finding anything in Albania – everything too small, too tight. We scored! And a bonus…a top-flight Brooks Brothers umbrella!! I destroyed the one I brought from the states when I promptly sat on the damn thing. Albanian umbrellas are cheap (less than five bucks), but, well…they’re cheap.

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Ahh, the Acropolis and the Parthenon. I’d been trying to get over to Greece ever since my first university classes in ancient Greek some twenty years ago. Alas, over the years my usual first stop had been Rome, often with the firm intent of a Rome-Athens hop. But no…Rome was too much a distraction (plus my Latin – and by extension my Italian – was a hell of a lot better). So, this trip to Athens has been in the making for quite some time.

OK. A bit of a history lesson here – and I know many of you are up to speed on this, so just a refresher. After the second Persian invasion (480 BC – the first invasion ten years before), Sparta made a half-hearted attempt to expand its influence in the Aegean. Well, the Spartans were pretty much militaristic home-bodies – colonization and trade not their thing. Athens stepped into the vacuum and created and expanded the Delian League – sounding like a collaborative venture but in the end another name for the Athenian Empire. OK. Getting off on a tangent which I’ll pick up on another blog post – maybe next year.

Anyway, with no end to the trade revenues, Athens had plenty of money for public works. Pericles (495-429 BC), the most influential and prominent statesman of this Golden Age, turned his attention to a very ambitious building project – the Parthenon. Xerxes, the Great King, destroyed the original temple in 480, built after the first Persian defeat at Marathon in 490. There was some debate whether to leave the desolation intact as a memorial. Pericles won out, and the new Parthenon was completed in less than ten years (447-438 – remember, we’re BC, so counting backwards). After another six years (to 432) the artwork was finished. The Parthenon existed relatively intact for 2100 years until 1687. The Turks were using the building to store ammunition and during a Venetian bombardment a direct shot blew it to hell. BAM.

The mystery/miracle of the architecture is beyond whatever – a massive optical illusion and no straight lines on the whole thing, right? Equally amazing, I think, is the restoration project which has been going on for the last thirty years – so far, $90M. In the course of my grad work I’d done some reading on the Parthenon – but one thing that struck me regarding the modern restoration was the genius in pulling this thing together. If there was a genius behind the work, it’s probably Manolis Korres. I think this is the guy, but not positive. I had a long conversation with one of the open-air cafe owners and he couldn’t remember the guy’s name either – but we both remembered he was able to walk around the rubble and by sight sort the 70,000 odd pieces of this massive three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

“Now, Mitesh, behind me is the Erechtheum, but first let me give you the scoop on these rock piles.”

This is a great shot of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in the second century AD. Now it's used for concerts: Maria Callas, Frank Sinatra, Pavoratti, Yanni (seriously?) and Elton John (yes!). 

What’s also nice about this pic is the view of course; way in the background is Piraeus on the Straits of Salamis – where the Greeks defeated the Persian navy in 480 BC – a major turning point in world history. (More on this a little further down when we get to the Ancient Agora Museum.) 

Most of the supporting scaffold came off about a half-dozen years ago and someone told me the completion is pegged in another half-dozen years – we’ll see. So much of the artwork has been pillaged, or destroyed in the process (“elgined” is a new verb Mitesh came up with – named after one of the great pillagers; a battle for recovery still going on today). Anyway, spend some time on the web – a big moment to finally get there.

View from the Hera Hotel

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The Acropolis Museum was just built about six years ago and they did a hell of a job. Pretty impressive. They are doing their best to preserve the unearthed bits and pieces, everything that had not already been “elgined” by the west. Many of the pieces are simply that, pieces - with added marble to fill in the blanks.

Note the added, newer marble to the Acroterion sculpture on the left.

The museum was interesting enough to offer some sense of what had been there; I especially liked the center-piece of the museum - the walk-around rendition of the famous Parthenon Frieze - a high relief sculpture which is basically a Panathenic slide-show illustrating the city's mythological founding and contemporary city life. These side-by-side images of the exhibit and Alma-Tadema's 1868 "Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends" give you a sense of the current condition and the imagined finished product - I'm thinking the painting may have given some inspiration to the museum's execution of the work.

Most of the surviving frieze pieces (480 feet out of 524) are in the British Museum ("elgined"). But what was still intact (and still in Athens) was impressive - it would have been nice to have a "Phidias" next to us explaining the work; as of yet the museum hasn't introduced any audio-guides.

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We spent our last full day in Athens checking out the Ancient Agora and the Roman Agora. In Rome it would be called a forum, but the same thing – markets, sellers, buyers and traders, government offices and courts, and importantly the place where assemblies of state were held.

The Ancient Agora was something I was looking forward to. Fortunately, in the 1950s John D. Rockefeller II put up a ton of money into preserving the site, including an impressive museum. So now preserved is some sense of what it was to walk where the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Pericles taught, argued, and spoke.

Giving a so-so imitation of Aristotle and Plato

The Ancient Agora Museum was OK. The collection was a bit sparse, limited to artifacts uncovered in the excavation of the site – certainly much had already been “elgined.” But I saw here something I thought I would never have the chance to see in person. I’ve seen these pictures in countless history books and I noticed most of the people in the museum just passed by this display – and then gathered around when Mitesh started taking pictures and I, of course (!), started to explain the significance.

You’re familiar with ostracism, right? Well it was an element of Athenian democracy going back to Cleisthenes, “the father of democracy,” when he reformed the ancient city constitution in the last years of the 6th century BC. He greatly reduced the power of the nobility and increased the power of the citizen assembly which was held in – right! – the agora.

Ostracism comes from the Greek όστρακο – which literally means “potsherd,” or a piece of pottery; the Athenians had plenty of broken pots. Next to the display was a pretty good description of the procedure:

“Ostracism was a unique type of voting intended as a means of protecting the city against aspirants to despotic power. The result of the ostracism vote was valid only if there was a quorum of 6000 present. Each voter scratched or painted on a potsherd the name of the man he thought most undesirable. The 'candidate' with the greatest number of votes against him was obliged to withdraw from Athens for ten years. Ostracism was decreed by Kleisthenes and was used through most of the 5th cent. B.C. In many cases it came to be used as a tactical manoeuvre between rival politicians.” 

So, back to the shards. Note that the name on all of these shards is Θεμιστόκλης –  Themistocles. He most certainly fought at Marathon during the first Persian invasion of 490 BC as one of the ten Athenian strategoi, or generals. Over the next years he advocated a strong Athenian navy in preparation for the coming second invasion; and in the which the Greek coalition navy defeated the Persians in the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Within a half-dozen years or so after directing this victory, Themistocles was ostracized from Athens. He had made a lot of political enemies and they were evidently organized. These shards were excavated from a bottom of a well in the agora – all in the same handwriting, all on the same type of pottery.

I’ve been asked many times why I decided to go back to school and study history. Well, obviously it’s interesting. After a while I answered “To get the jokes”: the improbable ironies in the course of history are interesting and amusing. I’m laughing now because ostracism, first implemented in the Athenian democracy 2500 hundred years ago, is still alive and well in today's Peace Corps. (Doing my best to stay busy – but never far from my thoughts. I’m sure you get this.)

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Marathon, Thermopylae, Thebes (even the National Archeological Museum!!)…planned, but not enough time. Bummer. So, a postponed trip with pics and historical tidbits on the Greco-Persian Wars for another post. Instead I headed out to Mykonos. Now at this point in the trip Nelson and I were out on our own and Mitesh was going to do a couple of days exploring and head back to Albania. I wanted to see Mykonos but it was too late for Mitesh to get Peace Corps permission for the side trip. Bummer. We spent our last day together in Athens and then I took the train down to the Piraeus for the ferry to Mykonos. Mitesh on his way back to his PC site in Vlora.

I had time to explore a bit of Piraeus:

The closest to apple pie in forever

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The Aegean is about the deepest blue I’ve ever seen and the trip was around five hours. 

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The hotel on Ornos Beach was very pleasant with great rooms, great food and a nice break from all the walking around.

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that many Albanians work in Greece, legally or not. I ran into them all the time: taxi driver in Athens, shuttle driver in Mykonos, and half the staff on Mykonos was from Albania. One of my servers was from Vlora! They all spoke English pretty well. One young lady was from Elbasan and she was visiting her sister, whose husband was my driver and she recognized me! Oltiana introduced herself and let me know she was a student at Nikola Koperniku School during my teaching there; she had just graduated and was set to start the med-tech program at Aleksander Xhuvani University in the fall. She also remembered me from my Coffee House office (!) and when she went back home in a week she said she’d stop by and give my regards. Albanians…all over the place.

I was only on the island for two nights and during the afternoon of the full day I explored the small town of Platis – the home of some famous windmills – Mykonos is aptly nicknamed “The Island of the Winds.”

The next day back on the ferry to the mainland.

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One more night at the Hera and for the experience, I returned to Albania by bus – a twelve hour overnight from Athens to Vlora. Feel the pain – but only about thirty euros, which worked well for an impoverished school teacher. I crossed the Isthmus, saw the Corinth Canal (late 19th century) and my fellow travelers and I made our way across on the Peloponnesian side of the Gulf of Corinth.  

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The whole trip was fun, but a bit rushed and hectic (Mitesh restricted with the Peace Corps out-of-site regs). There is a lot more of Greece I want to see, and I think a lot more pleasant if I spring for a car before the next trip. Tourism has fallen dramatically in the last few years because of the political and economic unrest in the country. Not surprising, though, I found the people there quite pleasant and very interesting. I got the feeling they were happy we made the effort. 

We missed you, Nelson, maybe next time. Hope you like the pics – finally.

My best to all of you guys. XO