Journal

Post 7 of 7

Ultimately, despite the disruption – and ultimately truncation – of the trip, we had a fantastic time. Our guides – Jeremy Paterson, George Terezakis and Bianca de Klein – were outstanding, constantly adapting in real time to the developing coronavirus crisis. We benefitted hugely from their knowledge both of the history of Ancient Greece and their intimate connections with today’s Greece.

Doors were opened that otherwise have been closed. And the Travel Editions team back in the UK sorted out our flights back to a London increasingly teetering on the edge of lock-down. We owe them all a huge debt of gratitude.

We also enjoyed ongoing conversations with a number of the other members of the group, though I’m very far from being a group person. On the ground, I’m typically far ahead, far behind or flanking any group. Scouting, I suppose. That’s how I see things that others miss, like the spray of bee-eaters launching almost from beneath my feet in the ruins of Dura Europa, Syria, and gliding down over the Euphrates.

Can’t wait to go to Greece again, including places we didn’t get to like Mystras and Sparta. But, first, notes on a few final stops we made along the way.

First, Mycenae. I think I first came across the Mycenians in my teens, through their role in the Trojan War. No way were we getting inside the fabled walls on this trip, with COVID-19 stalking the land, but we did have a wonderful prowl around the battlecruiser-shaped hulk of the ruined citadel, with a powerful wind thumping all around – and a fitful sun alternately shadowing and spotlighting the battlecruiser.

Post 6 of 7

Loved our visit to Nafplio’s (or, as we knew it, Nauplion’s) Palamidi fortress 50 years ago, back in 1970. At the time, Elaine, Rex and I sat for ages in an underground cistern, watching reflected sunlight from a high window scattering across the walls.

A natural form of the light shows in fashion at the time at places like the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden, which we haunted to see bands like The Byrds, Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and Marc Bolan’s Tyranosaurus Rex. Those were the days, my friend.

And here are some images from our return visit, when the town was gradually closing in on itself, because of COVID-19.

Altogether, we were four nights at the Amalia Hotel outside Nafplio, a great base for exploring the city and region. But very few other people were staying – and on the day we left to fly back early to the UK, they closed the hotel entirely.

Lovely to hear frogs in the landscape around the hotel – and to see bats flitting across the evening sky.

One less romantic memory surfaced, however, when George Terezakis, our Greek guide, pointed out the local open prison as we drove by. Near the Mycenian ruin of Tiryns.

That did it. We recalled pulling our Landrover off the road nearby back in 1970. Elaine and I were sleeping in the back of the vehicle, while the others slept around about in tents.

In the morning Elaine woke up from dream that someone was sawing off her feet, which protruded onto the Landrover’s tailgate. Lifting the tarpaulin backflap, she saw a man standing outside, with an axe.

We began talking to him, in French, I think. Turned out he was from the nearby open prison. We asked why he had been imprisoned. He said he had killed his wife’s lover. With an axe. Otherwise, a perfectly charming man.

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.