The Argolis

I mentioned that I've been travelling around the Greek mainland with my friend Jan, but in fact we have a third member in the party. Her name is Karen. That's the name given to the female Australian voice on my GPS, and she's pracically a member of the family now. The annoying second cousin that you need to have around but keeps getting you in trouble. You know the one - she can't pronounce Greek place names to save her life, but you don't dare correct her because of the conviction with which she says them. Karen has certainly led us down some ... exciting roads... er ... tracks to save a meter or two.

Asclepius complex

Theater of Epidaurus. I spat on the bouncer from up here.

Today Karen, Jan and I visited a number of important archaeological sites in the area surrounding Nafplio, the Argolid. First on the agenda was Epidaurus, a very important site in Classical and Helenistic Greece. Again on the ground it looked largely like a post-war zone, but with the help of the various signs and maps about the place we were able to get a fairly good impression of what it would have looked like. This area notably was the site of a very important temple to Asclepius, the god of medicine. As such many of the buildings were also once upon a time hospitals and other medical related constructions. But part of the complex is also the theater of Epidaurus, the best preserved theatre of the era, also one of the biggest of the time. This, as you may guess due to my thespian education, was of particular interest to me. And I wasn't disappointed. Well, okay I was, but not because of the theater itself. Being a Greek theater it naturally has great acoustics. As you can see from the picture, it isn't tiny, but standing on the very last row you can hear a person speaking not particularly loudly in the centre of the stage. So of course Jan and I thought it would be a great idea to try out the acoustics. Several people before us had stood on the stone disc in the centre and talked, shouted, sung etc., so we thought why not get a couple of tin whistles out of the car and play a little duet? Well, it turns out this place has its own bouncer - a twenty-something buff bloke in a tight white t-shirt, stone-washed jeans, aviator glasses and spiked, gelled hair. After the first couple of notes his shrill coaches whistle put a stop to our musical endeavours (why he's allowed to whistle around and we're not I'm still not sure). He yelled at us "that's not allowed!" and after we asked him why he replied just like a typical bouncer, narrowing his eyes and answering "because it's against the rules".
Oh well, bugger him. I wonder what he would have said to Jan's tipping out a bit of wine in front of Asclepius' temple for the good health of his girlfriend...

View from the "museum" Karen led us to...

Returning to Nafplio we decided to check out the archaeological museum which is supposed to house a lot of Mycenaean items from around the area. This is where Karen decided to be a bit contrary again. Firstly, she offered us two different museums with exactly the same name and both in Nafplio. We randomly chose one and followed her directions. These led us up the nearby hill to a long abandoned fortress. Thinking it might just be up the road past the fortress, we parked the car and walked for a good fifteen minutes in the glaring sun with nary a sign of a museum. We then locked Karen in the glove compartment and returned to our hotel for a sleep.
In Olympia and Delphi we had discovered that the best time to see ruins is in the mid to late afternoon. They're usually open quite late here, but at that time there's much less tourists, it's not as hot and the light is absolutely spectacular. So after we awoke from our slumber Jan and I (with Karen still in her naughty corner) drove to nearby Tiryns, a Mycenaean fortress. Now, the Mycenaean culture is absolutely ancient. Here's a bit of a reference point: when a normal person thinks of "long ago", some pictures of medieval castles usually come to mind. 900 years old would be pretty typical. For these so called people of "long ago" the Romans would have seemed like people of "long ago", also about 900 years before that. The classical Greeks, then, were for the romans ancient history, lying about 700 years before them (around 500 BC). Now, Homer (not from the Simpsons - the classical poet who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey) is often used to indicate the beginning of ancient Greek culture, around 850 BC, so even for the classical Greeks pretty ancient. Homer's works drew on ancient myths of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, around 900 years before him again.

Tiryns

Yeah, this shit is ancient. And considering how old it is, the complex is reasonably well preserved. And when you look at the size of some of the blocks that this fortress was built of it's hardly surprising - it would take little short of an earthquake to move them. What is surprising is the fact that they were able to put them together at all all that time ago. Tyrins itself was an important centre in the culture of the time, though not as important as Mycenae itself, but I'll be visiting that tomorrow.

Inside the Mycenaean tomb

After Tyrins we visited a couple of other nearby archaeologically interesting locations, just to show Karen that we can lead ourselves down poxy goat tracks without her help. The first was a Mycenaean tomb, which was very interesting if quite small. The second was supposedly a dam, but to be perfectly honest neither Jan nor I could really see anything that looked like it...