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pho­tos tak­en at Knossos:

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Look­ing smug — final­ly at Knos­sos, after a life­time of longing.

We spent the night sleep­ing fit­ful­ly on the deck of the Olympic Cham­pi­on, and docked at Irak­lion at dawn. The first bus to Knos­sos would not depart for a while, so we spent the ear­ly morn­ing walk­ing in the cen­ter of the city, which still has its Venet­ian wall intact. Ottoman rule seems to have left lit­tle archi­tec­tur­al influ­ence on the city, but the cen­turies of Ital­ian rule clear­ly did. There was also a nice ear­ly Byzan­tine church. Over the cen­turies, it had been con­vert­ed to a mosque, then to a Catholic church, then restored to the Ortho­dox rite. Very sim­ple in plan, it quite nice­ly pre­serves the ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian church in the Roman munic­i­pal office build­ing (basil­i­ca). Read more »

Pho­tos tak­en in Athens

The recon­struct­ed Stoa of the Agora

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Tem­ple of Haephestos

The first things we noticed about Athens were the unmis­tak­able signs of a police state. Cops every­where, in gear more appro­pri­ate to an invad­ing army, some­times tot­ing machine guns. Parked near the Uni­ver­si­ty, and around Syn­tag­ma Square, were the riot wag­ons — sin­is­ter armoured bus­es full of gas masks (clear­ly vis­i­ble through the slit win­dows) and god knows what dis­sent-crush­ing tools. On a back street, we found a home-made mon­u­ment to a six­teen-year-old shot by the cops. The city is dirty and run down. The Metro is closed “for repairs”, but actu­al­ly for a strike. Most peo­ple look like they’re grudg­ing­ly mark­ing time rather than plan­ning for the future. I saw more ragged peo­ple, addicts open­ly plung­ing nee­dles into their flesh, and des­per­ate-look­ing young men than I’ve seen in any Euro­pean city.  Read more »

Tomor­row, I’ll be in Greece. I’ll be meet­ing my stal­wart friend, Fil­ip Marek, in Athens, and short­ly after, we’ll head for Crete.

Anyone who knows me is aware that, for most of my life, I’ve has per­son­al fas­ci­na­tion with ancient Minoan civ­i­liza­tion. My liv­ing room wall dis­plays a large framed print of the “palace” of Knos­sos, as some­what imag­i­na­tive­ly recon­struct­ed by N. Gou­vousis. The old­er ver­sion of this web­site was dec­o­rat­ed with an icon­ic Minoan mur­al. I’ve always pre­ferred the flu­id, sen­su­ous Minoan and Myce­naean art styles, with their domes­tic and nature-ori­ent­ed themes, to the more rigid and often mil­i­taris­tic styles of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The mytho­log­i­cal sto­ry of The­seus, defeat­ing a tyran­ny by enter­ing the labyrinth (a fair­ly obvi­ous metaphor for the search for knowl­edge), and fight­ing the mon­strous Mino­taur, finds its way into my writ­ing in var­i­ous forms. I would count myself a fail­ure in life if I did not at least once set my foot down on the site of the real Knos­sos. Now, for­tu­itous cir­cum­stances allow me to do this, and to spend some time explor­ing less pop­u­lar archae­o­log­i­cal sites, and the back coun­try of Greece. Read more »