For I’m sleeping under strange strange skies
Just another mad mad day on the road
My dreams are fading down the railway line
I’m just about a moonlight mile down the road.
—The Rolling Stones, “Moonlight Mile”
I left my hostel in Omonia Square as early as I could and walked down to a corner bus stop. By luck, providence, the Great Magnet, or the grace of God, my bus was there waiting; but, adhering to the disgruntled ego of man, the driver would not open the door. He was stalled in heavy Athenian traffic, but when I walked in front of him and waved, he only wagged his fulsome finger and pointed it toward the sign five meters back, directing me to wait for the next bus. I guess there’s a difference between a designated stop and an incidental one. Traffic was moving so slowly, though, that I just walked alongside his sealed doorway until he came to the next Official Sign, although I had to run the last block, knowing the driver would not hesitate to leave me behind.
At the station, I caught a bus to Corinthos and rode it along the narrow stretch of land called the Isthmus that gates the entirety of the Peloponnese, broken only by ancient walls constructed against Persians and Turks and by a canal sixty meters deep that links the Corinthian Gulf with the seas around Attica, and was when we passed over it plied by a long cargo freighter which was directed by the steep, man-made cliffs as a log plume on a waterlogged track at Disneyland.
New Corinthos serves the Isthmian trade route from the coast of the gulf side, five miles from the more-defensible archaic site of the city, where Medea killed her children. I missed the bus to the archaeological site by minutes and instead of waiting for the next bus started walking southwest, directed by my compass since the noontime sun was no use. I got a greasy pizza slice from a bakery, then followed a predominant road between rows of bland concrete high-rises until it emptied into pasture and citrus groves and small houses where everyone wears white and spends all day helping their grandparents.
I saw a highway off to the southeast and a solitary mountain of stone in front of me, topped by the split teeth of medieval ramparts, which could only be the Acrocorinth — the ancient redoubt of Corinth and one of the Fetters of Greece, so named because whosoever controlled its unassailable fortifications controlled the Peloponnese. In the absence of any map or guide, the Acrocorinth became my waypoint and my goal, and I kept on the road I had started down until asphalt bled into dirt, the neat wood houses into destitute shacks of corrugated aluminum fronted by weeds and ivy. A slope and a row of shrubs cored by a barbed fence separated the path from the intermittent roar of the highway, now only ten feet away. While I was trying to figure out how to best cross over, something white jumped from the open road into the scrub, and I armed myself with a bit of ragged cement. But the creature had fled.
Soon the slope leveled, the shrubs died away, and the highway branched off west toward Argos, while the main route continued on south past the Acrocorinth to Nafplio. I followed the advice of an orange-vested road worker with long hair and a dangling red flag and took the western road under the daunting slopes. A cop pulled over and asked me where I was going. “This is a highway,” he informed me. “You can’t use feet here!” I agreed and jumped off the service lane into the heath until he left, then continued walking to an offramp that led up to Archaia Corinthos.
The road through the tiny service-based suburb that surrounded the meager ruins and on up the hill was composed entirely of switchbacks that diverted traffic from the steep gradient of the Acrocorinth and tourists from violating the farms and olive groves that clung to it. I soon got tired of walking ten steps for every one step of ascent, and turned toward a more direct route. I threw my backpack (much lighter since I ditched three read tomes in Athens) up the rocky cliff and climbed up after it. Some pheasants scattered at the noise, flew in a circle, and landed a few yards away as if nothing had happened. In Fall, the Greeks shoot the stupid birds with rifles for their harvest feasts. Rejoined, my backpack and I traversed a sloping copse of olive trees and frail grass, marked in the corner by a mysterious mattress and a few overturned lawn chairs, then climbed a few fences, crept by a squadron of slumbering hounds, and emerged back onto the next tier of the road that swirled slovenly up toward the fortress.
The switchbacks stopped after this, so I followed the road as it curved up around the mound. More of the turreted and castellated architecture came into view over the limestone reef at the top of the hill, rising ruinously from sun-scorched grass. Some kids on mopeds waved at me on their way up the road and again on their way back down, when I was still plodding up at a steep angle. I bore my stubborn determination against the fatigue, the heat, and the added anxiety of my guidebook, which said the site closed at 3. Although I was only halfway to the top when this time passed, I was determined to succeed even if I had to breach the high revetments alone and without the aid of Turkish cannon or lengthy siege.
I saw the gates and bridges of the entrance to the citadel overhead, but the road turned indecisively around a secondary hill and up to the visitor’s parking lot. I took to a game trail up the steep gorge between the two hills, under the drawbridge that traversed it, and outpaced to the top a blue minivan that passed me on the meandering road just as I disembarked for the more direct and hazardous route. At a store near the entrance, I bought water and drank a liter of it — you can handle any temperature and hardship if you drink enough water — before exploring the Venetian fortress upon the classical citadel.
The Acrocorinth is approachable only by rocky defiles and the narrow road, and can be entered only through a series of gates on the eastern slope. Through the first gate and across the drawbridge, the path runs up along an arrow-slitted wall and into a second doored checkpoint, then curves up the hill under the bloody and forbidding auspices of a stretch of towered battlements to the mightiest gate, with funnels for hot oil and niches for deadbolts and a portcullis, though the valuable metal was long since removed. This wall runs around the irregular plateau and apexes in fortresses on an eastern outcropping and on the high western knoll. A retaining wall holds up the higher southern side, and is topped by an old Orthodox chapel with a collapsed onion dome.
I walked over to the eastern fortress, which was more or less complete, then followed the encircling wall around the back to the western hill. Of the tower that once stood on this highest part of the mountain, only the stony foundation remains, from which vantage you can see the mainland across the Gulf from Corinth and the folded landscape of the Peloponnese that stretches away to the south. Protocol dictated that I urinate triumphantly off the side of the vertiginous ruin, and after following this dictum I hurried back down towards the main gate on a trail that threaded the high yellow grass, which rustled with snakes and grasshoppers and wind and my own haste, and buzzed with crickets, and sang with birds, and snagged my socks with chaff and nettles.
I was in a hurry since I wanted to get to Nafplio by nightfall, and since I thought it was later than 4:30. So I hustled down, grabbed my pack from the earthen wall where I had cached it, and jogged down to the parking lot, then started trudging back down the road. I had not descended far when a car heeded my thumb and stopped, and I climbed in with three women: an Austrian, a German, and a Russian. Austria told me about their trip and said she worked for Hewlett Packard, and I thanked her for making my printer. Germany and Russia in the front seats pretended not to speak English, though they kenned it perfectly when Austria spoke to them, and confirmed my observations about the chilly folk of the Baltic.
The Teuton dropped me off at the site of Ancient Corinth, and I spent a while looking over the ruins of the marketplaces, the temple pillars, and the mighty and hollow rock of the Fountain of Glauke. The setting sun reddened ruins and rendered the Acrocorinth above with shadowy streamers and gilded light. I retrieved my pack from behind the ticket office and belted its weight onto my hips and shoulders, then threw my canvas shoulder bag around my neck and walked quickly in anticipation of having missed the bus to New Corinth, with attached accessories, drying socks, a pair of sandals, and the bag all flopping ridiculously. I flagged down the driver, who told me, “It is one Euro for this service.”
In Corinth, I asked the driver and a Greek woman for directions to the bus station, and they told me to take a taxi. “Look at me,” I said. “I can’t afford a taxi. I’ll just walk there.” They insisted that I abandon such winsome endeavor and find a taxi, because it was at least three kilometers and probably more. It was in fact only a ten minute walk. People in hot climates, when they adapt to air-conditioning and sealed transport systems, lose the disposition to walk, and find such a modus vivendi abhorrent. The Greeks look up from their frappes with a combination of disdainful incredulity, hostly apprehension, and good humor on the Westerners who stroll about under the noontime sun: the same look a Californian might send a Scandinavian who wears shorts and swims in the ocean in early Spring.
At the Corinthian bus station a woman told me I needed to take a bus to the Peloponnesian gateway station near the Isthmus. I had missed the latest one by seconds, and missed the next one a half-hour later, being too interested in a cheese pie; but somehow the next bus to swing by was also going to Isthmia. Soon I found myself on the overbooked 8:30 service to Nafplion, standing in the aisle with a dozen Greeks while the bus rocked unsteadily and the driver dodged drunks on the two-lane highways of Argolis. We were so penitent and still that it felt like a mass, except I smelled horrible since I had spent the 100 degree afternoon running up a steep hill under a backpack.
In Nafplio, after overcoming the aggravation of a lengthy hunt for my intended lodgings, I checked into the Hotel Economou, which attracted me because it offered dorm beds for €10 a night. There was some confusion when I forgot that in Europe the second floor is the third from the ground, but finally I met the matronly owner there and found my room, already occupied by an Australian law student from Melbourne named Pat, who like me wanted to visit Mycenae and Tiryns the next day. The hotel bed could have made an excellent percussion instrument for someone with the patience to learn its creaking, but even that could not prevent me a fitful rest.
Pat and I got cheese pies the next morning and took the 10 a.m. bus to the conflagrated husk of Agamemnon’s once-great palace. The unexpected occasion of Environment Day meant admission was free, but did not stop the tourists from buying hundreds of tiny plastic water bottles and disposing of them in the trash. Pat and I passed under the famous Lion’s Gate and climbed up to the palace at the top of the stout and commanding hill, its roped off lanes, tiered foundations, and Cyclopean walls packed with Europeans in shorts and Japanese who struggled to document themselves in front of every outstanding feature. We went into a black cave under a triangular cave, which was once a cistern, but a deafening buzz and a well-founded fear of wasps drove us back out.
At the feet of the hilltop fortress are several beehive tholos tombs, earth-clad domes of stone blocks in which kings were buried and the slightest suggestion of sound echoes painfully. The chambers are approached through avenues between the angled revetments of monolithic rocks that buttress the grassy hill and end in high and conspicuous doorways, long since shattered by the treasure-seekers and Turks who cleared out the mausoleums and left only the shell for archaeologists to wonder over. The monuments have lasted 3500 years, and will outlast the highest of today’s skyscrapers. Even the five-year-old descriptive signs, printed on metal sheets, have begun to peel and fade in the currents of sun and time and human hands.
Pat and I walked to Mycenae town for lunch, then took a bus back toward Nafplio and stopped at Tiryns on the way. We had been waiting under some sort of berry-bearing tree, and had unknowingly picked up some of the rotten remnants of the year’s ignored and over-ripened produce on the soles of our shoes. When the bus stopped for gas, the driver looked down and started shouting, “Malakas! Malakas!” A trail of black and half-jellied berries led straight down the aisle to our row, the only one occupied, so the culprits were caught red-handed. The driver chased us out into the parking lot and told us, verbally and with emphatic gestures, to wipe off our shoes. While we guiltily did so, he took out the rugs on the bus steps and mopped the floor with a furious diligence, ejaculating, “Malakas,” under his breath.
To speak in generalities, Greeks are glibly complacent, being possessed by a cheerful ennui and a love for peace and quietude, yet still bright-eyed behind their sunglasses, especially when there is a rumor to tell. They enjoy with somber appreciation coffee and good food, open air and soil and green things, and are tendentious with regards to healthy habits, so long as those habits involve nothing more active than a diet, and so long as that diet tastes better than the unhealthy alternative. They are never sick, but often dying. They are inquisitive and extroverted, proud of their history in a vague, thoughtless way. Sincere and roughly impatient, they are occasionally struck with solemn indignation or, like the fastidious bus driver, foreign and exhaustive fits of aimless rage; alarming emotions wrench their features, exude in every breath, until the storm has passed and the happy balance is restored.
The driver put away his cleaning supplies and allowed us back on the bus to Tiryns. Little remains of the Archaic fortress but the walls that beleaguer the low hill on which it was constructed, the blueprint of the palace and magazines drawn by remnant foundations, and the mystery of how so many massive blocks of cut stone came to be carried there. We walked on for the last few miles back to Nafplio, and then went into the peaceful downtown. Between the refined apartments of white stucco and brick are cobblestone alleys littered with the tables of inviting restaurants, and wider avenues cruised aimlessly by Saturday evening drivers under the framed strings of lights, patterned as wreaths and geometry and lettering, that hang over the main thoroughfare of every township in Greece.
We ate rooster at one of the restaurants, then went out to the main drag by the docks and the palm strands on the shallow northern edge of the Nafplian peninsula, which juts out west into the ocean. The southern rim is much higher and entirely occupied by a long series of Venetian fortress complexes: the Akronafplio along the low climb of the peninsula and the Palimidi on the much higher ridge that stretches back on the mainland. On the back the dunes fall precariously into the Argolikos Bay. Another stronghold, the Bourtzi, sits out in the harbor on an island just west of the peninsula, and at night spotlights illuminate all three redoubts.
On the waterfront promenade, a wide cobblestone street intersects the bars on one side and the accompanying canopied seats on the other. Here Pat and I sat for hours trying to grok the Hellenic nightlife. The outdoor tables were entirely occupied, but only on one side, as Greeks positioned themselves to look in at the pedestrian current while they sipped flat beer or lukewarm coffee over a period of hours. This tedious consumption, which like their ignored company was a sideshow to the main act of observation, meant that each of the packed cafés had comparatively few attendants, each of whom generally had nothing to do. Inside, the bars were empty. People did not come to drink; the drinks were only excuses, and the perceptive guests only needed one.
The seated crowd was almost exclusively older than 30 and predominantly male, but the pedestrians were generally young adults. (It’s apparently acceptable in Greece for older men to shamelessly ogle girls, and they make no excuses, nor do they pretend to be doing anything else.)
The evening strollers are the symbiotic complement to the audience in the Nafplian nocturnal ritual. Like the Albanians, though I would not make the comparison known to either people, young and witless (and perhaps penniless) Greeks dress up and come into town to walk up and down this street under the rude attentions of the grimly silent assembly. Their transient packs begin in the shady square at one end of the esplanade and walk, eyes wandering and mouths sealed, to the square at the farther end, where they might converse for a few minutes before turning around for another lap. This repeats indefinitely, or until the clubs begin to draw people in with playlists of 90s hits.
Pat left early the following day for Sparta, but I stuck around to explore the town, and to make the obligatory trip up the 999 steps to the pile of stones above it — rocks cut and fitted to the specifications of tactical design, lugged with Herculean effort to the long high peak, and bound with a clay mortar that sustains clinging greenery where it has grown soft, into steps for men and ramps for guns, arches and doorways, cisterns and chapels; walls to hold back the soil of the mesa; walls to hold back men, with slits for arrows and rifled barrels and angled niches for cannon; bastions named for a random assortment of Greek warmongers, like Themistocles, Achilles, and Epaminondas; and flag stands that have seen too many colors to care which heraldry flutters overhead. I’d seen too many Venetian fortresses for the Palimidi to make much of an impression.
Back in town, I walked along the waterfront and watched the sun set behind the waterbound Bourtzi and the more distant hills, from a spot in a firing line of amateur photographers. The red-gold orb with echoes of orange silhouetted the west and melted the ribbons of scattered clouds crimson as hot metal. At night I washed my clothes in the sink, and in the morning they were dry, or just damp enough to be a short-lived comfort against the heat of the road.
Sunday morning I took an 8:30 bus from Nafplio to the Peloponnesian travel hub at Tripoli, and from there walked five miles south to Tegea, through the fertile hills of Arcadian farmland and the spectrum of highway pollution. I ate a lunch of bread and Nutella, spread on with a pocket knife, in a shady park between the old Agora and the Altar of the Imperial Cult, among the statues of modern war heroes. From Tegea, I followed signs and directions further south to a hamlet in red and white and a temple of Alea Athena. I hopped the metal fence, hung my bag on a post, and circled the ruin, its solid foundations surrounded by a junk yard of stone. Insects crowded the verdant fields, the scarlet, white, and lavender sunbursts of flowers, and the green and yellow of olive trees and stout evergreen shrubs.
From the village the winding road led inevitably west to a town on the two-lane highway, where a man who worked for the bus service showed me where to wait. The eventual bus drove south from the unknown village and up into the foothills of the Parnon Mountains, one of the pair of ranges that skirt Laconia like a reversed V, open only at the narrow top and on the southern sea. Fallow wind turbines capped the hills, which were yellow and green with scrub that faded under dark green firs as we proceeded, and white and red where the limestone, sandstone, and shale streaked through the undergrowth. Scenery changes a remarkable degree in Greece, and half the country is mountainous. Soon we entered the rolling wooded piedmont of the Skiritai Rangers, and then rolled softly down onto a shining plain that long ago, by the purity of its air and water, the rugged quality of its soil, and the intensity of its law and regimen, produced the hardest soldiers in the world.
East are the Parnon Mountains, west the razor-edged ridge of Mount Taygetos and its apprentice peaks, and south a rolling and cultivated plain all the way to the sea, bisected by the River Eurotas, which is so drained by agriculture and thirst that by the time it reaches Sparta it is hardly a stream, and looks pathetic in the wide riverbed, like a child in a shirt ten sizes too big. I visited the half-circle ruin of the Temple of Artemis where boys were ritually whipped, and the plot of disinterred land between a house and a supermarket where King Leonidas was supposed to be buried under a shrine to his heroism: one of the many archaeological finds that dot the new city, stony squares clawed surgically open, desecrated and abandoned.
Thucydides wrote, “If the city of the Lakedaemonians were destroyed, and only its temples and the foundations of its buildings left, remote posterity would greatly doubt whether their power were ever equal to their renown,” but the Romans found it a city of wood and voluntary poverty and made it a city of brick, adding a theater-arena west of the old acropolis hill. The knoll, no more than twenty feet in height, is penned in by massive stones and planted over with neat rows of olive trees, the ground carpeted by cut grass. A peacock screams, and the white concrete of the characterless City juts above the low trees, imposing itself gracelessly on the hallowed cemetery.
Without the site, in front of the modern sports stadium, is a more modern monument: a statue of Leonidas in heroic proportion, facing east with his shield up and his sword drawn against the Persian menace. Beneath him is written, Molon lave — Come and take them — the characteristically Laconic bravado of the most famous King of Sparta. The town was repopulated in the nineteenth century on the order of the same philhellenic Bavarian, Otto the King of Greece, who made Athens his capital as tribute to posterity. Today’s Spartans share the name and live on the graves of antiquity’s heroes, inherited due to modern idealizations of an ancient totalitarian slave state no more worthy of reverence than the Third Reich.
In addition to being Pentecost on the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Sunday summoned the Greeks to elect their legate to the European Union, a position which is considered comically trivial in countries like Britain, France, and Germany, too self-important to care about their confederate role. Yet through the European Parliament the Greeks hope to assert the patriotic frustration of a country that once was, or thinks it should be, better off than it is now. At night, all the old Spartan men sat around sipping coffee and beer, flipping rosaries around their fingers if they were not holding a cigarette, as they watched the televised results of the exit polling instead of leering licentiously at passing girls. The television stations in my hotel were crowded with commentary on and speeches by the victor, a bald and aristocratically mustached sloucher from the Pazok worker’s party, and after a few minutes spent considering the Greek remake of Karate Kid on the only non-political channel, I went to sleep.
Monday was the equally propitious All Saint’s Day, and the receptionist at my hotel warned me that the buses only might run, and even then only if there were people demanding them. “We play things by ear here,” she said. A driver had to start a bus up to Mystras on my account, though he did pick up a woman on the way.
Mystras is a fortress-town on an outlying bluff of Mount Taygetos, which, high as it is, looks like a crenelated pimple under the line of the mountain. Frankish conquerors of the misdirected Fourth Crusade founded the city, and the Byzantine Despot of the Morea expanded it into a cultural capital which outlasted the Empire. Dozens of ecclesiastical buildings — cathedrals and chapels, monasteries and convents — line the winding road to the upper citadel, each a restored work of brick and mortar and red-tiled dome roofs, with holy friezes peeling off the ceilings under which Emperors of Byzantium were crowned. When I reached the windswept fort, four tanned girls in party dresses and high-heeled flip flops who had somehow scaled the cracked and broken stairs were stumbling back down again with their hands on each other’s shoulders.
Tuesday: I stumbled out to the bus station, bleary-eyed and hungover, and caught the 9 a.m. bus to Pylos, across mighty Taygetos via Artemisia in a mountain vale and Kalamata at the feet of the other side. The winding pass over the natural rampart in no way soothed my stomach, but I was in a hurry to get to the ancient Messenian port and to reach the long island that shields the bay from the sea’s wearying currents.
I saw a Rooms For Rent sign and willfully entered the adjacent door, which opened onto a dimly lit scene. In the corner of a wood-paneled bar, a council of five middle-aged men sat around a green felt table, half hidden by a lattice screen, under a green light which other than the door, now blocked by me and my backpack, was the room’s only source of illumination. The men all wore buttoned shirts without ties and were heavyset and black-haired wherever their tanned pate did not show. A few of their detached and indistinguishable faces looked up from their cards at me, and I could only smile back, not at their attention but with the astonished warmth brought on by such novel and cinematic circumstances.
A churlish woman from the corpulent mob seated outside shouted at me. They were sitting there every time I passed that waterfront bar and never seemed to be active at anything or to take much pleasure in each others company. The woman told me that the Room For Rent sign referred to a place up the hill, and I found it and got a room without worrying too much about the upturned cockroach on the stairway, or the Messenian gangsters I may have offended.
At the Battle of Pylos in 425 BC, a battalion of 440 Spartans crossed onto the island of Sphacteria to keep the besieged Messenian rebels of the city from escaping there, but were themselves trapped and stranded when the Athenian fleet happened into the bay. A week of deliberations and guarantees between the two superpowers yielded no agreement, and finally the fire-eating Athenian statesman Cleon sailed out with an army of thousands of javelineers and slingers who pelted 292 men of Sparta into inglorious and unprecedented surrender, a marked shift in policy from that of the doomed at Thermopylae two generations before. The Athenians, reinvigorated by success, planted the captured Lakedaemonian shields on the Acropolis. One can still be seen in the Museum of the Agora, its disfigured plate of rusted bronze vandalized with the inscription: “The Athenians took this from the Spartans at Pylos.”
The island caps the crescent Bay of Navarino from north to south like a twelve-mile lid. The southern opening is the widest, with sheer walls on either side as if the isle was riven from the land. A tabled rock called the Pilos Islet, 150 meters high and fissured through the center, stands freely in the straights. Sphacteria’s crooked spine, drowsy with dark pine and fir, curves smoothly with a solitary outstanding cleft down to a low spot in the center. The cliffs and the colossal rocks they have shed fade to a rocky shore there, and then rise back up in a fractious slope to a second peak on the northern crest, this one bald and sunbaked, with mounds of weather-worn limestone and sparse scrub; it is called the Prophixis Ilias, where the Spartans built their fortifications and made their last stand. Then the island falls into the sea, leaving a gap between itself and the rocky mainland summit called Voithio Kilia that guards the northern end of the bay wide enough for a single galley to pass: the Sikia Straits.
The modern town of Pylos is on the southern rim of the bay that faces west towards the island. It ascends the slope in a stairway of bland concrete construction and erratic avenues. At the center is a wide and shady marketplace with cafés and fruit stands, which opens to the water and the palm-lined arcade that runs along its edge, and is near the unsuitable but crowded twenty-square-feet of beach and the docks.
I took a bus from the square to Gialova on the northern end of the bay, near the Sikia Straights which would be my best bet of reaching Sphakteria. My interest in the island stems from a story I wrote about the battle in college, and a desire to see the historic geography that perplexed my imagination, my only previous resource being unsatisfying maps from Google. I walked north along the sandy and intermittently pebble-strewn beach until it turned into a narrow and scrubby sandbar dividing the bay from the Gialova Lagoon, which continued on a few miles to the Voithio Kilia where ancient Pylos was sited. From there I could get a better look at the straights and, despite the sun-glare that reduced every distance to a hazy blue outline, could see that no bridge connected the mainland mesa and the island cliff — and as I would have to climb, I wasn’t keen on swimming with my shoes.
The route was untenable, and I, defeated but undiminished, went back to Gialova and spent thriftlessly at a beachside restaurant called Elias on red peppers stuffed with feta and doused in oil, vinegar, and green onions, and on moussaka, a dish like lasagna but with meat, cheese, and peppers on top of instead of between the folded layers of pasta.
The next morning, I went down to the docks and subscribed to a boated tour of the bay along with a group of old Israelites and a jolly English family. The hirsute pilot took us across the soft ripple of the denim-colored water to the Pilos Islet, out into the rough waters on the other side of the island to a cave, and past the monuments of the nineteenth century Battle of Navarino. We finally disembarked onto wooded Sphakteria at the central dip in its elevation for a look at the regal Russian monument, but it was still an hour-and-a-half trek to the site of the Spartan’s last stand. I satisfied myself myself with multitudinous photos and observations, made easier by the morning sun.
My reconnaissance accomplished, I boarded a bus and enjoyed the air-conditioning and a big bag of cherries I had bought until the driver dropped me off near Nestor’s Palace at the summit of a high bluff. The foundations of the palace complex, which may or may not have belonged to the wizened and peacemaking Achaean, were dirty brown and well-signed behind a pen of ropes, under a warehouse roof of corrugated steel supported by iron struts that looked like they were discovered underwater. Past a guard tower was a courtyard before the throne room and its vast, circular hearth, with a slot on the right for Nestor’s chair. Pantries and magazines for wine and oil, a bedroom for the Queen, and a bathroom with a ceramic tub surrounded this throne room. In the southeastern court, some archaeologists were packing roller bags full of tools familiar from the dentist’s office but larger and stained with earth.
From the palace I walked north a few miles with the midday sun at my back through a moorland of olive trees, planted randomly but in levels like great steps up the hills, and scattered with cypress and flowering scrub. Hora, twenty kilometers north of Pylos, was a ghost town, it being siesta time. I read in the shade through the hot and lifeless part of the day, until kids started roaring up and down the street on souped-up and un-muffled 50cc scooters, staring at me in either curiosity or with the primeval glance of challenge. Then I walked north of Hora towards Kifissa until a square-faced and earnestly-expressed old villager named Jim picked me up and drove me through his farming hamlet and on to the next, which bore the strange name of Pyrgos M.D.
Jim said he would have driven me further, but he had to go home and shower so he could have dinner with his wife. He spoke English with a strange Hollywood Italian accent that ended each syllable in a sigh, and he drove frantically and haphazardly, without full conscious effort or concern for the distraction of having to steer, in the way of all Greeks. The Greeks turn two-lane roads into four-lane highways by driving in the turn and service lanes, or into one-lane funnels by parking two astride, with much squealing of brakes and tires. The rules for motorbikes and scooters are: accelerate steadily and noisily up until you absolutely have to break for a turn or obstacle, and helmets are not necessary for trips of under 30 miles.
Jim dropped me off at a gas station and wished me luck in life and travel. I walked north from Pyrgos M.D. for a while and then saw a bus for Athens, hailed the driver, and slept all the way to Kifissa. There I boarded a train around the edge of Kifissa Bay to Pyrgos, seeing more of Messenia’s heathland of grass and olive groves. The setting sun reflected off the sea’s soft swells and framed the sparse trees in an incandescence of gold. I ate ice cream in Pyrgos and patroned an Internet café (I was amazed to find that the first café I visited was full of Greeks invested in Defense of the Ancients, my favorite game from back home) before taking a late bus inland to a cheap hotel in Olympia.
The ruined temples, treasuries, and athletic facilities where the Olympic Games originated are installed on a plain abutting the Kladeos River, surrounded by hills and repetitive museums. Oak trees and flowering bushes grow between the foundation stones of sacred buildings ruined by earthquakes and Christian zealotry. Anything of interest is fenced and inaccessible, and the by-now-familiar whistle-blowing defenders of antiquity prevent closer investigation with the attentive bluster of poolside lifeguards.
I visited in the morning when it was cool and uncrowded, and saw the long stadium where the games were held, surveyed by up to 45,000 citizen spectators in the grandstands, and by women and slaves from the curled cap of the Hill of Kronos to the north. Emperor Nero constructed a house just south of the stadium and across from the famous Temple of Zeus when he decided to compete in the Olympics. Unsurprisingly, he won the olive wreath in every event he entered.
I looked in a few of the museums, sat around drinking frappe and hating the loud Americans, and decided to stay another night when I found a filthy youth hostel with beds for €10, a nice reprieve from the thrift-born haste of my Peloponnesian itinerary that allowed me to picnic on sardines and bread with cheese and salami in the park near the Olympia site and to sit around in a café with a Hawaiian Mormon who teaches high school history. I also got a good night sleep.
By the skin of my teeth, I caught a series of bus the next morning to Patras on the northwest corner of the Peloponnese (one of which had to be manually pushed out of the boarding station), and then a four-hour ferry across the water to Ithaca, just off Cephalonia and the western coast of Greece. The boat debarked at a dock in the slim center of the hourglass-shaped island, with a song like a discordant speaker as the ramp of the stirring ferry shifted across the pavement, and from there I crossed the hogbacked spine to the port of Vithos on the southern peninsula, which is offset to the east from the slightly larger northern one. Amid the constructions of squatters at the crest of the spine lie the ruins of Alalkomenes, which bumbling archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann believed on a whim to be the site of Odysseus’ Palace. On the other side is the bay where the cast away King returned to his island.
The next day was Sunday, and I got up before the sun and walked through the nighted hush of the penned pastures on a road south toward the stomping ground of Eumaeus, his sons, and his swine. The paved road turned to gravel halfway to the end of the southern parcel of Ithaca, and the land evened out imperceptibly into a rolling plateau, thick with green and ochre scrub that clung to the knolls in swirling patterns. On my left, Dawn had stretched out her fingertips of rose and was soon to explode over the clouds in radiant gold.
A shepherd pointed me toward the Fountain of Arethusa, accessible by a narrow footpath off the main road, and after I had left for it the man started shouting down into a rock-walled gorge and listening to his amplified voice echo back over the surf. The Fountain was down in the fault between two rocky hills where the shepherd had been shouting, under a cap of sheer white limestone which near the trail jutted out in a jagged wall of slanting steps. Arethusa dripped enough to sustain a tumescent accretion of dark green moss in the shade of some dead trees. I can’t imagine how or why anyone, even the noble swineherd, would lead a flock of pigs down into that defile to water, as island legend says Eumaeus did. The three mile path is narrow and in places very steep as it cuts through the hillside, and for a while follows a dry riverbed, the rocks worn slick and treacherous.
The greatest danger, however, for man or pork, is the infernal species of engorged, skull-marked, bird-eating arachnid that has infested the trail. To reach the Fountain, I had to lay waste to a hundred profitable webs, strung across the path on yarn-thick strands by Giant Spiders as fat as pinballs. Where the road passed between high trees the Spiders had constructed hive cities of webs connecting to webs, nests to nests, in intricate communal patterns. On my way down, I wiped out everything in my path, and on my way back I destroyed the early and alarmingly far-along attempts by the Spiders to reconstruct their devastated ecology. When the Crusade Against Spiderdom was ended, the frayed branch-end I used as a broom had so much spidersilk wrapped around it that it could catch bugs.
Back in Vathi, I took a nap, then rested my legs near the waterfront of the excellent natural harbor while flies harried my sandaled feet. The gentle sea plunked and slapped pleasantly against the yachts and sailboats and the hollow stonework of the docks. Tiger stripes of silver and navy blue shifted across the teal glass of the surface, until the afternoon winds stirred it all into ragged chop. Then the German-made pleasure ships, flying the colors of Brittania and the Spanish Crown and the Fifth Republic, and bearing names like Elektra, Nota Bene, Viriato Dos, and Okey-Dokey, cruised in to moor for the night; the old Ithacans sat outside the coffee shops with that look of casually morbid observance that strikes the Greeks as sunset crimsons the hills: the fir and cypress, the brush and lanky grass, the gravel and shale and smoothed limestone of the high folded ground about the Vathiot port, streaked with roads; and the tourists came in off the ferry from Patras and Cephalonia and soon after resigned themselves to join the solemn old Greeks around those mirthless tables, their pale faces tinged by wistful disillusion, like they’ve been waiting for someone they really wanted to see.
They find Ithaca has not changed a great deal since the days of Homer, excepting the modern trappings and the greater ease of reaching its harsh and rocky shore.
My own ferry left the following afternoon for the mainland and a waiting train, a long trip through light and darkness along the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, back to midnight Athens, the end of this adventure and the beginning of the next.
