Journal

Post 5 of 7

Arriving at the fence of the Romans centre of Ancient Corinth, I was particularly interested to look across to the ruin where (St.) Paul was invigilated. Here he had worked as a tentmaker, before he gave up trying to pitch Christianity to the Jews and decided, instead, to focus in future on the gentiles. A truly momentous moment in world history.

But I confess that throughout I cast a constantly covetous eye at the massive, castle-crowned mountain beyond the site. Acrocorinth. Before arriving, I hadn’t even realised it existed, but now I wanted to get as close to it as possible.

Shortly afterwards, we were wending our way up and up, until we were right in front of the gates. What an extraordinary defensive system.

One name strongly associated with Acrocorinth is Leo Sgouros. A profoundly unpleasant and violent man, aggro incarnate. He would lead a brave five year resistance to the Franks, who laid siege to the acropolis. In the end, it is said, he committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs on his horse.

Apparently the people who find this story hardest to bear are the British. They feel sorry for the horse.

Post 4 of 7

Not quite the last person I expected to bump into in Greece, but close to it, was Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. But there he was standing inside the ramparts in Nafpaktos, in bronze effigy. Waving.

Then I recalled reading decades ago that he took part in the Battle of Lepanto, just offshore from Nafpaktos (formerly known as Lepanto) – receiving three gunshot wounds for his trouble.

He would later quip that, “The loss of my left arm is for the greater glory of my right.” The right arm that, in short, would write what is reputed to be the first novel in European fiction.

The Christian coalition that won the Battle of Lepanto had been promoted by Pope Pius V to rescue the Venetian colony of Famagusta on Cyprus, where I spent happy years in the 1950s. This was after Nicosia and other Venetian possessions in Cyprus had fallen to the Ottomans in 1570.

As Wikipedia notes: “The Venetians had surrendered after being reassured that they could leave Cyprus freely. However, the Ottoman commander, Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had lost some 50,000 men in the siege, broke his word, imprisoning the Venetians.”

Then, as I remember being horrified to learn while at school in the 1960s, Marco Antonio Bragadin was flayed alive and his corpse hung on Mustafa’s galley, together with the heads of three other Venetian commanders.

So you could safely say Lepanto was something of a grudge match. And that other statue that the statue of Cervantes appears to be waving at in Nafpaktos is of Giorgos Anemogiannis, who also came to a sticky end at the hands of the Ottomans.

Post 3 of 7

On the slopes of Mount Helicon today, we visited the monastery of Hosios Loukas. Charming. Indeed, a vision of heaven on earth, or at least of heaven as seen in the past by some of those then on Earth.

By way of a stupefying contrast, on the way across we stopped off for a coffee in Distomo, the site of an horrendous massacre by Waffen-SS troops in June, 1944. Truly a vision of hell on earth. Some further background here.

Even if these events happened five years before I was born, it’s not hard to see why Greece’s relationship with Germany remains an often troubled one to this day.

Later, as our small group headed towards the Peloponnese, some of us were busily monitoring what looks set to be one of the biggest shocks to the global economy since WW2, the coronavirus outbreak now ripping into Italy – and set to turn Europe into its new incubator and transmission hub.

It’s all-too-tempting to fall back on a Manichean view of this world of ours, with an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil. But such terms, as a certain U.S. President demonstrated with his “axis of evil” ideology, are all-too-easy to pervert.

Post 2 of 7.

Finally made it to Delphi, 50 years after we arrived to find the site closed – as explained in a previous post. The site was simply humming with bees this time, though the sight of pine processionary moth cocoons in some of the trees was distressing. The museum closed before we could get to it – and not too long afterwards the site as a whole was closed. But we had moved on by then.

A truly wonderful visit, with relatively few other people visiting such sights as the temples of Athena Pronaia and, higher up, of Apollo. A fuller account of the site’s history can be found here. One bit of the recent story that Jeremy (Paterson) challenged was the idea that gases from a chasm under the site had helped induce a state of trance in the priestesses. I confess, though, that I still find the explanation seductive – even if many shamans can get there unassisted.

As we travel, with a fair number of books in our baggage train, I have been reading A Rising Man, by Abil Mukherjee. A wonderfully engaging portrait of Calcutta back in 1919, just after WWI, with a simmering independence movement that would take another 30 years to come to blood-spattered fruition.

And I find myself constantly wondering what it is about today’s world, apart from COVID-19, the gathering climate emergency and the exponential undermining of the natural world, that we ought to be paying more attention to as clues to the future in the present?

Post 1 of 7

In 1970, in my father’s Landrover (see below), on a month-long journey en route for a month on Skiathos, six university friends (Rex, Ian, Martin, Jan, Elaine and I) arrived at the gates of Delphi, to find the site closed. Ever since I have longed to try again.

Now, 50 years later, Elaine and I finally made it, courtesy of a ‘The Glory That Was Greece’ tour organised by Travel Editions, led by Jeremy Paterson. The coronavirus contagion sweeping the world severely disrupted – and ultimately truncated – the trip, but the net result was glorious. Some glimpses are afforded in this short series of six posts.