“Incredible” is the word I keep landing on when thinking about my time in Greece. Over and over again I keep cresting a hill and getting blown away by what’s on the other side. The country is just stunning (another word that keeps coming up), and I could spend a whole trip just exploring Greece on its own.
Most of what I knew about Greece before I arrived came from the Classics courses for my History BA, which made Greece very academic for me. The Greece I knew was the Greece of Plato and Alexander, over 2,000 years ago, and it turns out modern Greece is so much more than that.
(On a side note, I found Classics to be somewhat inaccessible and, well, pretentious. It’s very tied to its roots in the late 1800s, when it was a way of signalling your status as an elite. Classics scholars didn’t write to educate others; they wrote to show off their ability to drop casual references to Herodotus or quote entire paragraphs in Greek or German, untranslated. If their readers couldn’t keep up, then clearly they had no business studying the subject. It turned me off pursuing it further.)
As a result I expected to be a lot more impressed with the remains of Plato and Alexander’s Greece than I actually was. It’s not that I was unimpressed: the ancient buildings are surprisingly huge, and the fact that they’re still standing – or were intact enough to be restored to their current size – is remarkable. But, well…not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of the Greek ruins are, at the end of the day, extensive piles of rocks. It takes a lot of concentration just to imagine what the original buildings were supposed to look like, let alone what it would be like to live in them, so properly appreciating the sites takes a lot of mental energy. Being well-versed in the Classics would probably help, but even then it takes work to extrapolate the shapes of buildings from the fragmentary outlines on the ground.
Smaller artifacts were easier to appreciate. The National Archeological Museum was definitely worth a visit, so my anonymous escalator friend gets credit for pushing me to see it. When I think “ancient art” I tend to think very simplistically: crude drawings and hieroglyphic pictures, so I was surprised by the level of detail in the pieces, and how lifelike many of the statues were. The Mycenaean collection was particularly impressive. Multiple people mentioned The Mask of Agamemnon as a highlight, but honestly I found the intricate details of the buttons and ornaments much more interesting (if hard to photograph).
So to recap: I started my Greek trip with a direct flight from Istanbul to Athens, where I spent a good chunk of the week. There’s an interesting seediness to Athens that doesn’t show up in my pictures. The city is covered in graffiti, and many places outside the tourist areas look run-down – and a little scary, especially after dark.
It was also surprisingly expensive. Part of the problem is getting used to being in a country with a stronger currency than home. Plus, 1 Euro to 1.49 Canadian is a difference that’s just enough to be significant, but not so much that the prices look significantly different. 10 dollars Canadian is a comfortable amount of money to spend on lunch…10 Euros, not so much.
The other part of the problem was that I was staying in a tourist area, so naturally the prices were inflated – although only by a couple Euros, I’m discovering now that I’m out in smaller towns.
Leaving Athens, I headed to Delphi for a quick overnight trip. It was also to see ruins, but Delphi managed to overcome the problem I described above by putting its ruins in the middle of some truly stunning mountains. In fact, the mountains of Greece are badly underrated overall. They’re not as large as the Rockies, but as a result you can see much more of them. It was really something to look out the window of my hotel room in Delphi and see all the way to the ocean.
None of it was as impressive as Meteora, though.
I’d hesitate to say Meteora was my favourite part of my entire trip, but it’s definitely in the top three. Enormous fingers of rock bursting from the ground, balancing five-hundred-year-old monasteries precariously on their tips. Stairs were only cut into the sheer cliffs in the last century, and before that the monks had to hoist themselves and everything they needed hundreds of metres into the air. Standing at the edge of the cliffs makes you marvel at the strength of faith needed to build these structures, just one slip away from a unsurvivable fall. I’d never even heard of it before I arrived in Europe, but I’m so glad I did – just an incredible experience.
Now I’m writing from Ioannina, a cute little town built around a Byzantine castle that served as the seat of a powerful local Ottoman governor. It’s apparently a popular spot for Greek tourists within the country, on their way to see Meteora or Vikos Gorge, but there’s not much to see within the town itself.
My being here is a good example of my lack of planning coming back to bite me. My original thought was to go from Meteora to Corfu, and from there to Albania. Ioannina was supposed to be a brief stop to catch my breath and make the bus connection manageable. After some research, though, it turns out that there’s not much to do in Corfu at this time of year, and also that it’s kind of a pricey place to be. On top of that, Albania seems to be a difficult place for travelling, with poor infrastructure. So rather than trying to figure out that whole headache, I decided (very last minute) to cut my losses and take a cheap flight to Dubrovnik…via Athens. A little roundabout, but oh well.
So that’s goodbye to Greece. What a time it’s been.
Harmon Moon 