I’m a sucker for alliteration.
I just came back from a week-long trip to Greece, and all in all it was pretty good fun.
The week began with three days in Athens. This was something I really wanted to see because I studied A-Level Classical Civilisations, one module of which was Athenian Democracy, taught by the fantastic Mr Middleton. There’s just something about having a really inspiring teacher that really gets you genuinely interested in the material; those lessons still stick in my mind. So for me the experience of standing on the Areopagus, or seeing the Parthenon built by Pericles, or the Thermistoclean wall – these things were more than simple tourist sights. I knew the history, the significance. I saw the theatre where they performed Oedipus Rex and Prometheus Bound, the tragedies and the comedies; the very birthplace of thousands of years of culture, the works that inspired Shakespeare. It all meant so much to me because I understood it.
The new Acropolis museum is also quite a thing to behold, although they are awfully fond of glass floors over very large drops…
There’s an exhibition of various artefacts discovered on the Acropolis, and a brand new gallery housing the Parthenon marbles, including casts of the ones not actually physically there, mostly because they’re in the British Museum in London. It’s actually astonishing how many the BM actually does have; easily half of the total collection. The most depressing thing about the marbles is that today they’re in a very sorry state; some you can understand only from the accompanying descriptions.
We took a walk around many of the other sights, the ancient Agora (or marketplace), the historic Plaka district, and sights like the Parliament building and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
We then headed down to Piraeus to take a fairly hellish overnight ferry to Rhodes. Spend a bit more and get a cabin or a seat, is all I can say. I did get some reading in, though.
Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about Rhodes, so the whole thing had no resonance with me; the Old Town is however extremely beautiful, but my knowledge of the history and iconography of the period is somewhat weaker, so I had trouble identifying the origin of most of the architecture. Heavily fortified, though, probably Byzantine or Crusader, although there are the occasional Islamic (probably Ottoman) touches like water fountains, but I mostly had to guess!
On Rhodes we stayed in a hotel in Faliraki, which isn’t as bad as you’d expect from its reputation. The beaches are beautiful, and the nightlife is nothing if not loud and vibrant, but we didn’t partake in much of it. Cocktails are, happily, abundant. The sea is incredibly cool and clear, and generally an all-round pleasure to swim in.
Hiring a car is certainly worth it, we did it for only a day and still got to see many of the sights around the island, including the beautiful Lindos.
The weather altogether was incredible, there was pretty much only five minutes in the whole week in which the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Speaking of the sun, the heat at midday was absolutely ferocious; it became almost impossible to do anything except sit in the shade and sweat, unless you had access to a pool or the sea to keep cool. Every day you think you’ve gotten used to the heat and every day feels like you’re about to melt. We really noticed it in the amount of water we were consuming just to replace what we were losing. That’s certainly what advice I’d give to anybody else going, keep out of the sun as much as possible, and keep hydrated.
Anyways, it was altogether a lovely week, and it’s certainly a part of the world I’d consider visiting again.
Pictures are available here.
