This trip involved stops in Athens, Delphi, Mystra, Yithion, and Olympia before a return home.Unforgettable and eventful, I can barely think how to describe it, for the memory is, I think, enough. The highlight remains Athens though Delphi and Olympia absorbed me as they have many others and in may accounts – in novels like Forster’s Maurice for instance.
Maybe with sites you visit as ruins and which are isolated from contemporary modernity, you feel you tread in too many steps that trod things that have only decayed in order to change and can only further decay. Such things can never transform you from a mere tourist to a visitor to the living home of a people that has undergone change within the idea of their Hellenism. Bot not so Athens, for it is like a palimpsest of Greek culture in the flow of the lives of Greek people that renews itself – a small Byzantine church (see below) almost buried in a road island and towered over by shop fronts becomes a thing in itself when you merely come across it in a walk along a major shopping street on your way to the Archaeological museum, the Acropolis a hub of night life and student buzz.
I miss you Greece.xxxxxx
The Byzantine church of Panagia Kapnikarea on Ermou Street in Athens. Photograph: Why Athens: https://whyathens.com/byzantine-churches-athens/
With love
Steven
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