― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else.”
Go-Date: Day ……pick one – Various and sundry days, thru Feb. 20
Lessons Learned: You need not have an agenda, a list of locations, things to do, or UNESCO sites to visit. There are marvelous things to see just around the corner.
Regrets: Why didn’t we do this when we were 19?
What did we do?
• Hike around Epidaurus
• Hike around Palamidi Fortress
• Visit to the Nafplion Archeological Museum
No, we are not being tourists. We are taking hikes, visiting sites that don’t make tour guides, finding antiquity sites so obscure they are often closed, free, or found on local guides (but not in tour books), local referrals, and blind luck when we stumble upon them. We’ll let the pictures do the talking.
Epidaurus
We already did the UNESCO site visit, but now there is a 6-kilometer hike around the dig. And we found that all the monuments aren’t contained within the fence of the archeological location.
Epidaurus (Asklepion) was first excavated by Panagiotis Kavvadias (easy for you to say) of the Greek Archaeological Society in 1870-1926, and since he had a lavish 56 year grant he was able to uncover the sanctuary’s most important monuments. Additional, limited excavations were done in 1942-43, in 1948-1951, and in 1954-1963. In fact, new excavations by the Archaeological Society have been in progress at the sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas since 1974 and is still in progress today (see the following pictures). That’s a lot of digging and assembling, so much that it looks like a lot of Legos laying about.
We read about a nice walk around the monument in the http://www.visitnafplio.com/ web site. This site has great ideas for a lovely part of Greece, but can be rather vague in its directions. In fact, for this walk we got lost before we even found the trail-head. But with suggestions of the employees of the archaeological site we found the starting point and had a great day.
Total cost for the day was coffee and breakfast pastries. So for less than $10 and we had a great walk.
Palamidi Fortress Hike
The fortress hovering above Naplion is too impressive to only visit once. So, Ellen and I parked down in the town and hiked all the way to the top, and then took the stairs in the fortress back down to the harbor. It sounds easy, and its not a terribly long hike, but its not the distance, it’s the change in altitude that gets you. You are either walking up a 20% grade, or navigating down narrow, tall, winding stairs with sheer drop-offs on one or two sides. People hundreds of years ago were shorter than we are today, so I don’t understand why these steps should be more suited to LeBron James than Ellen or myself.
Along the way, we took a side excursion to a local ouzo distiller, but alas they were closed for the season to visitors. If you are ever in the neighborhood in June, July or August I’d take the tour. The people were very nice, but wouldn’t let us in the gate. Its just as well, I’m sure I didn’t need any ouzo onboard during this hike. Especially going down those stairs from Palamidi.
Visit to the Nafplion Archeological Museum
There are dozens of archeological sites within 20 kilometers of Nafplion. A great deal of the artifacts are housed at the Nafplion Archeological Museum. Which is a very old, farm stone, two-story building on the north end of Syntagma Square in old town Nafplion. Even if you aren’t going to the museum, this is where you want to be on a lazy, sunny afternoon. Nafplion was a Venetian town for about 200 years. They built the Palamidi Fortress overhead, and the town’s architecture is all Venetian as it was a very prosperous period for the city until it fell to old King Otto in 1715.
The museum was first built in 1713, during the second reign of the Venetians, under the Naval Proveditore Augustine Sagredo to be used as the navy’s depository, I couldn’t find when it became the museum. It is well-preserved, quirky, not ADA-compliant, and a very interesting Venetian structure.
Nafplion was inhabited way back to the Mycenaean period (1600-1100BC) and up till the present day, although there have been times that the city was largely deserted. It was known in Venetian times as Napoli di Romania and even today it looks mostly like an Italian-looking town. It was the first capital of Greece after the war of independence against the Turks in 1821. It was also the the place where the first president of Greece, Johannis Kapodístrias, was murdered in 1831.
The ship-shaped island in the mouth of the harbor is the castle of Bourtzi. The Venetians completed its fortification in 1473 to protect the city from pirates and nasty ship-hosted frat parties. In 1822 it was captured by Greek troops and served as a fortress until 1865. It was then transformed into residence of the executioners of convicts from the castle of Palamidi. This would be like living in a stone condo during February in Minneapolis. I really do like the Venetian style architecture. Its off season, they only take tours to the island on Saturdays and Sundays, so we never seemed to make it downtown on these days to take the tour.
Gorgeous stuff. Could be great inspiration for potters.