As we left Athens this morning for the Peloponnesian peninsula, I realized that the Battle of Salamis may serve as a metaphor for both the past and the future of Greece. The past is easier to discuss. It’s much of what we’ve seen. Today, for example, we were on our way to visit two wondrous ruins of the ancient world when our guide mentioned that on the coast we were passing Salamis, where in 490 BC Greek sailors defeated the Persians, one of the telling battles that led to the ascendancy of Athens and the building of the world class Acropolis. We were on our way to two sites, one nearly 1000 years earlier than the Acropolis, reflecting the civilization of the Mycenae period,, the other, a third century theater, paired with Greek medicine, that today has acoustics and seating for 14,000 that still draw entertainment from performances of Aeschaelus to symphony orchestras, with acoustics at the top as clear as at the bottom—and no electronic magnification.
The trip took us about 100 miles from Athens, into the Peloponnese, an area that rivaled Athens, and ultimately, in the Peloponnesian Wars (read your Thucydidies, considered one of the early historians), across the canal—considered by Alexander the Great, begun by Nero, completed in the 1890s—that cuts through the isthmus of Corinth, saving shippers the trek around the peninsula.
The theater is stunning, set in pines in the mountains, but its origins were to celebrate the god of healing, Asclepius. The Greeks had developed medicinal practices, ultimately ordered by Hippocrates (in the Hippocratic Oath that doctors still take today), that included therapies borrowed from Egypt, and home grown therapies such as shock treatments (putting people in with snakes)! I’ve seen a similar complex in Pergamon, which apparently rivaled Epidavros, but today, what’s left at Epidavros is the theater.
We then went to Mycenae, which rekindled memories of Homer and the Trojan War, the Illiad and the Odysee, and the first humanities course I took in college. Mycenae, located by the famous German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, was supposedly the home of Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces during the Trojan War, which was fought to reclaim Helen from Paris of Troy, who had kidnapped her. Once considered pure fiction the current thinking is that Agamemnon was a real king, but the “mask of Agamemnon,” one of the most famous pieces in the National Archeological Museum (did I tell you they close all museums save the Acropolis museum at 3 pm to save money) is about 300 years off. We saw the citadel on the acropolis, distinguished by a double lion gate, and the beehive shaped tomb where Schliemann found the mask. We also saw ruins of many other citadels, proving that Greece had both civil wars (the Peloponnesian War marked the end of the ascendancy of Athens) and wars with the Persians (and later others, including the Turks, who conquered the country shortly after the fall of Constantinople, and the Venetians, among others.
Back to the Salamis example I started with. As we passed the port there, our guide pointed out what might be the future of Greece: Russians and Chinese had each leased a section of the port, which they were developing for export and import into the Southeastern states of the European Union, which after July 1, will include Croatia. In fact our guide was hoping for Chinese tourists to cause the industry to rebound. Tourism, she pointed out, is down.
Hard to tell tonight as we had dinner in a traditional tavern, complete with folk dancing, in the shadow of the Acropolis.
Early tomorrow we depart for Istanbul. Hope you’re enjoying the memorial day weekend