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.