Almost to Italy

March 28, 2007

Igoumenitsa, Greece

Right now I am sitting in the lobby of the ferry port, waiting until late tonight when our ferry will pull out of the harbor here and make its journey across the Mediterranean sea to Brindisi, Italy. From there we board a train until we finally make it to Reggio. I loved Greece but I cannot wait to make it to Italy, where there is more to sea and do and more different food to try!

Today has been very restful. Because we knew that the ferry was leaving late in the day and we only had one site to visit without a very long bus ride our wake up call was for 9:30—I couldn’t sleep that late so Ambrice and I ended up having breakfast and then grocery shopping, wandering around the town back toward the old Byzantine fortress. Appparently Ioaninna is famous for its silver jewelry, so we stopped in at a couple of shops to examine the wares, but did not purchase anything. It felt so relaxing I almost couldn’t believe that we were still on the classics trip!

Then it was some emailing and some reading before loading the bus for the last time, and trundling our way came to the site of Dodona. This place held the oldest oracle on Greece, which centered mostly around a sacred oak tree, under which big bronze cauldrons would be placed in order to catch the falling acorns. The sound that the acorns made rattling against their bronze repositories was supposed to represent the voice of Zeus himself.

There is not much left to the sanctuary now, most of it is dominated by the ruins of a theater, added onto in a few stages, most notably by Augustus during which it was converted into an arena for beast shows by removing the few lower seats and replacing them with a retaining wall for the containment of the animals. The theater is quite big, supported by large retaining walls on the diazoma that rather resemble the walls of a fortress, and was believed to have a capacity of about 17,000 spectators, making it one of the biggest in Greece. Indeed, the back of the theater itself abuts the acropolis, and from our position down on the cavea we could clearly make out the tops of the fortification towers. Along one of the retaining walls, the crumbled remains of a third century stadium barely poked itself out of the ground, the seats built into the same hillside as the theater retained their shape and integrity, while the other, a simple earthen embankment, fell into ruin and reintegrated itself into the landscape.

There were a number of small temples and shrines on the site, all reduced in most parts to lichen covered grey stone foundations, bleak testaments to the majesty of what had run before. The sacred oak of Zeus himself stood taller than the cnclosure that once would have held it—although the oak had the advantage of being replanted where the ruins had been left to the mercy of time. At the far end of the site was a Christian basilica, a 3 aisled church with the usual rounded nave at the east end, the remains of columns and walls poking out of the grass.

But the most spectacular thing of the entire site was not in what the ancient Greeks did, for to turn the back on the theater meant to turn toward the vista of those massive jagged snowcapped mountains, surging out of the landscape and clawing toward the sky. The day was clear but the tops of them were shrouded in cloud, and the sun would hop in and out of the pockets to illuminate the green rolling landscape that abutted the mountains like a mussed rug against a chair leg. I have been consistently impressed with the landscape here, and today has been no different. Greece is beautiful in its own rugged way. We stood and stared at the landscape for a while, saying our own private goodbyes to Greece, before hitting the road.

Now we are here in the station for a good amount of hours, and have to content ourselves however we can, by reading or sleeping or walking around, typing etc. When we wake up tomorrow we will be in Italy!

Byzantine Fortresses in Ioannina

March 27, 2007

Ioannina, Greece

Today was a day of a lot of non-classical studies. We woke up early as usual and trudged down to breakfast to be greeted by Brad with a shock of orangey blond hair. Apparently last night he went grocery shopping and ran into an aisle of hair dye, much as Ambrice and I had in Athens, and decided that he was bored with his coiffure and needed to change it. Unfortunately the results look like he has an orangey yellow highlighter attached to his dead, a bad imitation of Alexander the Great. Too bad.

After that rather unexpected surprise, we loaded the bus to head out to Ioannina, a city on the western side of Greece, very close to the port so that we could see some sites the next day and then quickly board the ferry to Brindisi, and then the ferry to Reggio. But as it was, we were on a bus struggling through the high mountain passes in Greece. I read for a while, more of 1453, as the Ottoman ruler Mehmet employed any means necessary to bring the city to its knees, even mining underneath the city walls, and ferrying a large contingent of Ottoman ships over land to circumvent a huge chain placed at the neck of the harbor that protected one side of Constantinople from bombardment. The engineering and ingenuity at this man’s resources were incredible, and he mobilized men and resources better than any of the European states, still embroiled in their bitter petty infighting. But soon the motion of the bus overwhelmed me, and I fell into a sleep.

Which awoke to a world of blinding white light. It turns out that as I had slept the bus had climbed high into the mountains, and when I awoke the landscape sliding by was completely frosted, with a rolling ocean of snow piled beneath the evergreen trees, also laden with their own unique ornament. We sat and stared. Ambrice and I both got really excited, us southern girls don’t get to see snow very often, and every few minutes another one of us would awake from his or her nap to exclaim “holy crap, its snow!!.” All thought of reading and work and of Constantinople in its poor plight were put to the wind as we watched the winter wonderland unfold before our eyes.

We stopped for a midmorning break in the small town of Metsovo, the cheese capital of Greece and a place with a charming array of shops and restaurants. All of the homes are made of brick, concrete, and stone, with slate roofs, or newer terracotta ones. The streets are narrow and crazy—every turn was a random selection of the compasss, and we wandered around for a bit before discovering a cheese shop. Anne and Jess really wanted cheese, but they discovered that the shopkeeper spoke very little English. However, she did parlez vouz francaise, which both Anne and Jess spoke, so the whole discussion took place in that language as Ambrice, Scott and I looked on. They did manage to get their small wheel of cheese, which was reportedly very good, and bought a fresh loaf of bread at the local bakery and had a very nice midmorning snack on the bus. Metsovo was charming in a remote alpine sort of way, but we had to move on, so we loaded the bus again, newly laden with our cheeses and such, and headed off to the next destination.

We arrived at the outskirts of Ioannina to come upon one of the strangest museums I have ever seen—it was a wax museum depicting most of the modern history of Greece, including the expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor, the beheading of Ali Pasha, and a number of other scenes of warfare and struggle, fully outlined in lifesize wax figures. The man who created it worked entirely on his own, and built the entire building that housed the museum too, which in most instances resembles a false cave like the kind one finds in big aquariums. Except that the tanks held the wax figures of people hiding, or fighting or dying, clothed in typical traditional Greek military dress instead of the peaceful fish. It was a very odd experience, and our minimal knowledge of modern Greek history meant that most of the names went straight over our heads and the only things that we were able to apprehend was the eeriness of the entire situation.

We wandered through the maze of narrow dark halls to peer in at the illumined scenes, with Toumazou translating the Greek placards that outlined the event. We even passed a memorial to the man’s fallen bretheren in WWII—a reconstructed crematorium that creeped us out. It was like contemporary art installations gone mad. We were very happy to emerge from the twisting tunnels and into the bright air of the city.

Then we drove into Ionannina, done for the day and without a single ruin in sight. Stewart and Catherine Knepp and I were rooming together in one of the largest hotel rooms that I have seen so far on the trip, complete with almost 2 rooms and a shower with a shower curtain. We arrived at the hotel and did a brief walk of the city before realizing that at 3 pm everything was on siesta and we could not find a thing except for a fruit stand where we all bought oranges and ate them on our walk back. Then it was another chapter in 1453 for me, the fall of Constantinople itself, and all of the havoc wrecked upon the ancient city, and a nap.

I woke up and it was still early afternoon, so I decided to go running. I ventured out into the town, on the walk it had seemed like an area with a few shops and cheap restaurant, but on a whim I made a left and spotted what looked like an old tower off in the distance. Setting it as my goal I worked my way through the streets until I came up against a very old wall, punctuated at the bottom with a series of arches. This looked like the remains of a Byzantine fortress or something similar, and I ran along side it until it curved around to form a big rectangle against the shoreline. To my right I could see rows of outdoor cafes and shop lining a wide boulevard with cobblestone streets. But out over the water was the most spectacular sight of all—the tall steep mountains that we had passed through yesterday rose up out of the water in a jagged thrust and continued up to their snow covered heights. It was positively spectacular—the Rockies shoved down into the middle of some sort of lake. I put the fortress behind me and ran along the shoreline, reaching the end of the road I turned and came back until I was up to the fortress, then ran around the outside of it, watching the niches and edges of the walls surge back and forth as the mass of stone thrust out into the water. Along the waterfront were a bunch of statuary celebrating victories in war or something, I could not read the text so I had a difficult time deciphering them.

In some of the niches of the fortress were a Byzantine museum, unfortunately closed, and a few other museums, also closed, and a Byzantine bath. It was closed too—it was siesta time, so nothing was open… but I was able to look over the fence and it looked pretty cool, a maze of moss covered brick facing the lake and the mountains.

I ran on and on, surveying the view on one side and avoiding the pedestrians on the other side, until I got tired and headed home. But I don’t think the view is something I will forget easily. The snow capped mountains and the lake and the old fortress all looked like something out of a fantasy, a combination of all of the good parts of the landscape—sky, land, water, edifice, all put together in a way that was breathtaking. I regretfully headed back toward the city.

Reaching my hotel room I reported what I had found and asked if anyone wanted to return to that beautiful part of Ioannina to eat dinner that night. Many people said that they wanted to, so after showering a large group of 11 of us wandered back through my running route to reach the old stone wall, and then turned along the waterfront to walk up and down the rows of open air cafes. We walked for a while before turning in at one all glass fronted place with a friendly waiter and an extensive menu, a bit pricier than what we were used to, but containing a good amount of local and regional dishes from the Ioninna region. Sounded excellent! We pulled a bunch of the tables together and sat down, affording ourselves a great view of the mountains and water, with the spires of a minaret and the stout walls of the cathedral completing the picture.

The food was delicious, we had rolls and tzatziki, and almost all of us ordered some of the local types of food, all cooked in these small thick walled pots and served piping hot. I ordered a dish called Ali-Pasa, a type of casserole thing with pasta, potatoes, meatballs, all topped with a mild type of mozzarella cheese and tomatoes. Mmmm. The other kids ordered stuff that varied between different types of meat—Lamb and chicken, all served with the hearty potatoes and tomatoes and cheese. We were at the restaurant for probably around 2 hours, talking and eating the whole time—quite an enjoyable experience, and made even better because of the large size of the group and the variety of people. I ate with people that I had not spent a significant amount of time with in a while, and I returned to the hotel happy and full. They even served us some desserts—cake with chocolate chips, drenched in honey as all the Greek sweets seem to be.

Then it was a leisurely walk back to the hotel, some internet and Law and Order—Amrice and Jess and Stewart and I are all addicted now. I am also in the middle of trying to figure out my courses, and after visitng Istanbul I want to learn more about the Ottomans and the Byzantines, and I found a history course that seems to fit the bill. Other than that, its working on completing my thesis and the rest of my major—more art and anthropology, which I always enjoy.

Islands in the Sky

March 26, 2007

Kalambaka, Greece

The past two days have been pretty relaxing, for the Classics Trip. Two days ago we had a very short day, going around Thessaloniki and looking at the classical monument that it contained, and then yesterday was the Greek Independence Day, celebrated by closing everything except for restaurants and by us by having a free day. I was very happy—I think I lost the taste for the breakneck pace over spring break and am working to reacclimate myself to going going going all the time! Today we have visited a few archaeological sites, all of which have been closed because it’s a Monday, and that’s the day that no museums are open. But we are making our way slowly to the Greek coast, where two days from now we will load the ferry and head off for Italy!

The day before yesterday started late, with a wake-up call at 7:30, which we were very happy to receive, and we awoke to a beautiful bright and sunny day. We set out from the hotel on foot to see what Thessaloniki had to offer. Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, behind Athens, and contains a good deal of stuff from the Roman and especially the Byzantine period. During the Byzantine empire it was second in importance only to Constantinople itself, and much of the city itself is dominated with the great domed churches that are the hallmarks of the Eastern Orthodox religion.

Our first stop was the ancient Roman agora, dated to the 2nd C AD and located only a few blocks from our hotel in the middle of the more residential part of Thessaloniki. One minute we are walking along these narrow streets with a apartments rising up four stories with gyro restaurants and little shops below, and the next minute we enter a fenced in square with ancient red brick ruins poking up out of the dirt. There is not much left to the agora except for a bouleterion—a small theater, and the remains of a few stoas that met to form a colonnaded courtyard. All of the ruins are set several meters down from the current ground level, a testament to the city’s long period of occupation.

We also stopped in Agios Demetrios, the largest church in Thessaloniki and one of the most prominent churches in Greece. Founded over a Roman bath complex in the 5th C AD, it is a 5 aisle basilica that was popular before the cross-in-square type was developed later. Closer in floorplan to that of the Gothic churches, it is rather long and narrow with a crossed plan near the front before the holy of holies, and ended in an apsidal end toward the east. Not much of the 5th century stuff remains, the church was burned down in the 7th C AD and later restored, and burned again in the 19th century. But it still remains quite impressive for its size and for the different periods of ornamentation. We walked into the middle of the Orthodox service—two priests with long robes sang a series of songs, which Toumazou told us related to the worship of Mary. The inside of the church was austere white in many areas, with a pitched timber roof. The 5 aisles were demarcated with colonnades topped with floral capitals that looked like they dated from another of different time periods. The most ornate part of the church itself was behind a huge dividing screen of ornate gold leaf and icons. The chanting of the priests echoed throughout the whole church as we wandered up and down the aisles, peering in at the niches where tall thin candles burned in tubs of sand, releasing a soft scent of incense. The voices rose and fell around us as we contemplated the mysteries.

We wandered around for a while before exiting the church to revisit the exterior—a bunch of brick and white stones concentrating around the arches. The entire outside is perforated in a series of threes—three entrances to the doors, arched over with brick, three sets of windows in the clerestory, all covered with a bunch of white latticework. The outside was plain and austere, lacking superficial exterior ornament except for around the windows.

Then we continued on, heading down the waterfront until we reached the Rotunda—an area built during the tetrarchic period, in the 300s AD, as part of a larger complex of the palace. Originally intended as a mausoleum for the emperor Galerius, this building was never completed as such and later was converted into a church. The building is massive and sturdy in the roman fashion, dominated on top by a big dome in the center with the later addition of a porch on the western side. The building does not give away its secrets until you enter in the echoing space and find the larger round space surrounded by arches and niches along the interior. Although most of the inside is covered in scaffolding, small bits of frescoes and mosaics still cling to the walls, on the insides of the arches. Small foul and birds dart in and out of the latticework, glittering patterns in the dark. Shafts of sunlight come slanting in through the windows. On the far end of the church, the niche held a crucifix, outlined in the glowing sunlight and backed by the raw masonry of the inside of the church.

Continuing to the outside, we walked around the whole outside of the rotunda before going to the Via Egnatia—the former main street of the city, which lines up the three major monuments in the city—the Rotunda, the Arch of Galerius, and the Palace. The Arch of Galerius was built by Galerius to celebrate his victories over the Persians at the end of the 200s AD. A big arch that went right over the road, it was four sides with a dome over the center and had multiple registers of sculptural ornamentation—clusters of shallow relief with fighting figures and parades and triumphs. Three of the four sides of the arch have fallen away, exposing the red brick under the marble exterior. This is one of the most complex of the arches in the Roman world, and represents the culmination of a development of Roman monumental arches. Nowhere else do we see a tetrapylon of such complication in the ancient world.

Exiting the Arch of Galerius, we moved toward the sunken remains of the palace complex, in line with the Via Egnatia and finally leaving the roman ruins to rest we moved down toward the waterfront. From there we were free! Toumazou let us go early and some of us opted to go the Byzantine Museum. But first we walked for a while, along a wide boulevard crowded by pedestrians and bounded by green space. Alexander reared up before us, a massive statue in bronze—a horse rearing up, brandishing his sword and spear and facing east, toward the empires he conquered. The sun was bright and the sky was perfectly blue, without a single cloud, and we walked along and sunned ourselves before taking a number of pictures and heading back toward the city and the Byzantine Museum.

The museum itself was deceptively housed in a building of squat modernist brick with flat ribbon windows, a big block surrounding an inner courtyard. We walked in and saw the high ceilings and the brightly lit displays with a whole history of the Byzantine empire. The museum was big and very well done and we wandered slowly through the halls, not taking notes but taking some pictures. A few things that interested me were that in one of the churches with a basement crypt with barrel vaulting, the spaces between the arched ceiling of the crypt and the level floor of the church were filled with a bunch of terracotta amphorae. I saw a number of floorplans of Byzantine churches, ranging from the long type to the cross-in-square plan, a number of capitals and elaborate floral capitals. There were a number of icons from the Paleologan dynasty, when the Venetians and the Italians gained contact with the arts of the east and brought forth a resurgence in naturalism that had been lost since the end of the Roman empire. We also saw a number of engravings that came in vogue at the time—complicated masses of lines with saints, George slaying the Dragon, and Mary with child.

Finally inundated with all of the gilt and images, and embroidery, and starving because by then it was late in the afternoon, we left the museum. Anne and Ambrice and Jess and Sam decided to go back to the hotel, but Chris and I saw what looked like an amphitheater on the map that we had. We decided to go see it—maybe it was an ancient arena that the program had overlooked. We winded our way up the streets toward the arena, past a Sports Museum that I decided that I am definitely going to visit in the summer, and reached the arena to find that it was not a roman ruin, but a modern incarnation in squat boring concrete and metal. There was a running track located around the complex on the side, and we walked around and around it before determining that there was no roman arena close by and we walked home. We ended up taking close to an hour—we had walked much farther than we thought, and ended up back at the hotel starving and tired. So after some gnutella and bread, we had a nap. After laying down for a bit, I went down to a small internet café by the hotel with good sun and read more of 1453, which detailed the development of canon in the Ottoman empire—who under the ingeniousness of Mehmet ended up casting a canon of 27 feet long and capable of throwing a canon 1 mile and burying it 6 feet down. Because the walls of Constantinople were built before the development of guns, they were unable to hold the recoil of the canons and gave the Ottomans a supreme advantage. With three shots of their canons they could reduce the hundred year old fortifications to rubble….

I ran into Ambrice and Jess later, and we decided that we should have a wine and cheese party, really classy, to celebrate the free day. So we went shopping for wine, cheese and crackers and worked on setting up the room. Ambrice and Jess were in charge of invitations, and later we worked on setting up the room. Our room was originally a double that had been converted into a triple with the addition of a cot, so we moved the mattress to one of the other beds and then took the frame outside to the porch. We arranged the crackers neatly on tiny trays, set out the wine glasses, and got ready for the party.

The party was a great success, we asked everyone on the invitations to have “cocktail attire,” which for the classics trip meant some skirt or dress that we had brought for the trip. Most people ended up dressing up in skirts and dresses and some of the boys wore collared shirts, and people ate the cheese and drank the wine and generally acted very sophisticated until late at night, when the wine took its effects and we all got loud and rambunctious. Even Toumazou and Jarrett ended up showing up, and they put on a big soccer game—the Turks and the Greeks, and talked and laughed late into the nightl I actually ended up sleeping on the crack between Ambrice and Stewarts beds, too lazy to get my own from off of the balcony.

The next morning was a free day and a holiday, but I was unable to sleep in and woke up early to a huge breakfast. We were originally going to go to the Orthodox mass to celebrate the Greek Independence day, but because it was also daylight savings time our 9:00 was actually 10:00 and we ended up missing it. So Ambrice and I had a wonderful Law and Order SVU marathon until the late afternoon, until my laziness overwhelmed me and I decided to go on a run.

I ventured down Agios Demetrios street until I reached the church itself and turned to run toward the waterfront, enduring the stares of all the Greeks the whole time, until I reached the harbor, choked with people in the outdoor cafes and walking along the ocean. The day was dazzlingly bright and warm and I enjoyed people watching as I made my way up toward the White Tower, one of the landmarks of Thessaloniki. People ambled along the ocean, entirely too overdressed for the warm weather in their black and leather and tights and tall boots. I ran all of the way down to the end of the harbor and then back, into the city toward the arena and finally arriving at the hotel much later.

Then it was more chatting, a shower and a walk around the city before another picnic, some reading and bed. The free day was wonderful, and incredibly lazy, but it was over and it was time to pack and do work before the early morning.

This morning it was back to go go go… we had a 6:30 wake up and a big breakfast before packing all of our things on the bus and heading out for the day. The first stop was at the site of Pella, the birthplace of Phillip II and Alexander the Great, and the capital of the Macedonian empire. Unfortunately it was Monday, so the place was closed, but Tomazou had us exit the bus anyway, in the middle of a pretty severe rainstorm, so we grimacingly stepped out and walked along the highway until we reached a break in the fence and could peer over the links at the ruins of walls and columns. We walked back along the fence as the trucks roared by and sprayed us with water—the start of another crazy day.

We got back on the bus and Toumazou continued his lecture as we endeavored to dry off our soaking jeans and settle in for another long drive. We unloaded again, this time at Vergina, another famous city in the Macedonian empire, the place of Phillip II’s assassination at the hands of a jilted lover. But, unfortunately, this place was closed also. We sat on the bus as Toumazou ran around the terrain, and he finally scampered back down to tell us that if we climbed up the hillside we could reach a vantage point to see most of the ancient site. So we did, braving the steep terrain until we came to a low hill from which we could see the low foundations of walls and a few stunted fallen columns. The most impressive part of this site and the only place visible to us was the palace complex, built in around 300 BC when Pella itself was increasing in importance. However, this place was always reserved for the funerals of the Macedonian kings, and the tombs of Phillip II and most of his family (with the exception of Alexander, who was actually buried in Egypt) are located here. However, we did not see much of anything execept for the wet and steep hillside which we struggled to navigate on the return. So far a pretty disappointing day.

We returned to the bus for the ride to our final destination—Kalambaka. However, as they tend to do, plans change and our early stop at the hotel was prolonged for a detour to Meteora—a place located high in the mountains with a large number of monasteries. Initially I was kind of unhappy about having to forego my early stop at the hotel for another site… that was until the bus made its perilously windy trek up the steep cliff face and we came out at the top.

Meteora reminded me very much of Sedona, with the notable difference in color of the rocks—where Sedona is a lovely shade of red, Meteora is a slate grey. But the cliffs rise up in the same steep fasion, eroded into fantastic shapes by the forces of wind and water. They create tiny islands in the sky, atop which these monasteries cling. Most of the monasteries are dated from the 14th century, and some are accessible only by rope and ladder. And how often are the ropes replaced? According to Tomazou, who asked one of the monks, “God decides.” Scary.

The place looks like something out of a dream, and I can clearly see why the monks would have been drawn here; anyone who wanted contact with God could see him written on the fantastic rock formations and on the sweeping valley with its terracotta roofs that opened up before us in the valley below. The mountains in the background were obscured with a thick cloud of fog, but the weather was holding so far so we moved out of the bus and toward the biggest of these, a monastery upon an island in the sky, with its ramparts hovering on the edge of the void. To one side of us we could see where a series of lines had been strung across a shallow valley and to the far side where the monastery rose up in its steep strong masonry before us. However, in front of us were a series of steps leading down the valley and back up again to pierce the walls of the monastery and allow us entrance. Not trusting myself to the will of God, I opted for the steps, and was rewarded with spectacular views down the cliffs and across to other monasteries perched like birds atop small posts, careful not to spread their feet to far for fear of ending up in the valley below.

We descended and then ascended the steep steps, with a low retaining wall that separated us from the long drop below. Then it was up and into a tunnel in the rock and more steps before emerging in the monastery itself. All women were required to hide their trousers with skirts, which the monastery provided for us. They were simply these long sarongs in black and white patterned fabric that we wrapped on over our jeans, looking ridiculous and feeling less reverential toward the place than we had before. We all took pictures, the boys looking on and chuckling, as we tied the awkward garments around ourselves and took the ramps up into the main part of the building.

The monastery had been converted into a museum, and contained different sections where the old winery, kitchens, and mess halls were displayed, as if they were still in working order. The other parts of the place had been converted into museums for Byzantine and monastic art and culture. There were a number of old uniforms for Greek soldiers, and I finally realized that the goofy uniforms I had seen in front of the National Palace in Athens could be explained by looking at the early 1900 military uniforms—stockings and long tunics with berets and tasseled shoes.

We saw a number of engravings and tons and tons of icons, ranging from fairly old to contemporary, everything done up in that ornate yet static style that is the hallmark of the Byzantines. We also saw the infirmary of the monastery, designed with a dome in the center and four wings extending below it. The dome contained a hole in the roof and space for a large hearth underneath, allowing for ventilation and the expulsion of noxious gases from the sick and the dying. The infirmary had two stories connected by the dome, with the elderly of the monastery on the top floor and the sick on the lower floor, everything was surmounted by brick barreled vaulting.

The whole monastery was arranged in a way that to get closer and closer to the church we had to wind up and up and around, and coming on to a ledge we were afforded another fantastic view of the landscape with its steep sculpted grey cliffs and the grey clouds and rolling foothills. The church at the top of the mountain had an apsidal side in red brick, the arches outlined with smaller blocks of masonry highlighting the curves and folds of the apse. We entered the church and came upon detailed frescoes, dimly lit by the sunlight streaming in through the upper windows. The frescoes contained crowded figures set in triangular outlines—the lives of the saints and Mary and Jesus.

Coming from the antechamber we entered the major portion of the church, ornate in gold and silvered icons. This space was less crowded, but contained no less impressive images adorning the walls. I walked up to one of the columns beneath the arch and came upon an altar that held an image of the saint and for one of the first times paid attention to the intricate detailed carving of the flowers and florals snaking their way up the arms of the altar and across the front up to the ceiling. They looked to be hand carved, and some were guilded and others remained wood-bare, but a testament to the care and love of their creator. Candles flickered in the dim light and brought a warmth to the cold grey day.

We stepped outside of the sanctuary and back into the cold and the drizzle of the monastery. It had begun to rain again and we walked around a bit more before finally exiting, walking down the steep steep stairs in the slick, and coming back up up to cross the valley and come on the other side of the straight between the two islands in the sky, and back on land once again, we surveyed the sculptured spectacular cliffs once again, before retreating to the dryness of the bus and the eventual safety of the hotel.

Kalambaka seems like a friendly enough little town from what I have seen of it, Jess Ambrice and I watched some Law and Order with Chris before heading on the town to find a gyro place. This was one of our last places in Greece that we were going to visit and knowing that we were going to miss the gyros tremendously we ate our fill—tzatziki, French fries, and all, and continued around the town. We pirated some internet from a street corner nearby—the crazy Americans again, and I was stopped by a man who asked me in Spanish where the nearest internet café was located. I surprised myself in my ability to give a convincing—if broken answer to the question and sent him along his way. Leave it up to us to find the internet within the first five minutes of coming to our destination—its our only connection to the outside world.

Now its back to the hotel for some relaxing, reading and blogging before another long day tomorrow. One more night in Greece, the next on the ferry, and then we are in Reggio.

Thessaloniki

March 23, 2007

Thessaloniki, Greece

We arrived in Thessaloniki in the late afternoon yesterday after a long bus ride. We haven’t gotten a chance to see much of the city yet, but in a few days it’s the Greek Independence Day which apparently is a huge holiday around here so we should get the opportunity to do plenty of exploring.

Yesterday we woke up in our cozy little hotel and made our way carefully down the stairs to be greeted with a very traditional Greek breakfast—bread and coffee. Apparently breakfast is not a huge thing over here, but it is for us, considering that we do not really get much of a lunch with Toumazou at all. We ate what they had and settled in for a very hungry morning. We hiked our stuff out of the mountains of Makrinitsa and watched the beautiful early morning view unfold before us as we descended to a larger road where our double decker bus was ready and waiting.

Our first stop was in the town just below Makrinitsa, at the archaeological museum at Volos. This small but well made museum contained tons of pottery from the paleolithiic and Neolithic periods—shards of dark browns, blacks and reds. Patterns of spirals and geometric shapes parade across the outside, incised with a sharp instrument, like the shapes in a rug. We wandered quickly around the exhibit for a while, looking at squat mother goddess figures with distended breasts and bulging bellies. Moving into the center rooms, we encountered stuff from the historical period—grave stelae from this area are covered with paintings, a characteristic that is very rare in archaeology. Dr Toumazou told us that the loss of ancient Greek paintings is one of the biggest ones in the physical record of ancient Greece—made of perishable materials, with pigments that could be washed off by too much rain and faded by the sun, or burned, the paintings by and large have not withstood the test of time. However, these grave stelae from Volos contain many colorful paintings, preserved primarily because the tombstones themselves were buried in the earth soon after being painted, the result of being later incorporated into the fortification walls of the city.

The paintings are somewhat faded but show scenes typical of the grave stelai that were carved in the Attic stelae at Keramaikos, for example. The scenes show two and three figures holding hands and embracing, or show lengths of red ribbon delicately wrapped and draped around the stelae, like the traces of a memory. One stelae in particular showed a poignant scene of a young mother reclining, fainting, upon a couch, while the attendants in the room cluster around her. The inscriptions along the bottom indicate that this young woman died in childbirth along with her child, leaving the grave stelae as a testament to her struggles.

The last exhibit in the museum was an exhibit on athletics in Thessaly—right up my aisle—and contained plaques describing the typical athletic diet, which for a while apparently consisted of tons and tons of meat, which put me in mind of the types of food stacked on the trays of Davidson’s football team… The exhibit also showed a number of dedicatory statues of athletes, strigils used for scraping olive oil when bathing or preparing for athletic activity, and a Panathenaic Amphora, which Athena on one side and athletes in a full out sprint on the other.

After visiting the museum, we ventured out to the site of Dimini, a Mycenean site with minimal fortification but the presence of a possible megaron-type building that is standard for this time, and a massive tholos tomb. The landscape was pretty barren and windy, the stone foundations of the buildings came up to our knees and we quickly walked around the site, holding onto our caps as the grey skies whipped the wind around us. Approaching the edge of the tomb, we looked down into a circular dome whose roof had fallen in, the place for the burials of whatever kings here. According to the archaeologists who worked here, this may have been the ancient city of Iolkos, from where Jason and the Argonauts set sail.

Then it was back on the bus for another long bus ride—I slept and read some of my Byzantine history book, which dealt with the foundations of the Ottoman empire. I had never before realized how many different peoples went through Asia minor that lead to the foundation of this place—I had always assumed that the Byzantine empire and the Ottomans were contiguous, but to see the history of antagonism between the rising band of innovative entrepreneuring Ottomans, and the hidebound, shrinking, but stubborn Byzantines. In fact, I was surprised to learn of the many contacts between the Byzantine and the Catholics of the west. They are never mentioned in the histories of Europe that I have read, but there were clear connections between the two—between the 4th crusade in which the Christian crusaders sacked Constantinople instead of freeing the Holy Land, to conflicts between the pope and the Byzantines over doctrine, to most immediately to the book, the pleas of Constantine to help his empire as it began to be dominated by the Ottomans under the enterprising Mehmet. More on this later, I am only about a quarter of the way through…

We stopped for lunch because we were starving, and I had some spanacopida—a spinach turnover with flaky crust, and we loaded the bus again, emerging at the site of Dion. We went to the museum at first—more statuary and pottery. The one unique object in the museum was the presence of a musical instrument called the hydraulis—the precursor to the modern pipe organ, made in bronze and looking like a massive updended set of pan pipes. Then it was out to the site, surrounded by the steep mountains of Olympus with their heads stuck in the thick white clouds.

The site itself is situated in a low plain and contains a number of sanctuaries to various goddesses—to Hera, Isis, and Artemis, most of which are located a few meters down in the ground, which has been excavated but subsequently inundated with water. The columns and apses of the sanctuaries rise out of the water, sending their ripply echoes out in front of them to greet us as we truged over the boardwalks that spanned the wet spaces. We came to a very well preserved Roman bath, complete with a caldadarium, marked by the stacks of bricks that allowed hot water to pass underneath the floors and heat the room. There was even a public toilet with sewage and plumbing. Farther in the distance, a theater was visible, its seats set into the hillside. The place was magical in a hidden, secretive kind of way—nature was trying to obscure some of the place’s secrets from us, by fog and water. By the end of the day, however, the magic was eclipsed by my need to sleep—I loaded the bus and dozed the whole way to Thessaloniki.

I woke up just in time to see the city of Thessaloniki loom out of the bus windows, a bustling place lined with shops and restaurants and grocery stores. We got in late in the day, and went out to get supplies for a picnic—cucumber and tomato salad along with canned tuna and tons of fresh bread. Picnics are some of the best discoveries of the trip so far—we ate our fill and with the help of a pocket knife and a bowl, were eating like civilized people. The rest of the night was spent in the company of retsina and beer, talking the night away.

This morning came entirely too early—we had a 5:30 am phone ring when the high-school age Greek kids staying in our hotel came back from the club and decided it would be a great idea to call and harass the American kids. I thought it was our actual wake up call, and hating life until I looked at the watch and realized the time and turned over to go back to sleep. But an hour later the wake up call DID go off, and we dressed and headed downstairs for a good dose of yogurt and cereal before our day began.

Today we went and saw the site of Olynthos, a classical Greek settlement characterized by an orthogonal grid plan, resting on a low plateau surrounded by green and red rolling hills. Northern Greece seems to be quite a bit less arid than the south, with more solid and less scrubby trees, fields of green and bright red clay. The site itself contains reddish rows of low walls, sprinkled with twisting flowered trees. We were given an assignment to figure out the floor plans of the houses, which ended up being defined by a central courtyard that gave access to the other rooms of the house, and two stories on the north with an opening to the south, again to give the maximum light and the minimum heat in the summer months. We stayed there until lunch time, stepping gingerly over the walls and recording remains of column bases, terracotta drainage pipes and fireplaces, the homes of people some 2,000 prior to us.

The place was pretty well organized for being so old—all of the buildings were aligned to a grid, all of similar size and were joined end to end for 5 houses, in between which ran a large street. In between each row of 5 houses ran a narrow alleyway that allowed access to the internal courtyard and drainage into the street. It looked a lot like a modern subdivision, except that the houses were of course much smaller and back yards did not have tire swings.

After that we headed back to the bus to return to Thessaloniki, where we went to the archaeological museum there, another new and well organized facility that at times reminded me more of a hands-on-kids-museum than a dry historical place. The museum was chock full of a number of different things, ranging from Neolithic to the Roman period, and contained statuary, magnificent gold jewelry, and a number of grave finds. Instead of leading us through the museum, Tomazou let us wander around by ourselves, so we strolled slowly through, looking at each of the exhibits at our own pace. So we wandered and took pictures for a few hours before heading home.

I was so tired by the time I got back that I crawled into bed with all of my clothes on and slept until dark. Then we woke up, walked around Thessaloniki for a while in search of more grocery stores, until it was time for dinner and we had another picnic. I really want to go see downtown tomorrow, and the church of Agios Demetrios, the most famous church in Thessaloniki is close by. But for now, its enough to rest and read.

Northern Greece

March 21, 2007

Makrinista, Greece.

Today we woke up bright and waaayyy to early for our breakfast at the hotel and loaded the bus for the Northern Greece leg of the trip. We reunited with Toumazou and ready to start CSA part II. Everyone was really excited to see each other again, and we were ready to keep moving. On this trip, staying in a few weeks at one place starts to feel too comfortable, and we wanted to see something new and exciting. I have heard many good things about Thessaloniki, and am happy to go there.

So after a long bus ride we arrived first at a place called Gla. Toumazou himself actually worked at the site for 2 years at the beginning of his archaeological career. The site is pretty disappointing—just a big field of tall wildflowers that buried any semblance of walls in the entire site. Toumazou led us up a steep goat trail to the top of the citadel where we could see the gentle rolling hills of the countryside spread out like a blanket below us. The day was cold and windy and rainy and we hunched our shoulders against the inclement weather as Toumazou shouted out the history of the site to us. We trudged through the biggest gate, which surpassed by far the size of any of the fortifications at Mycenae. We walked around for a good while, moving past the “agora” area that contained the remains of a number of walls and buildings believed to have been used for commerce. Then we moved toward the palace area, a place which also consisted of a number of submerged walls, two megaron areas set at right angles to one another. All of this, however, was obscured by the tall and spiny plants and with the grey skies threatening above us and the wind howling all around us we hurried to finish the lecture and head back to the bus.

The next place that we visited was the site of Thermopylae, the site of one of the most famous battles in Grecian history. In 480 BC the 300 Spartans that we had seen in the movie the night before had sacrificed themselves in order to slow down the Persian invasions under Xerxes. Pinned in a narrow pass between the high cliffs of the Kallidromo mountain and the sea, they could use the numbers to their advantage and decimate the troops until a shepherd named Ephialtes told Xerxes where the slim mountain trail allowed the Persians to surround the Greeks and attack from two fronts. When they realized all was lost, most of the Greeks abandoned the cause, except for the few valiant Spartans and the Boetians, who backed themselves up to a small cliff where they were overwhelmed by the Persian arrows. Some of the most notable quotes from the story are: 1. When the general Leonidas was leaving with his personal bodyguard to go fight, his wife or mother figure or whoever famously told him to “come back with his shield, or on it”, and 2. When the Persians threatened to block out the sun with their arrows, Leonidas and his men replied “so we will fight in the shade.”

So much for that. The day had gotten sunny by then and the wind whipped around the steep mountainside, we were on the side of the road where a modern monument dedicated to Leonidas and his men had been erected with a series of sculptures topped by a large bronze figure of a striding Leonidas complete with a Spartan helmet, shield and sword. The landscape had changed considerably since the battle had been fought, the sea had retreated and the place where we were now standing would have been underwater in ancient times. As it was now it was a flat and shallow plain dotted with vegetation. The wind whipped around us as we surveyed the spectacular scenery before loading the bus again and heading north toward the little tiny town of Makrinista, which is located a bit above the larger town of Volos.

Our bus wended its way farther and farther up the steep mountainside, past the town of Volos and up up up, until our bus could no longer navigate the narrow seats and we had to grab our daypacks, stuff them with just what we needed for one night, and trudge our way up the steep cobblestoned streets and to our hotel, which was one of those small homey-looking places where the rugs all look handmade and the doorframes are slightly tilted off ninety degrees. We clustered into the small lobby before being shown our rooms—triples and doubles in heavy ponderous wood furniture and wall hangings of local manufacture. The staircases were so steep that we hit our heads on the ceiling on the way down, and everything was heated by small space heaters and wood fires. Pretty rustic.

After checking in and setting our stuff down, we ventured into the town—village really—that had spectacular views overlooking Volos, where the hills gently rolled down into the harbor, and all of the houses were painted white with pitched stone roofs. The town square had a big fountain with some Christian motifs etched into the stone above where the water poured out, and there was a small church with an apse on one end, done completely in a grey stone with minimal carving. The inside, as usual , contained shiny gold and silver icons, and a few candles burned in gilded sand trays close to the altar. The rest of the village contained a few tavernas, mostly closed, and a few gift and curio shops that we wandered around in. The whole place was like a village out of Cinderella or something, we walked up and down the steep cobblestone paths, looking over moss covered roofs and watching a small stream as it was channeled down through a series of fountains and divots. This was another place like Siphnos where I felt like I could come and escape the whole world.

We walked around for a bit and then returned to the hotel for a bit of reading by the fire before heading out to the main area of town to find a restaurant, and went to the only one open. I had bean soup and tzatziki for dinner, which was quite filling, and practiced a little bit of my greek ordering the food. Then it was back to the hotel again, where we all snuggled up in the cozy little lounges on each of the floors, in front of the fires, and watched Meet the Parents, and talked late into the night. Dan (our resident language expert) and I went through my new phrasebook and I practiced some things, and learned more about Greek. I really wish now that I had taken some sort of Greek before going on the trip, because now I am working hard to pick up a few phrases. I have downloaded some learning-Greek podcasts and with my phrasebook I should be OK. I write down a few phrases on a scrap of paper and glance at it throughout the day until I have learned them all, then its onto a new set of phrases. It still feels incredibly inadequate, but I hope to be able to check myself into a hostel or hotel and order food without too much trouble.

Finally, it was bedtime, and on to Thessaloniki in the morning…

CSA Spring Break Reunion

March 20, 2007

Athens, Greece

Two days ago we said goodbye to dear old Siphnos and took the five hour ferry ride back to Athens. I was really sad to leave the island, it was one of the most relaxing experiences of the trip and getting to see my family was really fun. I would definitely come back to an island in Greece, except I would probably time it better so that next time we would not be the ONLY tourists on the island and restaurants would actually be open. Although I did enjoy the opportunity to see the place when it wasn’t putting on a show. The rural nature of the island really surprised me, and I liked getting to walk up the remote mountain paths without running into anyone, although if we did we were guaranteed to get strange looks due to our clothing and the fact that we obviously did not belong. Everyone seemed to know everyone else in the close-knit little mountain community, and we would walk by groups of locals chatting, or shopping, and get a little window on how the whole place operated.

Then it was out of the quiet and the remote and back into the noise and the bustle of Athens. We took the metro back from Piraeus and dragged our multiple packages to our hotel in Monastiraki. The area was in the not-so-orthagonal, not so clean and pretty part of Athens, but the place where tons and tons of little tiny shops crowded their awnings together across narrow streets and the vendors hawked their wares. But the rooms were clean and the shower was hot and best of all there was free internet. We arrived at about 9 pm from Piraeus and stayed at the hotel just long enough to get the location of a local taverna, located in the Psiri district of Athens. Again, not so clean but there was a bunch of young Athenians there walking around and we found a taverna that was absolutely crowded. We sat down and although they had no menu we walked back to the kitchen where they showed us their selection—some meatballs, soup, gigantes, and most unusually lamb’s heads, cooked complete with teeth and all. My mom took one look and refused to eat, but we ordered a Greek salad for her and I had the gigantes and my dad some meatballs so we had a relatively decent meal before heading to a patisserie for wonderfully rich chocolate dessert and then bed.

The next morning I woke up early and we headed out into the busy Athenian morning, and walked for a good while around the Roman agora, stopping in at the Tower of the Winds, and Hadrian’s Library in search for a crepe place that my parents had eaten at before. But it was located on an obscure little windy street that we were never able to find again, and giving up we headed back up Ermou where it turned straight and broad and ate a breakfast at an outdoor café there. Then, much to my Dad’s dismay, it was some shopping for a good part of the day. The area around Ermou street had a good number of bead and jewelry shops that attracted our attention, and we stopped in a few s we worked our way up to the National Garden.

The National Garden was lovely, a bunch of green space in the middle of Athens, with tall trees and winding paths. We walked farther and ran into a small zoo- complete with a few turtles and goat and such. The park was big and the day was warm, and we really enjoyed seeing a pretty part of Athens. We emerged from the back side of the park in a pretty area of Athens that I had never seen before—widely spaced boulevards and three and four story apartments that overlooked the park. We turned in one direction down the path that circumvented the park and ran into the Panathenaic stadium, which my parents had not seen before. I think they were pretty impressed.

After that we walked back around the park toward the royal palace—an area I had run by a few times in Athens. But this time when we walked by we actually saw the guards stationed there doing their very characteristic, very unusual walk in front of the palace on a series of red blocks set into the sidewalk specifically for that purpose. They were dressed in long black jackets complete with shiny brass buttons, red berets with tassels hanging down the side, and long cream colored tights with shoes with a huge black pom-pom on the toe. On their side they held big guns, and a few other soldiers in regular olive colored uniforms watched as these special guards about-faced and began walking toward one another along the red pathway. They would raise one arm and the opposite leg high and straight in the air, would pause, and then would bend the knee, still raised, back and forth like the leg of a marionette. Then they would put arm and leg down, would stomp the ground several times, and then take another step forward. Then they finally met in the center in front of the royal palace and went through the same bizarre series of moves, which eventually resulted in the both of them crossing each other and heading in the opposite direction, back towards their posts on either side.

My parents stopped and took pictures, and then we mosied our way back toward Syntagma square and Ermou, for a last little bit of shopping—I bought a book on Greek cooking and a few tin pitchers that they use to serve wine in at the restaurants around here, my Dad bought my Mom a ring, and we stopped in at a pita gyro place for lunch. Surprisingly, this was the first pita gyro that my parents had had the entire trip! I felt that it was my duty to introduce them to one of the cheapest and best types of food Greece had to offer. They enjoyed them quite a bit, and then we all headed back to the hotel for a little bit of a siesta before dinner.

For dinner we walked down toward the Agora, past the Hephaistion, to an area with a bunch of bars and restaurants set into the open air and lit up with small lights. We surveyed the area for a while before finally deciding on a place that had a pair of Greek musicians all playing traditional Greek music. The food was great, and at the end of the night they played a few Beatles covers, an obvious nod to our presence. That night I started booking flights and hotels for the big trip after the semester’s end. There is so much planning to go into a trip like this that I can only imagine how Toumazou must have felt planning this CSA 07. I feel overwhelmed enough as it is trying to arrange for 5 weeks of travel, let alone 4 months.

That was the last night my parents were here. They left very early the next morning and I sleepily waved goodbye to them from the comfort of my bed, and fell asleep until much later. I had the entire day in Athens to myself!! There were many things that I wanted to do so when I woke up on my own at around 7:30 I decided it was time to start the day so I got dressed and headed out into the bright Athenian morning.
I had decided earlier that I wanted to go see the Byzantine Musuem. I figured it was only appropriate after having read The Secret History and having seen Istanbul to see the Byzantine art and architecture that we had completely missed in Athens. The museum was really empty that early in the morning, and I had all of the exhibits to myself as I walked along the echoing hallways. The museum was not very big, but it contained a good number of mosaics and carvings from the entire Byzantine period, ranging from Justinians’s time which is considered by most to be the official beginning of the Byzantine empire, when it splits from the Roman empire and begins to develop a life and culture of its own. Very early on there is a lot of overlap between classical and Byzantine art—the angels look like the winged Nike figures, Jesus looks like the CalfBearer, and everything is rendered in a highly realistic style, with Roman looking clothing and facial features. As time goes on, however, the clothing and artistic style changed, it become more rigid and iconographic—the importance lay not in the realistic depiction of human beauty but in the symbols and the message of the story. The images become much more readable—this is the beginning of the tradition of the Greek Orthodox icon, which we have seen that up even to the modern period has great significance.

Then there was the period of the iconoclasm, when one of the Byzantine emperors made it illegal to depict any god, and there is a resurgence of floral and spiral motifs—the only symbol visible anywhere is the cross—the Greek kind that is as wide as it is tall and sometimes flares out at the tips. I saw the floor plans of a number of Byzantine churches—the traditional Greek ones with a cross-in-square plan and a dome at the center. Others were converted from earlier pagan temples—the Parthenon was one—with the addition of an apse on the east end and the division of the cella into three aisles.

Finally, I reached the end of the Byzantine empire, where with a final classicizing resurgence under the dynasty called the Paleologans (I think) which were big hellenophiles and brought the art around closer to its beginnings, with a focus upon the realistic depiction of figures, and the realistic fall of drapery and weight and mass and light. Then it was out of the museum and into an auxillary exhibit dedicated to Dali.

I couldn’t understand much of what the purpose of the exhibit was except that it was related to Dali. I walked down into the basement of another building into the Byzantine museum complex and first saw a number of prints of Dali’s work—the Hallucinogenic Toreador stood at the end of the hallway at about ¼ of its actual size. Then I turned sideways and entered a room filled with statues, one titled “Nude Ascending a Staircase—Homage to Duchamp” which did indeed show a nude ascending a staircase that resembled a conch shell. All of the rest of the room was filled with statues of varying sizes, and judging by the names and the dates on the placards these were homages to Dali—cubist angels that struck angular contrappostos with their hard edged arms outstretched, the big elephants of Dali with legs of toothpics, women whose bodies looked like they had been turned into dressers, and all manner of Dali-esque stuff, down to the melting phallic symbols and the ants. Lining the walls were a series of pen and ink drawings of the Dali style also with the same recurring motifs, and the signature of Dali in the lower right hand corner of everyone, although on the left another set of initials described themselves. I think based upon this that it was another homage a Dali. The exhibit was very interesting though—I was especially drawn to those initial classicizing figures that had been turned cubist, or in another instance had been turned surrealist—with holes in the middle and spindly arms and legs. But although the external expression had changed, the shift of weight in the figures were clearly drawn from the likes of Praxiteles—a huge s-curve and the typical posturing of the Greek nude, expressed in a modernist form. Cool.

By then it was nearing 10:30 and I had to go check out of my own hotel in Monastiraki and check into the one that the group was staying in, so I hauled all of my things several blocks through the streets of Athens to reach the safety of the Astor hotel lobby. I ran into Dan there, sprawled on one of the couches, bags in tow, waiting for a room himself. People were coming back!! Within a few hours we had reunited with about half of the group and heard lots of stories about spring break and how weird it felt to be in Athens with a whole day to ourselves. I got pretty restless at some point so Dan and I walked over to a huge famous bookstore in Athens, whose name is in Greek. We spent about an hour and a half there--- the bookstore occupies 7 stories with a café on one floor and the rest divided by category. I browsed every floor, picking up and putting down books as I went until I finally met back up with Dan and had to narrow my selections down to two—I picked Around the World in 80 Days, which I thought was a good book to read while traveling like we were, and 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam in the West, a history book with a big title but hopefully not too dry and academic, that would give me more information on the Byzantine period. All of the stuff we learned about stopped with Justinian, and I was curious to know more. I have only read a couple of pages so far but it looks interesting and will give me a history that I have never learned in school—everything I know is about the west and this will be a neat change of pace. The first few pages deal with a description of Istanbul and I was so excited to have recognized the places in the book! Things like that are so much better when you can picture them from having seen them…. One of the benefits of this trip.

We came back and met up with more people and headed out to a familiar restaurant close to the Agora for kebabs and tomato and cucumber salads before the last big event of the night—a movie showing of 300. This is a movie based upon a graphic novel of the battle of Thermopayle, in which 300 Spartans under the rule of Leonidas with the help of a number of Boetians single handedly defended Greece against the Persian invaders under Xerxes. For a while, the combined Greek forces held off the Persian attack, but a turncoat told the Persians where there was a secret path to come behind the Greek troops and surround them in a very narrow pass. Knowing that there was no way to win, the 300 Spartans chose to die in defense of their country.

The movie was highly unusual, the whole format had the appearance of a comic book, with its overblown characters, luminescent skies, and heroicism blown way out of proportion. I had no idea what the movie would be like before I saw it, because the surrealistic quality threw me at first. But once I got over that, the idea of seeing a comic book movie was fascinating aesthetically, even if the characterization was minimal.

The movie got out pretty late so there was just enough time to head back to the Astor for an early bedtime. We were waking up super early in the morning so we had just enough time to share some more stories before turning in.

Siphnos

March 17, 2007

Apollonia, Siphnos, Greece.

I woke up this morning with the sun shining in the windows of the little cottage we have been living in for the past three days. It has been wonderfully relaxing and I am so happy to be staying in one place, or more specifically this little charming house in the little charming town of Apollonia.

To start off with, all of the houses on this island are completely whitewashed, simple square structures, with thick wooden shutters that provide the only color variety. The most popular color for the windows and doors is a bright shade of what my mom termed “Aegean blue,” a bright royal blue color that contrasts with the spare whiteness of the rest of the building. Most of these places are square buildings with square windows and flat roofs, and accessed by narrow shallow staircases to allow for mule as well as foot traffic. All of the roads here are made of stone set in concrete and accented with white paint between the stones and when the sun shines the brilliance of the white on the walls so close together and the white of the stones and the blue of the sky dazzle the eyes.

Our little cottage is spare and perfectly suited to the Mediterranean climate. It faces south, like the Greek stoas that we have seen so many places, and is not placed on a perfectly orthogonal plan: the two rooms of the house rest at an obtuse angle to each other, the mouth of the angle forms the little patio out front where we can sit and watch the roofs cascading down the hill all of the way to the sea and sky in the distance. One of the arms of the angle contains the master bedroom, the mouth of the angle itself has a small kitchen that opens onto a tiny bathroom, and the other arm contains a living/dining room. The furniture in the house is minimal—the few chairs are small and made of a teak colored wood, and the same with the tables. The couches and beds are built right into the walls and floor of the house, built up on plaster platforms that underneath the cushions has a storage compartment that reminded me of the cockpit of my dad’s boat the Sweet Haven. The couches are lined along the walls in much the same fashion, and are wide enough to be converted into beds, but when they are not used as such the addition of some vertical cushions provides padding for the back. The desk in the bedroom and the closet are set right into the wall, and the kitchen contains a tiny fridge and an oven that we originally thought was a microwave until we stepped closer and saw the three tiny burners on the top and the wire racks on the inside. Everything is whitewashed except for the wood furniture and the olive colored blankets and shutters.

All of the windows open wide to admit the cool breeze and the tile floors aid in spreading the cool air around the house in the tourist season, but because it was slightly cold when we were there we shut the windows up tight, left the shutters open to let the sunlight in, and turned on the space heater that in a few hours left the little place warm and toasty. It was a truly relaxing and idyllic setting: no TV, no internet, no phone, and no washing machine (which actually was bad because by that time my entire suitcase was full of dirty laundry). Our days were as slow and peaceful as the little place that we were in, giving full credence to Mr. De Botton’s theory about the impact of architecture on Happiness. Staying in this place I could very well believe that I never had to return to the hustle and bustle of the trip but could sit on the porch all day and read The Architecture of Happiness and write in this blog and walk around the town for the rest of my life. Which is what we have been doing for the past few days.

On the subject of architecture too, I also think that this type of house is one that Walter Gropius would have very much enjoyed for its simple functionality and its refusal for excessive ornamentation. The shutters he might have criticized, perhaps, but their value for closing out the bright sun during the morning and insulating the house at night are invaluable. The roof is flat, the façade is unadorned with anything, and it meets the needs of the climate and the resources perfectly. No trace of bourgeoisie snobbery here. It is a building that Wright would have liked for its intimate connection with the landscape that surrounded it. De Botton would agree that the use of local stone and the sensitivity to the bright Aegean sun and the breezes makes it a building of beauty. And its embodiment of the values that I myself find lacking in my daily life. De Botton tells us that we find beauty in buildings because they in some way embody an ideal that we find missing—an explanation for the increasing tendency toward creating “authenticity” in place when so much of our lives are based upon a template that can be dropped down anywhere. McDonald’s is everywhere, and locality and rationality seem to be disappearing in the face of mass capitalism. But here, this building stood for a pastoral, simple, and distinctly Aegean life—born and bred to the elements and restoring a sense of calm and serenity to me that is lacking in the busy schoolworld of Davidson and in the frenetic pace of the Classics Trip.

This was an Aegean Wright Prairie House. Indeed, the similarities go far beyond the Wrightian principles of spare ornamentation, use of local materials and congruence with the culture. Like Wright, great attention is paid to the windows. To save energy, Wright placed the windows on his prairie houses underneath deep gables, and often high on the walls. This house contained almost no windows on the northern side, where the summer sun would come pouring in—it faced south, allowing for the most amount of light and air. However, where there were windows on many of these houses, they were shaded by a trellis covered in vines—a natural and elegant solution to the problem of shade. Wright’s prairie houses were constructed using an L-form, and this house too was on a widened L. These were locally grown houses, devoid of false ornament and true to the land from which they emerged. And that is beautiful.

Being in the company of these houses and the sleepy little town that they compose has given me a valuable opportunity to relax a bit. Every morning we have gotten up late, had a simple breakfast and taken a long 2 or 3 hour walk around the island. Siphnos itself is only about 10 km wide and 20 km wide, and we were stationed right about in the middle. So each day we would walk down to a town close to the coast, admiring the bright white houses and the blue domed churches as we went. We climbed staircased trails that moved off of the roads and into the terraced hillside, witnessing scenes of pastoral life along the way—cows enclosed in stone pens, goats moving along a hillside, fields of olives and lemon trees. And then there was the wind—rounding corners we would get hit by a blast of brisk air that would cause my dad to grab for his hat and my mom to pull up the hood on her windbreaker and hunker down. Whenever we were sheltered from the wind the days were warm, but by the coast it was relentless and whipped around the trees and houses and us, the crazy tourists.

One day we walked down to the coast to a remote church located on a spit of land jutting out into the blue blue sea and accessibly only by a narrow band of stone stairs. Another day we descended to the port city of Kamares, lined with small rowboats and potter’s shops. But since this was not the tourist season and it was a weekday, we would arrive in these little villages to find them almost completely empty—shops closed, people entirely absent. It was rather like walking through a town in the computer game Myst—where everything is a little bit foreign and the settings idyllic, but its impossible to figure out what is going on because there is no one around and the signs are all indecipherable. We were walking through ghost towns, and although it was lovely, the feeling of being the only people in sight was slightly unnerving.

Today was probably the best day so far. I slept in and we had a late breakfast before walking up to this little town past Apollonia called Artemonas that afforded us scenes of the island life: people washing clothes and hanging them on the laundry line, smells of cooking, putting a fresh coat of paint on the bright white buildings and sidewalks, rebuilding a sidewalk, grocery shopping. Usually I greeted them with a shy “kalemera” or “yaisas,” some of the few words I have picked up so far (my parents brought me a Europe Phrasebook, so I am trying to learn the words for some staple groceries and how to say “how much”). We reached the top of the hill to find ourselves in the middle of a goat pen, with the goats unluckily hobbled with the fore and rear hoofs on one side of their bodies roped together. Past them were two squat windmills with signature blue roofs, although from the looks of things their sails were put away for the winter.

We descended the slope and passed everyone getting ready for the start of the tourist season, and returned to our cute little cottage where I proceeded to park myself on the front porch. It was warmer today and I sat in the sun and worked on my tan until lunch. We ate tomato and cucumber salad, along with bread and cheese on the porch, and I resumed reading and blogging until siesta.

What a great day.

Spring Break Has Begun

March 14, 2007

Apollonia, Sifnos, Greece.

I have been trying to catch up on the blog like crazy so I will fill you in on the last few days of Istanbul. Right now my parents are with me and we are on Spring Break, hanging out at a beautiful Greek island with lovely homes and fantastic scenery but little to no internet and very breezy weather. So if this post comes super late I apologise. It may be a week before this becomes available.

So after our last day of touring in Turkey we were given a day for testing, and a free day (test days separate from free days are another advantage of Krentz. I wish Toumazou did that for us). So besides studying for and taking the test, we essentially had two free days in the lovely city of Istanbul, and I intended to take full advantage of the opportunities to walk and see the city, as well as doing some shopping.


We slept in, which for me meant waking up at 7:30 instead of 6:30—my how things have changed since Davidson! Then I proceeded to eat more than my fill at breakfast, knowing that I did not want to waste my money on expensive food I tried to take enough rolls and deli meat to last a good part of the day, then I descended back to my room to study.

And study I did, for most of the day, stopping at 3:00 to venture with Sam and some others to the spice market, a relatively short walk from the hotel and a place where I could buy excellent tea and Turkish coffee for my family. We walked into an arched covered bazaar and the smells of spice greeted us. Everywhere we went sellers would yell at us, what they were selling, or would sing songs, or say “hey Lady, come spend your money here!” Or something of the like. But the spice market was not just limited to spices, they also sold the typical traditional gifts of Turkey, including but not limited to the rugs, pashminas, beautiful ceramics, evil eyes, and Turkish Delight. Sometimes we would stop in and browse but mostly we just enjoyed watching the hustle and bustle at the vendors would try to get us into their shops so they could show us their wares.

We did stop at one store where a nice vendor scooped up fragrant piles of tea for us to sniff. They had every type of tea under the sun—love tea, liver-enhancing tea, lemon tea, rose tea, apple tea, tea to cure cancer… Most of the ones we smelled were delicious and he offered to vacuum pack them for us so that we could transport them back to the United States without any problems. He gave us tea and samples of the Turkish Delight he was selling and asked us where we were staying, saying that he had grown up in the area and that we were staying in the best area of Istanbul, to which we vehemently agreed. He asked us if we had ever smoked the water pipe—Hookah—which we had seen being sold everywhere. Hookah is something that is popular in Egypt also, and is a flavored tobacco smoked in an elaborate manner through a pipe in which the smoke passes through water in order to filter it, then up a hose and into the person’s mouth. Not unlike the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. He told us where to find a good place to smoke, and some of us duly took note. I did not care to try the tobacco, but I did hear that a few kids went out later that night and did smoke some of the water pipe, and said that they enjoyed it.

After making our purchases and looking around some more, we returned to the hotel, and I studied some more and took my test—a long and painful process. Then it was some Desperate Housewives. I think I am getting all of my friends hooked on the show, including Scott, which is pretty funny. He knows all of the characters’ names and everything. Then it was finally bed. Free day in the morning!

I woke up early still and went upstairs to breakfast. I went up to the terrace to greet the day and saw some of my fellow travelers up and awake, enjoying the amazing breakfast and watching the clouds move across the sky. It was truly breathtaking; there was one instance in which the sun, which had been hidden by a mass of clouds, actually broke through the cloud cover and shone a spotlight down upon the water behind the Blue Mosque which dominated the foreground. It looked like the voice of God was coming down to speak to us or something, and I ran back downstairs to take some pictures before the light died. Then Stewart and Jess Dwyer and I went on a long walk of the city.

We left before 8 in the morning and we went to the Grand Bazaar—this really famous shopping district in Istanbul, consisting essentially of a massive covered market where one can haggle one’s life away. But we were there too early—the bazaar itself was closed, and outside of it a row of small shops were just setting up their wares, rows and rows of knockoff designer labels including Polo, Puma, Gucci, Armani… just to name a few. This was NOT the type of Grand Bazaar I was expecting, but Jess Dwyer, who had been the previous day assured me that inside the market was much different from the sleazy stuff that I was seeing outside of it. So, to keep moving and to occupy our time until the Grand Bazaar opened, we returned to the Spice Bazaar, where we bought some lovely scarves and ceramics and jewelry, haggling the whole time for the price. Its hard to know whether or not we were getting a good deal at these places, because if we made an offer that we thought might be a tad low the vendor would look at us like we were crazy. But I had read somewhere that the initial offer that the vendor gives at these places is often two or three times the price, and bargaining simply required a good deal of nerves and not allowing some skeptical look to dissuade us from seeking a good bargain. But it was tough. Although I enjoyed many of the items I purchased and thought I was getting a good deal, there was no way to tell.

In any event, I ended up leaving the bazaar with some little coffee cups for Turkish coffee and a Turkish coffee maker and a pashmina for my parents. Then we headed to the Grand Bazaar, where I bought a lovely blue and yellow bowl decorated with floral designs of tulips. Walking through the Grand Bazaar was as big an assault on the senses as the spice market, excepting the realm of smell. Everywhere we went we had vendors approach us with scarves, blankets, you name it… By 11 am we were more than loaded with tons and tons of beautiful things, and we were starting to get cold. So we returned to the hotel to relax for a bit.

I came back and checked in and had some yogurt before another group headed out, this time to a book market that was supposedly located right next to the spice market, in Istanbul. I wanted to go back and buy more tea anyway, so I decided to take them over to the spice market area and look for the book place.

We made our way over to the spice market, and having reached it stopped in at the spice place where the nice young man had vacuum packed our tea and coffee. Chris and Erika bought some more tea, and then we headed over to the book market. Located off of one of the side entrances to the spice market, this was an open air square lined with tons of little shops with books literally spilling out of them. They were stacked in rows and piles and in multiple languages—I spotted German, French, Turkish, as well as English. And some of the books were old—that leather bound indestructible looking book with thick coffee scented pages slightly yellowed with age. We spent a long time looking through the stacks of volumes, exclaiming when we encountered old friends—classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Candide. In addition there were a number of older histories—a British history of the world, histories of the Ottoman empire, histories of tile painting, of rug weaving, and all of the traditional Turkish arts. Curious, I asked around to see if I could find a book about the oft-spoken of architect in Istanbul, a man named Sinan who had designed a number of mosques and baths and schools in Istanbul. I had read about him in an architecture book I had gotten as a gift before leaving, and he was mentioned in relationship to the Blue Mosque and to Hagia Sophia, although he himself had designed neither of these.

I asked about Sinan in one of the shops and the shopkeeper directed me to another store across the street where tons and tons of coffee-table type books were arrayed on the steep shelves. Then the other shopkeeper pulled out two and very expensive books. I asked for something smaller and was rewarded with a nice pocket guide of Sinan’s works in Istanbul, complete with color photographs and floor plans. I had to have it. Then it was out of the book market, past the spice bazaar, and out to the waterfront. I wanted to go on and see one mosque in particular—a building that WAS designed by Sinan, and was considered to be one of the most beautiful mosques in Istanbul.

Finally, I convinced Chris to come with me, and the others departed and we made our way toward where the mosque was indicated on the map—at the top of one of the seven high hills in historic Istanbul, and demarcated by a series of soaring minarets. We followed the slope of the land uphill, and the minarets would duck in and out of our vision as buildings rose up before us. But finally we arrived, at the back side of the huge mosque complex, marked by a solid set of gray walls. We walked around and around until we could get to a side entrance that afforded us entry into the front courtyard of the mosque, which was flanked by a collonade topped with domes. The front of the building contained a cascade of dome shapes, all colored with a grayish blue type of material, and flanked by the soaring minaret towers.

Removing our shoes and stepping inside allowed us to see the greatness of the architect—the vaulted space soared above our heads and the far wall almost seemed to melt into a maze of colored glass. Called Sulimaniye after the Sultan that commissioned the building in the 16th century, this building was built along the same principles as Hagia Sophia some 200 years earlier, but contained a number of structural refinements that reduced the bulk on the inside of the dome that allowed it to soar. The inside is not as densely decorated as the Blue Mosque, but contains the characteristic red and white stripes along the arches, and floral highlights along the edges of the shapes, as the square base of the building moved upward along columns to meet the circular dome shape in the center, flanked by two half domes along the front and the rear. The elaborate tracery and the windows added a sense of majesty without being overpowering—an awe without the senses being completely inundated with color and with pattern.

We stood in silence and looked around at the sides, where the arches of the colonnades and the windows streamed in light, to the front where the low lying chandeliers subdivided the room into a lower level for human beings and prayer, the cables that supported them soaring up into the realm of God and up into the dome where the name of Allah was drawn in flowing lines. On the corners of the building, an elaborate triangular design outlined in red turned out to be sculpted into the walls—the indentations pretended to be flat tracery only a ruse—the walls really did recede and project like we had thought. Then we silently exited, taking the hush of the mosque with us.

Once we had replaced our shoes, we moved to the rear of the mosque, where Suleyman the Magnificent and his family were buried. We moved past a series of scripted headstones with scalloped tops, and came to another domed building placed atop an octagonal or hexagonal space, and entering through the doorway we were confronted with five triangular topped coffins, above which the tiled and floral ceiling rose in an expansion of ordered pattern until it had reached the apex of the dome and concluded in a medallion at the top. This was much more dense decoration than the mosque, but in the small space it seemed strangely appropriate, especially as the tomb of a great Sultan. Not a single surface was left unadorned—no blank spaces where God steps in, just a crochet of color and pattern to the magnificence of the Sultan.

We walked around the exterior of the mosque some more, discovered that unfortunately the tomb of Sinan himself was closed, and retreated to the hotel. By now it was getting quite cold, so we were very happy to be back—we were within 100 feet of the hotel and it started drizzling. I thanked Chris and retreated to my bed and sleep and some Desperate Housewives.

That night was the last night in Istanbul, and we spent the majority of it talking and hanging out, leaving the hotel only to secure a late night meal at McDonald’s—all of us felt so deprived of western food that we broked down and ordered burgers at the cost of our integrity. We sat in the McDonald’s and admired the high quality of the furnishings and criticized the ill-aligned attempt at a Doric collonade around the interior, where the triglyphs and metopes did not sit atop the columns. Then, realizing that we were analyzing the composition of a fast food restaurant as if it were a Greek temple, we laughed to ourselves and left.

The next day we woke up so early that we were eating breakfast before the sun had risen, and heard the 5:30 am call to prayer with our heads sunk down in our cereal bowls. We sleepily loaded the bus and headed for the Istanbul airport, bundled down with all of our packages and excited to finally be on SPRING BREAK!

It was a long day of traveling, between a plane flight and a train ride to Piraeus to meet my parents, whose faces nearly broke with smiles at seeing me, and then a hike to a ferry before arriving on the island of Sifnos. We arrived around 9 and were greeted by Stavros, who owned the hotel that we were staying in. He piled us all into a smallish car and drove up the narrow street high into the island, where the whites of the buildings reflected back in the car headlights. It turns out that my dad had booked a small cottage for us in the capital city of Apollonia, a two room house with white walls and green shutters. I showed my parents a bunch of pictures from the trip, and some of the things I had bought in Turkey and elsewhere, and then it was time for bed. Spring break had begun.

Catching Up Turkey

March 11, 2007

Istanbul, Turkey

I am still catching up from before, so let me tell you first what happened two days ago when we first arrived in Istanbul, and then what has happened subsequently. I am still really far behind so this may come in a number of small installments.

Two days ago we drove from Pergamon to Istanbul, and it was the longest bus ride of our lives. We spent about 6 hours in the bus, straight, in addition to the earlier morning ride from Pergamon to Troy and then another not so short ride to Gallipoli. By the end of it, we were ready to tear out our hair, or throw each other off the bus, or just run around in circles like maniacs--- anything to get off of the bus! But the sites were very nice and we were VERY happy to be staying in one place, Istanbul, for a few nights. And what we saw of the city that night would only be confirmed by the next few days exploring: Istanbul is amazing.

The first site we visited that day was Troy, the ancient city featured so much in Homer’s epic Iliad, the magical mythical city that so few of the early archaeologists even believed in and that Schliemman was so determined to find. And find it he did, set much farther inland than it was during Homer’s time and underneath mounds and mounds of later settlement and occupation. Troy itself was excavated by at least two other archaeologists, one of which, Carl Blegen, ended up concluding that there were as many as nine different major periods of occupation on the area. And of course, every major occupation period can be divided into innumerable other ones, resulting in as many as 90 different phases of Troy. We arrived there already tired from the very early morning wake up and were immediately greeted with a blast of very cold wind. Troy was not going to be a pleasant jaunt through the ruins.

And it turned out not to be so impressive. One important thing to remember is that the Troy of the Iliad took place in the 1200s BC, which places it contemporary with the other Mycenean sites such as Pylos and Mycenae itself, and Sparta’s old megaron area “the Menelaion,” which are a far cry from the times in which Homer himself was writing in the 8th century BC, during the Dark Ages, and even farther away from the classical periods of Plato et al. There is about a one thousand year gap between Achilles and Aristotle, so what may have seemed big to Achilles may not have been so impressive to the later philosopher, and 2500 years since then seems downright small to us. However, Gulen our tour guide was also quick to point out that the fortification walls we saw surrounding Troy were not necessarily representative of the entire complex either—the parts that we saw were only the fortified citadel, (like saying that Manhattan is all of NYC, when that is clearly NOT the case, or something of the like. Form your own analogy.) and a good deal of the city existed in mudbrick homes outside of the city walls.

However, since Troy has been built upon so many times, walking around it was like stepping into a time machine on speed. One minute we were looking at ruins that were dated to 3000s BC, and the next moment we were on the foundations of the Temple of Athena, a Hellenistic structure that was 2700 years newer. Quite a time jump, especially for so small a site. I was happy to see the walls of the Troy of Hector and Achilles, which were constructed of finely cut masonry that sloped inward to protect from earthquake damage, and was saved from a monolithic appearance by a series of small juts that projected from the wall. I am not sure what their purpose was, they were much to small to be bastions, but they did make the wall quite aesthetically pleasing. We even got to see the mudbrick remains of the very first Trojan settlement, which was right around the corner from a Roman bouleterion. Figures.

However, the day was really cold and super windy so we quickly toured the site and hopped on the bus to warm our frigid hands and faces before we reached Gallipoli.

Gallipoli is the site of one of WWI’s biggest battles on the eastern front. Apparently Winston Churchhill thought it would be a great idea to try to get the Allied forces to connect up with the Russian by pushing through the channel that separates the Mediterreanean from the Black Sea. The naval attack failed, so they resorted to a horrible type of land war that resulted in the deaths of thousands and thousands of the Australian and New Zealand (called ANZAK) forces who were left to fend for themselves against the Ottomans. The battle lasted for several months and resulted in 44000 Allied and 97,000 Turkish deaths and the rise of the career of one Mustafa Kemal, who would later found the Republic of Turkey.

We visited the museum here, which was filled with war relics such as bullets, canteens, uniforms, and most poignantly, letters from the soldiers who were stationed in the trenches for the endless months. One of them concluded “Mother please do not send underwear I have money god bless you.” At that point I thought about how similar these young men in the trenches must have been to ourselves, in a strange place on the other side of the world, not knowing where their next clean pair of underwear would come from. I know one of the top things on my list for my parents to bring me over spring break are socks, and I was struck by the similarity in tone between my emails and some of the letters I saw. Of course, when my letters would casually mention one of us getting sick from the food or seeing a mosque or something, they would casually mention that one of their fellow soldiers lost their legs in a landmine explosion….not exactly an identical situation, but nevertheless I felt a great deal of sympathy for these men who risked their lives in such a far away place. For the first time, I knew how it felt to be so very far away from home.

The second place we visited in Gallipoli was the graveyard of some of the fallen soldiers, a sea of white gravestones placed in rows in the grass facing a beautiful stretch of rocky beach that faced brown mountains and a glittering sea. The silence and the beauty of the place arrested me, and we each moved in our own bubbles of silence, walking around and reading the headstones and taking pictures. Again, I was struck at how young these men were. I saw one grave that had a seventeen year old in it. And two nineteen year olds. For once, these people were not far removed or elder men or epic battles of antiquity. These boys were younger than me, and they had died here. I could not even imagine the horror and the tragedy of it. Considerably more quiet than when I had exited, I loaded the bus for the long ride to Istanbul.

Unloading from the bus was probably one of the best feelings of relief that I have experienced on the trip so far. We were here! We drove in past an ancient Roman aqueduct and saw the spires of multiple mosques rise up before us, the shops were open and people were selling glittering scarves and intricate ceramics, and we could finally stay put for a few days. We unloaded from the bus and were pleased to find in our hotel an excellent internet connection and a close distance from Hagia Sophia, as well as the Grand Bazaar. That was all we needed!

Ambrice and Chris Vincoli and I wandered around for a while, I walked into a book store and was amazed at the variety of beautiful books about Istanbul and cooking and history and art and spotted an interesting find—a book of Le Corbusier’s sketches of Istanbul. Most of the other books I had looked at, including one very interesting looking history of Istanbul book, were priced outrageously high, at about 75 turkish lira, which is about 50 dollars. But this book was much cheaper and contained pages upon pages of drawings and plans of the mosques and commentary by Corbusier himself, translated into Turkish, French, and English. I had to have it. Very pleased with my purchase, and hungry, we made our way to a small convenience store to purchase some food before picnicking it up at the hotel.

Our self made meal included some canned grave leaves, tuna, gnutella—surprise surprise, grapefruit, bread and assorted other snacks. A very hodgepodge assortment, but one that filled our bellies without depleting our wallets. We all decided to finish watching Gladiator that night, which was amazing! And then, sleep. We were going to see the rest of Istanbul in the morning.

We woke up later the next day—a whole hour to sleep in! And went upstairs to the breakfast bar which was located on the top floor of the hotel, affording us an amazing view of the bosphorus and Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, which rose up along the shoreline in a cascade of colored domes and sharp minarets. It was pretty amazing, and the food was good too. Enough to pack a lunch with, even, which is something that us poor college kids always appreciate.

The first place we walked to was the old hippodrome, established in 315 when Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire east because Rome itself was already in a big state of decline, and would continue to decline as the empire gradually split into two and the eastern part of the Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire. The Hippodrome looked pretty much like a massive Greek stadium, except for the fact that it has a large dividing wall between the two sides of the racetrack. Called a spina, this area was decorated with all kinds of monuments, whether they are indigenous or imported. One of the pillars from the Temple of Karnak, originally dedicated to Thutmose III was stolen by a Roman empire and set up here on top of a marble platform decorated with all kinds of relief sculpture, of the emperor and his wife as well as the story of the erection of the obelisk, which involved an inordinate amount of time and money. Another one of the imported monuments included a serpentine pillar that was originally located at Delphi, commissioned in order to celebrate the victories of the Greeks over the Persians in the battle of Platea in 479 BC, after which the Greeks were completely free of their foreign oppressors. Although the snakes heads that stood at the top of this pillar are now missing, the bronze pillar is impressive for its size. The last monument we saw is a colossal obelisk of grey stone blocks.

Other than that, not much remains of the Hippodrome, which at one point had a capacity of 60,000. The outline of the footprint of the facility is still there, all of the shops and such stand outside of the shape, with the Hippodrome itself remaining a negative space amid all of the buildings in Istanbul. We walked to the far side and saw the arched vaulting thats supported the sphendome of the horse racing facility, still in existence after all of these years and rising high above our heads from where we stood outside of it. The day was grey and cold but I was so excited to be in Istanbul that it did not matter. Everywhere we went we were greeted by bright colors and vendors hawking their wares and the smells of good food. And of course, the mosques. Although we saw Hagia Sophia the next day, walking from the Hippodrome to the cistern gave us a good preview. Istanbul is FULL of mosques, and they are all beautiful. More on that later.

The next stop was at the cistern, a building that pirated pillars and capitals from the Roman periods, although the cistern itself dates to the time period of Constantine. We descended a set of steps and entered into a gloomily lit forest of pillars and arches, among which threaded a walkway of drippy slick concrete. Our voices hushed in the spooky atmosphere, and the only noises beyond our hushed murmurs were the drips of the water as they trickled down the old columns and the spooky “mood music” that they put on the speakers stationed at regular intervals along the concrete walkway. We snaked around through the forest of pillars, coming to a place where one of the columns was inscribed with a series of tears, stained green with algae and glistening wet in the dim light. As we looked down, we could see all kinds and sizes of fish in the water, and coins where people had thrown money in for wishes. I took out 2 euro left over from Greece and contributed my lot. Moving deeper and deeper into the cistern, we came upon the bases of two columns with the heads of medusa on them. The medusas were rough hewn on all other sides, and lay sideways and upside down in the gloomy water. Pirated from another building and carelessly placed in an odd direction, they stared at us from the water. Creepy….

We walked around for a bit inside of the cistern, but eventually it was time to go so we reemerged into the grey day, and walked toward the Archaeological Museum. As seems to be the case with Dr. Krentz, we were given a short preview of the museum before we were freed to see the pieces themselves, which included, as always, a good deal of sculpture dating from the Roman periods, tons of portraiture, and a sacrcophagus decorated with scenes of Alexander the Great’s battles against the Persians. Many people find similarities between this battle scene and the famous one inscribed on the mosaic floors in Pompeii, that shows Alexander, hair flying, rearing up on his horse to attack Darius, who flees on his chariot from the scene. Although there is no Darius here, Alexander rears magnificently from the left side of the carving, jumping out of the relief background and dominating the action. There were also a good deal of early Christian/Byzantine works, clearly showing the progression of the art of the Roman empire from being dominated by a classicizing style to one that is more rigid and formalized, as Christianity takes over and concern with realistic depiction fades as concerns with heaven and other things beyond the physical world. We spent a good deal of time here, wandering around through the many floors and hallways. I even saw the remains of the bronze serpent head that stood atop the monument in the Hippodrome.

After getting my fill, we went to a pudding shop for lunch, which had tons of buffet style Turkish food. I had made some lunch from breakfast that morning, but I figured that as long as we were in a pudding shop I should try the pudding, so I examined the selection and finally picked a fruit and nut pudding, which tasted kind of like the inside of an apple pie, except with walnuts and craisins imbedded in it. It was quite tasty.

The last stop of the day was at a really old church located on the outskirts of the city walls of Istanbul, which no longer contain the city entirely, having been built at the time of Justinian. The bus ride from the Museum to the church was long, and I was impressed at the size of the city. Although most of the things I did and would continue to do in Istanbul remained within walking distance, I get the feeling that there is tons more to see that require a car ride. The church was of the basilican type, with a dome on the apsidal end and a later addition for baptisms on one side that were covered in frescoes. Other than that the entire church was moaicked, filled with small tesserae of shiny gold and blue. Gulen took us on a tour, explaining all of the biblical stories illustrated on the walls, and pointed out to us that this church is very unusual in that it depicted the story of Mary as well as of Jesus—her annunciation, birth, marriage to Joseph, and finally the birth of Jesus himself. The mosaics were quite impressive to see, but by that late in the day everyone was desperate to get home. I was so tired that I ended up falling asleep on the bus, awaking only when we had reached the hotel.

But, there was a whole city to see! And I had just received news that one of my teammates, Katie, was in Istanbul on Davidon’s spring break and was actually staying in the same hotel that we were! What a crazy coincidence! It turned out that one of her friends is actually from Turkey, and may have made the reservation with the intention of meeting up with us Classics Trip kids, but I certainly had no idea she was coming and was pleasantly surprised when I ran into her in the hallway. We decided to go with Stewart, who knew her as well, and a couple of other Classics kids and go to see the French Quarter of Istanbul, which supposedly was similar to Syntagma Square in Athens, the hub of the city and a busy district where we were guaranteed to get a good meal and see a different part of the city. And it would be a good chance to stretch our legs and do some walking.

Turns out we did a lot more walking than we had bargained for; the French Quarter was probably about 5 miles away, and we crossed the bosphoros on a bridge and up a long steep hill and kept going and going and going before we finally reached a crowded square with tons of people all dressed in black and rushing hurrredly along. Walking into one of the streets that fed the square we were assaulted with light, sound and smell at the clothing and food stores. This was the modern, not the tourist part of Itstanbul, and because it was a Saturday night it seemed like the whole city was there to shop and eat. We were crammed together so tightly it felt like a ride on the Athens subway. It had taken us about an hour an a half to get there, because we had gotten turned around a few times, and we were starving, so we quickly stopped in at a relatively expensive restaurant that turned out to have amazing food. Ambrice and Katie ordered a veggie pizza, and I ordered an amazing chicken dish that had the perfect eastern flavoring, and some others ordered crepes and salads. For a few minutes there was virtually no talking because everyone was so busy inhaling food, but after we were moderately satisfied we immediately kept prying Katie for gossip from Davidson. It felt so good to see another familiar face, and to hear things outside of the same recycled jokes and stories that 20 people stuck in a fishbowl can come up with.

Katie told me all about the team, and my roommates, and about her classes, and life at Davidson in general. Everyone was really excited because we had recently discovered via email and the internet that our own basketball team had made it to the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row, thanks in part to the performance of the so-called freshman phenom Stephen Curry. We wanted to know all about it, and what Katie thought our chances were of going further, and talked about the things we missed from home. We all had different things to say, but I think that constant access to the internet, peanut butter, and weekends were some of the top things on my list. But I would not trade this trip in for anything. I will gladly sacrifice weekends for the chance to see Istanbul.

By the time we were done with dinner, it was close to nine, and all of us had to go back and do homework and prepare for a test that we had coming up, so Katie and I and Ambrice and Stewart started to head back to the hotel. We had not gotten more than 10 feet before we reached a dessert shop, and HAD to stop. So we walked in and Katie ordered some chocolate ice cream and Steward had some of my highly recommended fruit and nut pudding, ordered by pointing to the pictures on the menu. No one in the restaurant spoke any English. Then, stuffed to the brim, we hailed a taxi, told them to take us to Hagia Sophia, the nearest landmark to the hotel, and walked the rest of the way home.

Katie and I hung out for a long time that night, and although I missed some of the people she spoke of at Davidson, I was so excited to be in Istanbul and on the trip that I think I ended up making her jealous of the trip I was having. So in spite of long days, lots of bus and airport time, and some uncomfortable bathroom experiences, I was happy to send her back to the US and stay where I was.

Today was the last guided day in Istanbul, and throughout the day I have realized more and more how much I really love this city. It is absolutely wonderful, and the people are very friendly, once you get past their aggressive soliciting tendencies. And the food and the fabrics and colors here are posititvely delightful. Everything feels like an excerpt from Arabian nights—nothing exists without some kind of pattern or shine. Even the most austere looking mosques contain calligraphy that is so exquisite that it becomes an art form to himself.

And the shops are fun—we have stopped in at many places where the vendors will offer us some apple or lemon tea, ask us where we are from and how we like Istanbul, and have us sit down as they showcase their wares. I am still getting used to the idea of haggling for a price, so some of the places we stopped in just to look at the goods and ask for the prices to get an idea of what things were worth, but I am astonished at the variety of color and pattern that can be found in the city. Between the pashminas, the ceramics, the jewelry, the rugs, and other trinkets one could outfit an entire house.

Anyway, we woke up early this morning and were afforded another stunning view of Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque from our terrace atop the hotel before bundling up to venture into the surprisingly cold Istanbul morning. The first stop we went to was the Blue Mosque, built in the early 1600s by a student of the famous architect Sinan, whose stuff seems to be very important in Istanbul. There have been numerous books that I have seen dealing with him, and Gulen our tour guide has mentioned him a number of times. Something to research in the future. The blue mosque is relatively austere on the outside. We walked through a doorway to an inner courtayard, ringed with a collonade capped with a series of blue colored domes, to confront the entrance to the mosque. The mosque entrance looks like a series of cascading domes, starting from the large one in the middle to smaller half domes terracing down the center, and expanding out to the sides. Framing the courtyard and the central domes are set of six minarets, which is a mark of the prominence of the building.

We walked up to the front entrance and put our shoes into a plastic bag provided for us before stepping inside of the buiding. Like the Orthodox churches, the outside of the building completely conceals the opulence within—the interior of the mosque is covered with elaborate blue tiles in delicate floral tracery. The windows all along the wall opposite the entrance are covered with blue and greens and reds, all floral shapes snaking up the windows and bursting into bloom. A ring of lights hangs low over the empty space, and above it a massive dome rises, ringed with the magnificent Arabic calligraphy and flanked on four sides by pendentives (the triangles on the side of the dome where it merges with the square supporting base below) in disks of tracery and calligraphy. All of the edges between the rounded and the flat shapes of the inside are dileneated in elaborate tracery in a variety of colors. There was nowhere to look that was left undecorated—it was like looking at a cathedral window that had overgrown its stone frame and grew onto the walls and kept going.

We turned in slow circles, admiring the many niches and walls and parapets around the interior of the building. No one spoke, we were all too busy trying to make sense of the profusion of color and shape. Keeping the hushed character that overtook us as soon as we entered, we took some pictures and retreated out into the cold of Istanbul. The next stop was Hagia Sophia, and everyone was excited to see it.

Hagia Sophia was commissioned by the emperor Justianian in 543 AD and is considered to be the forerunner of most Byzantine and certainly much of the mosque architecture in Istanbul. The outside of the building is not much to speak of—a reddish colored plaster covered the outside walls which were supported by big sloping pilasters and topped by one large and two semidomes, surrounded by four minarets. But once we stepped inside, we could see what everyone had talked about with Hagia Sophia. The inside was huge, dimly lit by the windows that ringed the dome and pierced the far walls, and was covered with scrollwork of the Ottoman design. In most places Hagia Sophia looked like a mosque—the four corners where the dome met its supporting pillars were covered with huge black discs decorated with calligraphy in shiny gold. The inside of the dome was covered with a series of spokes in florals leading to a central medallion. However, underneath the ornate florals, the plaster has been peeled back in areas to reveal the early Christian mosaics, including the apse at the church, where the half dome at the far end reveals a glittering gold mosaic of the Virgin and Child. We walked over to the apse to gaze up at the massive mosaic, and to walk around the two outer aisles of the church, which alternated between the plaster and painted areas of the mosque and the mosaics of the original construction.

Unfortunately, the center of the church is dominated by a dark series of scaffolding, which obstructed the view of the center dome. Our tour guide explained to us that the huge amount of tourist traffic in the old building has caused a build up of humidity, threatening the structural integrity of the dome, requiring the scaffolding to be moved to a different position in the dome area. I think some of the grandeur of the vaulted space has been diminished due to this, but the structure is still amazing.

Moving back toward the entrance, we moved up a series of spiraling ramps to reach the second story of the church, which opened up to the main dome in a series of arched colonnades. We emerged from the ramps to walk down the hallways and look from above into the open space. From here, the intricacies of the stained glass on the far end of the church was more readily visible, and along the walls the plastered paint of the mosque had been removed to reveal a series of brilliant mosaics: portraits of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and farther, other images of saints and the sponsors of the church, all outlined in tiny glittering pieces of glass. We walked all of the way to the apse of the church, where looking up through the arches we could glimpse the mosaic of Mary at a closer distance, where it glowed by the assistance of a spotlight. Then we turned and walked back underneath the arches to exit the church, in all its majesty, and confront the cold once again.

The day was getting colder and greyer and I had run out of my last pair of clean socks, so I was suffering with my Sperrys and my bare feet. If we walked fast enough I could keep warm, but we kept stopping and talking, and I could feel my feet getting number and number. But we pressed on, to the other great building in this part of Istanbul—Topkapi palace.

This place was commissioned by Sultan Mehmet during the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. The palace complex is subdivided into a series of courtyards, flanked by a wide collonade of arched columns and marked by a series of tall gate complexes. Tons and tons of school children in uniform passed us on the way, stopping to wave and gawke at Ambrice, who waved back. Apparently black people are a rarity in Istanbul, because we were later stopped by a pair of hankerchiefed muslim women who asked her to pose for a picture with them.

Gulen took us to the royal harem, the apartments where all of the wives and children of the Sultan lived, together with a number of eunichs and other servants. This area was almost entirely self contained. The area contained a number of living spaces, and the hallways between the apartments were entirely covered in the magnificent blue floral tiles, covering the walls with pattern from floor to ceiling. We stepped into the sultan’s chamers, and our eyes were confronted with a scene straight from Arabian Nights—rich carpets, and low couches, together with a huge bed covered in a scalloped canopy. The ceiling of the building rose up in a dome covered with gilded floral and paisley decoration. Not a single flat surface in the room was left unpainted—and the sheer number of different colors were enough to amaze. Some of the lower walls had the bright blue and white and green florals, highlighted with red accents, but the upper reaches had cream and gold leaf motifs, and the ceiling was a variety of reds, golds, and greens. And it was all so intricate. To our modern sensibilities, the pattern was almost too much to be truly attractive, but demonstrated a sense of baroque opulence matched by the magnificent drapery on the walls and floor. We were stunned.

Almost all of the palace was like this—a profusion of color and pattern to the point of over-saturation. Room after room unfolded in a series of floral patterns. Then we were released to explore the rest of the palace ourselves. The tour of Istanbul was over! And spring break was approaching. Gratefully we moved to the treasury area where we saw one of the biggest diamonds in the world, set in a tear shaped setting of gold and gemstones, and the light hit it and it glowed in a shattering array of hard white light. We saw thrones and bedsteads and daggers and all kinds of boxes all set in gold and rubies and emeralds. But we had had enough of being cold and our eyes were quite overwhelmed with the profusion of color and light, and we were hungry and cold. Time to head home.

On the way, we stopped in at a local shop and ordered doner kebabs, which are the closest things to pita gyros, which we had been missing immensely ever since leaving Athens. Pita gyros are the best tasting fast food I have had ever, and while they might not be the healthiest things around, you can get them for less than 2 euro and they fill you up. We scarfed down the doners and sat warming our limbs in the small shop before heading back to the hotel, to a warm bed and a short rest.

It was not long before some of my friends decided that we should try a Turkish Bath, a perfect way to warm up and relax on our first day of freedom. So, a group of six of us girls got the information for a reputable place recommended by the Turkish guy from Davidson, and we walked back toward Hagia Sophia, and then up toward the area of the spice market, stopping in at a relatively innocuous entrance marked with a blue sign with the word “hamam”. We had no idea what to expect, so we descended into the main lobby of the place to talk to the clerk.

It turns out that a Turkish Bath contains a number of different types of bathing options, ranging from a simple self service bath to a full exfoliating, wash and massage treatment. Ambrice and Anne opted for a professional bath, I for the next step of the wash and exfoliating treatment, and Stewart, Erika and Anna Marie for the full exfoliation, wash and massage. They took our money and led us down a hallway into another atrium lined with changing rooms, which really resembled small hotel rooms, complete with a mirror, hairdryer and a set of beds. Towels hung on the walls and the woman in the room gestured for us to enter the rooms two at a time, and to change and leave our things, where they would be locked for safekeeping. We all nervously left our clothes in the room and reemerged wrapped in the checkered towels, and stepped into the lobby to put on these awkward wooden sandals, before the woman gestured once again, and we were ushered down another long hallway to a bathroom area, and finally into the main bathing room.

The main bathing room reminded me of a mosque, an octagonal room capped by a domed ceiling, with the shapes of stars and moons incised in it to let in light. Around the sides of a room were a series of marble sinks, and in the center was a large raised platform of marble. The woman brought us to one of the corners of the room, told us to hang our towels on the hooks, and gave each of us a small metal bowl. She told us to sit, and we all exchanged glances—sitting would mean dropping towel and then we were all going to get to know each other WAY better. But we were already there and the Turkish woman was waiting, so we hung the towels up and sat quickly down on the marble benches, bowl in hand, as she turned on the spigot in the sink and made washing motions with her hands. So we were to bathe using the bowl and sitting down. We giggled at each other for a while, but the water was warm and we relaxed soon enough and were laughing and talking and it felt slightly less awkward.

Then a group of squat fat Turkish women entered in towels. We all exchanged glances, and then it dawned on us that these were probably our washing women. Sure enough they all changed into a one piece bathing suit and approached each of us, taking our hands and leading us to the stone platform in the center of the bathing room, pointing for us to lay down, and collecting their supplies.

Being bathed by someone else is an odd experience, especially when we were lying head to foot around in a circle on a big stone platform in the middle of a foreign country. The women would lather us up, then have us flip over, and finally sit up as they scrubbed our arms. They even brought us over to the spigot on the sides of the bath and sat us down in front of them to wash our hair and faces. That was probably the most uncomfortable part—trying to breathe while the washerwoman’s strong hands were rubbing soap up and down over my mouth and nose. And then remembering to keep my eyes shut as she passed over them. But I felt VERY clean and exfoliated and soon we were out of there and back in the dressing rooms, where we were given a little gift bag of a comb and a moist towlette and a little booklet advertising that this particular hamam was listed in the book of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. It was only then that I realized that one was supposed to give a generous tip at these types of places and I had spent all of my cash in procuring the bath.

I asked around the other girls with me, and it turns out that between us we only had 3 lira, not enough for one tip, let alone six of them. Sheepishly we exited and informed the women, who had been waiting patiently for us, that we had nothing to give them and told them that we could go to an ATM asap and return with their payment. They did NOT look happy.

So we remerged from the hamam with a mission—we felt terribly for not tipping and wanted to find an ATM as quickly as possible. Luckily we found one within a block, and I withdrew the requisite cash, which came, as always, in a singe 50 lira bill. So we had to find somewhere to split the cash so we each could pay our bathing lady. We had seen a grocery store on the way and from our previous experience they were the best places to break large bills, so we stopped in and I bought a 2 lira pack of cookies. When I came up to the register I asked to be paid in small bills, and the cashier took one look at me and said “no.” She asked if I had 2 lira, and I said no, so there was a huge stalemate until a nice gentleman came and traded his 2 5 lira notes for a 10 and she could finally break it for us. We went back to the bath after that, finally having gotten our tip, and paid the women, who looked much happier with bills in their hands.

It was back to the hotel to share our stories with some of the disbelieving people on the trip who were fascinated at the idea of a public bath, some breakfast food for dinner and lots of studying. We had a test on Turkey the following day and I wanted to be prepared.