The Navel of the World

The time is slipping away from me, but that's appropriate, because we're visiting some timeless places.  It's been more than two weeks since we went to Delphi, in many ways the center of the ancient Greek world, on a quick two-day bus trip from Athens. We made one other stop on the way, at the monastery of Osios Loukas, St. Lukas, who lived in the tenth century.  Here's a link to read all about him and the place, with better pictures than mine:  http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Medieval/Arch/HossiosLoucas.html.  We had lunch there, high on the slopes of Mt. Helicon, with only a few other tourists around, the weather gloomy and mysterious as it remained for the next two days, and our mood appropriately chastened and sanctified in this sacred Christian site for our next stop at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Apollo.  I'm going to use one of the pictures from this site for our portrait for this blog site, but here are a few others.  The first is of the two connected churches with some of the monastery on the left; the second is the Christ Pancrator at the top of the dome whose eyes follow you everywhere; the third is the mummy of St. Lukas, which Annabel insisted on me taking a picture of despite the flash-ban and the difficulty of seeing anything grisly in the glass case.  He's in there, I promise.  When her camera had run out of charge Annabel was always asking me to take pictures of the grisly stuff, plus of course of cats and rabbits and dogs and bugs and cute stuff.

For this excursion, and for Delphi in particular, I need a new excuse for why my pictures are so bad.  Let's see, I've already used "haven't learned how to work the camera," "the weather was cloudy/hazy," and "flash wasn't allowed."  How about, "it was the scale of the site that made the difference, and that was impossible to capture in this format"?  In other words, you had to be there?   The ultimate photographer's cop-out.  But regardless of the poor quality of the photos, there's no question that the power of Delphi came largely from its setting.  As Michael reminded us often, when the Greeks went about picking sacred sites, what mattered was location, location, location.  We went first to the Temple of Athena and practice race track, just below the main site, and I'll try with a couple of pictures to convey something of the setting, but you'll have to help by imagining sheer rock walls looming above, mountains all around, and the valley floor some distance below.

In addition to being the home of the most respected and frequently consulted oracle of ancient Greece, Delphi also hosted one of the four principal pan-Hellenic athletic competitions (the one at Olympia being the most famous of the four these days, having given its name to the modern revival of such competitions).  The stadium where the runners competed was closed at the time we were there, although I got a good view down into it later, but the practice track was near Athena's temple, and after Michael demonstrated the appropriate form, several of the girls took their positions with toes at the starting line.

After such strenuous effort, naturally we had to re-hydrate.  This is Meredith sucking down holy water from the sacred springs, which unfortunately has been chemically tested and shown not to contain any hallucinatory or other mind-altering substances.  Which doesn't keep some investigators from continuing to look for environmental factors contributing to the awesome powers of the Oracle.  Factors, that is, beyond merely having a giant temple in a large, richly decorated sanctuary in one of the most beautiful spots in the world.  I guess the prophetic powers had to come first, in order to provoke all the statues and temples.  But even in ruins this seems like a wonderful place to get in touch with whatever mystical powers one happens to believe in.

Our next stop was the hotel, perched on the cliffs at the lower edge of the town of Delphi, which was very small, entirely dedicated to tourists (and already partly closed down for the season), stacked in four or five rows along the side of the mountain.  That mountain was Parnassus, home of the muses, and it stretched for miles above the sanctuary and the town.  I had floated the idea of climbing it, or at least partway up it, to experience a scene from The Magus, one of the novels we were reading in my literature class.  But when the time came there were no takers.  I, however, could not resist, and knowing the daylight was limited, made brief inquiries at the hotel desk and then headed up.  Straight up.  For the first fifteen minutes I was slipping along in a muddy goat track, the heat and humidity were bringing out all manner of insects, and I thought seriously about turning around.  But then I hit the main path, a gentler, switchbacking, rock-"paved" trail that wound up the mountain above the town.  There were still lots of insects, but stopping to take pictures of them gave me an excuse to rest.  At times I thought I might lose the trail and the view in the clouds, but the weather improved all the way up.

At the center-bottom of the third picture you can see the site of Athena's temple and the race track, alongside the road we came in on, at roughly the same elevation as our hotel--in other words, where I started from.  I tried in the last picture to convey something of the tricky footing as well as the fog rolling in--it was tougher going down than up, of course, but in both cases I had to look down most of the time when I really wanted to be looking up and out.

At just above the point where the third picture was taken I crested out onto the upper plateau.  I still had a trail, for a while, heading inwards and slightly upwards, but I had no idea where it was going.  I knew the approach was relatively gentle, and the peak itself not particularly dramatic, but I also thought that it was farther away than I was going to be able to cover before dark.  After about ten minutes heading up onto the plateau I heard something...unexpected.

No, it wasn't the goat bells.  I'd been expecting those, and even looking forward to them, while dodging goat poop along what was more and more clearly becoming a goat trail that I was following.  No, it was something else.

Just when I was thinking there was no one here but me and the goats, along comes the goatherd, or maybe his teenage daughter, taking the tiny blue family car out for a spin.  Just after seeing the car I came in view of a couple of farmhouses, and while my sense of athletic accomplishment was considerably diminished, I nevertheless took pleasure in seeing a little bit of the rural life of Parnassus, including meeting a very friendly goat-dog, and wandering off-trail while following a hundred-odd long-horned goats across the heather for a while.

Pretty soon, however, I realized that the dark was coming on, and travel over the thorny and rocky ground was easier for goats than it was for me.  A bit of sun came out on some white rocks at the top of a small rise, or else the rocks glowed with their own inner light, being so chalk-white, but in any event I decided that I'd been given a sign, and here was my destination.  I rested, took a few pictures in the general direction of what I thought might be the summit of Parnassus (this one with my camera bag n the foreground among the glowing white rocks), and then headed back down the mountain with the keen sense of disappointment I always feel when I am forced to surrender altitude.

Alex and Annabel had done a little shopping, but mostly just sat on the terrace of our room and enjoyed the view.  That's a little corner of the Gulf of Corinth down there, by the town of Itea, where we later saw the thousand and one lights of a huge cruise ship, and the whole flat valley is one big olive orchard.

Annabel saw one of the few bats of her entire life at the harbor on Paros, but in the fading light at Delphi she got to see them swooping all around us, eating those abundant insects on a warm autumn evening.  We both tried hard to get pictures, but with little success--this was the best of a bad lot.

The next day we visited the sanctuary of Apollo and the fancy museum.  I took relatively few pictures, partly because it was another gloomy day, partly because I was intimidated by the challenge of capturing this mystical place, and partly because I was getting a little tired of having the camera in front of my face all the time.  But I offer one shot of the temple of Apollo from above, one shot of a stone wall covered by manumission inscriptions (having it in rock at Delphi pretty much guaranteed no one would call you a slave anymore, plus you spent money thanking the gods for your freedom in the process), and a few pictures from the museum.

Everything in this very attractive museum came from Delphi.  There are a lot of fragmented metopes, bits of temple or treasury frieze with scenes from Greek myth-history, like the one in the third picture above.  Lots of gods-vs.-giants and battle-with-the-centaurs and various accomplishments of Herakles and Theseus.  Especially Theseus.  The Spartans had already called dibs on Herakles as mythical founder of their city-state, so the Athenians had to look around for someone comparable, and through strenuous aesthetic effort on walls and pots, and by dint of having all the best storytellers, they managed to elevate Theseus into even more heroic stature.  I couldn't resist including a shot of Theseus beating up on a girl.  Well, it was an Amazon, not just any old girl.  (Michael tells us there is new evidence for an Asia Minor culture that included women warriors, so maybe there's more to the Amazon story than mere gynophobia.)  Another reason to include a shot of Theseus is that he was my first dramatic role, as Annabel keeps reminding me whenever we hear more about him.

The fourth picture above is a hymn, complete with musical notation.  Music and lyrics from 2500 years ago--how cool is that?!?

The last one is for my friend Joseph.  It's a statue of a philosopher, perhaps a particular famous one such as Socrates, but certainly a philosopher.  That was a time when you knew a philosopher just from looking at him, I guess, something about the skepticism in his eyes, or the insouciance with which he wore his leather jacket--er, I mean, himation.

Delphi is a wonderful place to commune with one's household gods, or one's monotheistic monolith of a God, or whatever one chooses to invest with spirit and wisdom.  Much of the power of this place comes, as I've said, from its natural beauty, and so rather than a statue or column, I leave you with one last bug, though I promise it won't be the last bug of this blog, though it just may be the prettiest.

 

More from the lovely island of Paros

[First a word from our sponsor.  That break turned out to be very painful.  I wrote and edited a long account of the rest of our time in Paros, spending way too much time on it no doubt, and then previewed it for Alex to proof, and somehow the first third or more of it disappeared.  Gone into the ether.  That's apparently one of the serious risks of blogging.  Not only can you not compose elsewhere and paste it in, which would make lots of sense and would have enabled me to work on the blog while I couldn't access my site for a couple of weeks, but you also cannot recover stuff written on Blogger that goes away.  Or not in any way I could puzzle out from following all the links from other people who'd made pitiable inquiries after their own lost posts.  I will try to reconstruct it, but those of you who've lost hard-earned documents and had to re-do them from scratch will sympathize with my pain.]

We were headed to lunch at Naoussa, the town in the picture below, taken from a place obviously higher up and some distance away.  More on that place later.  First we wandered around the town, shoping in the places that were still open (many of them on their last weekend of the season).  Our finds included a beautiful moonstone necklace for Alex, turquoise rhinestone Converse for Annabel (for 10 euros!), the most expensive piece of jewelry Annabel had ever bought for herself which you may be lucky enough to see in person one day, and a very cool scarf for Alex.  We also had to buy some sunglasses for Annabel so she could survive the blinding sun off the white buildings at lunch--perhaps you will catch a glimpse of those rose-colored glasses in one of the photos below.

We ate at a dockside taverna, two kinds of fish straight off the boats in front of us, or so we chose to believe.  Our restaurant was just around the corner past the breakwater in the inlet above.  We ate in the lee of the wind, so it was very warm, and Annabel had another opportunity to feed cats.

After lunch we headed out to...you guessed it, another beach!  This was a really spectacular and strange place.  Annabel and I swam in the lovely water and took a water-eye-view of the rocks, while Alex lay in the warm sun out of the wind.  After she took these pictures, of course.

The weird sandstone rocks were extended up into the hills above us, and Annabel and I were seized with scrambling fever.  After drying off in the sun and getting dressed in the car (all the local facilities were shut down for the season), we drove a kilometer or so back in the direction of Naoussa, to the sign for an intriguing turn-off:  "Mycenaean Acropolis."  No one we'd talked to had said anything about this; it wasn't mentioned in any of the tourist literature we read.  But we thought it would be worth investigating, especially since it was in the direction we wanted to go anyway:  up those perfect scrambling rocks.

At what we presumed to be the right place there was a sign, and that's all.  No path, no directions, just rocks and a hill.  From our massive knowledge of acropoli, we concluded that it was probably in the "up" direction, and headed off.  After just enough scrambling to satisfy Annabel and me and not enough to dismay Alex, we found a path that wound up towards the summit, through a field of tall, bumble-bee-pestered flowers, which I later learned were asphodels.

Homer described asphodels in the fields of the dead, but even without knowing that, the effect was haunting.  As we continued upwards I had trouble keeping my eyes on the path, as there was so much to see in every direction, and the fabled Greek light was having its way with us.  The summit was, you may say, satisfying.  The views were dazzling in every direction.  There were two people there when we arrived, but they left soon, and there were two people nearing the top as we left, almost as if we were taking turns having the place to ourselves.  There was no evidence of tourist management, no signs except the one at the bottom, but clearly lots of people had been busy moving rocks around at this site in the several thousand years since the Mycenaeans had a sanctuary there.  There were small buildings of piled rocks as well as lots of those little stacks of rocks that humans seem compelled to raise in high, rocky places.  Annabel took her turn at making a stack of stones, then began gathering clay shards, especially those with traces of paint on them.  She was practicing for her career as an archeologist, pretending to be finding ancient Mycenaean artifacts, one of which would give us vital clues to a deeper understanding of Linear B.  I enjoyed her game but in my despicable pooh-poohing daddy way, said that there had been plenty of other people up here in the last few millenia and it wasn't likely there was any Mycenaean pottery still around.  Well, Daddy, in your face!  We showed the pictures to Michael, and he said that some of the pieces with paint on them were very likely particular kinds of ancient pottery.  I didn't hear the details so can't supply them--I was busy eating my delicious humble pie while Michael was explaining things to Annabel--but I was cured forever of any patronizing attitude toward Annabel's archaeological explorations.  (On our excursion in eastern Attica yesterday she found a shard that Michael identified as possibly the rim of a Hellenistic drinking cup--naturally, we left it where we found it, but Annabel was magnified in the eyes of not merely her doubting dad, but of all my students as well.)

We weren't entirely alone--these goats were climbing up the steep back side.  And as you've guessed, this is where I took that picture of Naoussa from a distance.  In the dying light and (finally) dying wind the place was magical, and we didn't want to descend.

We did, however, want to spend a little time at the fabulous house, and needed to get cleaned up before dinner, so when the next couple of people arrived at the summit we surrendered the site and headed down the hill, back to the car, and back to the house.  Over a glass of wine on the veranda in the last of the light we read in an English-language magazine a glowing review of a restaurant near Naoussa and decided to eat there.  It sounded from the review like the place to go for a fancy meal on Paros, but the summer crowd had thinned out and we were eating very early by Greek standards, so we didn't worry about a reservation.  It's a good thing we were so early.  They seemed strangely reluctant to seat us even though there wasn't a single diner in the restaurant when we arrived.  But it filled up very quickly, and I think towards the end of our meal the people who had reserved our table were sitting at the bar impatiently.  As we were eating the first course, of vegetable puree soup that even Annabel pronounced delicious, we recognized the voices at the table behind us.  Sitting down right next to us were the only people we knew on the whole island, a couple we had met two weeks earlier at a reception at the Athens Centre.  He turned out to be the architect of Rosemary's house, which we praised copiously.  Petros and Marilyn were also the source for the information I mentioned earlier, about the marble for Rosemary's house coming from Naxos and the history of Lefkes.  The happy coincidence of this meeting gave me a powerful impression of how small the island was, and indeed how small Greece is.  Thus do we magnify chance into significance, as any of the six or seven million people in Athens might remind me.  I said it was a powerful impression; I didn't say it was accurate.

The next morning we enjoyed the sunrise over Naxos in a complete absence of wind, and dawdled with our packing, reluctant to say goodbye to the house.  Among other things we also said goodbye to the sad pink bathing suit, which could no longer be tolerated even by Annabel.  As we were of course leaving all of Rosemary's towels behind at the house as well, we had to tell Annabel not to expect any swimming on our last day.  But conditions were the best they'd been all weekend, and Annabel was quite sad about the prospect of staying dry.  As we made our sweep around the south end of the island, along the prime beach stretch, she insisted on seeing the Punda Beach Club, which had sponsored the printing of our map of the island, covering the borders of that map with photos of throngs of happy bikini-ed young women.  It looked like spring break in Tampa.  So we turned off at the sign and wound down to the beach.  We expected the place to be quiet.  We just didn't expect it to be desolate.

I tried to capture the rotting planks and pennants of the Punda Beach Club, in hopes of contrasting it with the beauty of the wide, sandy, absolutely empty beach.  Perhaps the fierce wind tore up those flags in just one summer.  But it sure looked like it had been closed for more than a week or two.  Sometime between the printing of our map and the present, the mighty Punda Beach Club had fallen very far, perhaps a victim of the "crisis," as it is referred to here.  As you can see from the complete absence of waves in the last picture, the wind had died completely by this time, and it was a balmy, if not exactly hot, day.  We had some fun with Annabel up in the lifeguard chair looking out for nonexistent swimmers.  But then I found an abandoned beach towel, which we concluded must have been a gift from Poseidon, and Annabel decided she had to go in, suit or no suit.  The last picture is of her out there in the altogether, a picture which she insisted on approving before I could post it, naturally.  She had a good swim, but then people arrived simultaneously at both ends of the beach, and she had to scramble out of the water and pick her hurried way among the rusty nails and missing boards of the Punda Beach Club to a safe location to dry off and get dressed.

Oh, but wait.  I almost forgot.  Before we headed to the Punda Beach Club, even before we stopped for delicious pastries and coffees in Maripissa, we had followed one of the standard brown tourist locale signs to a site near Rosemary's house.  This was perhaps the biggest anticlimax of the weekend.  In the picture Annabel is trying to catch a butterfly.  We did see our first Greek lizard, which was something.  But as archeological sites go, this was something of a bust.  You're seeing pretty much the whole thing.  Of course, we had to call it by its complete and proper name, which you may read on the sign.

Back to chronological order.  The southern coast of Paros was very beautiful, and we especially enjoyed the very charming little town of Drios, where we picked up handfuls of salt that had dried in the tide pools, watched fish swimming more than fifteen feet down in the perfectly clear and perfectly still water, jumped around on rocks, and even picked up a shell or two.  One of which Annabel regretted picking up some five minutes into the walk back to the car, when something pinched her.

We put the little hermit crab in a water bottle to keep him hydrated, then returned him to the sea in Parikia.  On the way up the western coast we turned inland and up a steep road to the "butterfly valley," an oasis of green in the otherwise dry landscape where a particularly flashy species is abundant.  We were disappointed to find it all locked up, but as the very helpful signs informed us, "butterflies gone--not in season."  Hmmm....  I suppose we should have figured that out on our on, perhaps from the guidebook descriptions that talk about them storing up energy for their winter migration.  Nevertheless, it was a little odd to find the entire "valley" locked behind a high fence.  We would have enjoyed walking under the big trees.  Perhaps I was wrong about the Tower of Hellenistic Period; perhaps Butterfly Valley was our biggest disappointment.

We did have one more very big and very pleasant surprise.  On Sunday afternoon in Parikia some things were closed, including many stores and the archeological museum.  But the church of St. Constantine was open--in fact, it was just about the most open of any church I've ever been in, and as you'll see in a minute, we were even able to peek behind the iconostasis down into the mysteries behind.  The church has an associated monastery, and the courtyard was beautiful and very quiet.  But we were not prepared for what we found in the church itself.  Alex is, as I may have mentioned before, even more into the Byzantine church stuff than the Bronze Age and Hellenistic stuff, and she was happy to spend more than an hour here, sitting, wandering, purchasing small stamped tin squares for hanging on the icon of your choice (with pictures representing what you were interested in having God intervene about, from isolated body parts to symbols of love), and just generally soaking in the ancient Christianity of it all.

We wandered around the main floor at first, looking up and around and peeking through the iconostasis, the wall that divides the congregation from all the mysterious actions the priests are doing behind the scenes, behavior way too sacred for lay people to witness.  I included a picture taken by pressing the camera up against the screen of the iconostasis--they were deliberately made so that by standing very close the congregants could see through to the beautiful altars and icons behind the screen, especially in the two side chapels.  But what looked like a figure of Christ from my keyhole view turned out from above and behind to have a disturbing resemblance to the big cut-outs of actors you see in the cineplex, or the stand-up advertisements for movies and games on display at the Comic Shop.  Once we'd discovered that the upstairs was open, and we could wander all around the back and side, peeking down behind the iconostasis, I started snapping pictures like mad.  I've just given you a few.  There had been a church on this site since the fifth century, and some of the parts we could see were very old, as old as the oldest churches we've been in in Spain.  There were only traces of the original frescoes on the walls.  There had been any number of re-modelings over the centuries.  The Greek Orthodox Church makes for some fascinating comparisons with Roman Catholicism, but I'm still digesting what I've seen, and don't have anything to contribute on the subject at this time.  Annabel seemed as impressed as either of her parents, and no one was in a hurry to leave.  Well, maybe Annabel was in a little bit of a hurry.  She wanted one last swim in the town beaches just past the port.  We couldn't find a girl's suit, but I came up with the brilliant suggestion of a boy's suit and a t-shirt, and it worked fine.  We still weren't sure how much of her sea-bathing experience was actual fun and how much was a kind of defiance of the seasons, but we indulged her, and admired her spunk, and had a drink and read the Athens News at a table in the sand, while she walked carefully out into the sea over the somewhat rocky and less-than-pristine town beach.  This, my friends, was no Punda Beach Club.  But it had more people.

We returned our rental car by depositing it on the curb sort of close to the office and a little further away from where we'd picked it up, and informing the people in the desks near our rental company's desk (which was unoccupied), who said that would be fine, and just leave the keys on the desk there.  When we rented it there had been none of that business of looking over the car to confirm dents, no discussion of whether you want insurance or not, just plunked down our money, and then had some trouble actually getting out from behind another car parked directly behind us (and not connected in any way with the rental car agency).  Clearly the car rental business in Paros is pretty relaxed.  The port was bustling with three evening ferries coming in and going out in close succession, but apparently it's a small town, they know what their car looks like, and they'll find it if we leave it anywhere in the vicinity.  Indeed, as we were having coffee and waiting for our boat, the last of the three that evening, we saw our rental agent George go by, and I started to tell him where the car was, and he waved me off with "Yes, yes, fine."  Okay.  I guess it was fine.

(By the way, half the men in Greece are named Georgios, and the other half are named Costas.  Makes it very easy to remember men's names, there being only those two.  Well, and the odd Iannis.  Greeks name children for their grandparents, so names are cycled and recycled.  Sorry for the digression.)

I'll leave you with a final couple of pictures, taken after we left the church and before we went to the beach.  One of the local sites in Parikia that couldn't close, because it didn't have any fence around it, was a Roman-era site just sitting there alongside the road, about a block off the main drag in an industrial area.  I took some pictures of the nice mosaics, but I was more interested in the cricket game going on in the vacant lot next door, to the accompaniment of what we guessed to be Pakistani or Afghani music.  For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about who these men were, and about how they established their Sunday-evening cricket game in this gravelly lot on the edge of this particular town in this particular island in the middle of the Aegean.  If I learn anything relevant about it, I'll be sure to tell you.

We now continue our scheduled broadcast

Did you miss me while I was unable to access my Blogger account?  What, you didn't even notice?  Well, I noticed, and I was getting more and more panicky by the day.  But with the help of my new friend, the Google account expert at the UAF Helpdesk, I'm back.  And boy do we have a backlog of pictures to catch up on!

The AHA Site Director for Athens, Rosemary Donnelly, generously offered us the use of her house on Paros, a fairly big island in the central Aegean.  We took the giant "slow" ferry (which actually moves extremely rapidly) through very rough seas for four hours, arriving in Paros mid-day, in time to pick up our rental car, put our stuff in it, then grab some lunch.

Yes, you heard that right--we rented a car.  Eric actually drove in Greece.  As Rosemary had assured us, Paros was nothing like Athens.  My confidence level was so boosted by this experience that I'm even considering renting a car elsewhere, on the mainland, although only if I can manage to completely avoid Athens.

Rosemary's house is on the other end of the island from Parikia (where the ferries dock), which meant a drive of maybe half an hour.  Although a big island for the Cyclades, it's actually very small.  Having a car to tool around in was perfect.  We managed to mess up Rosemary's directions right at the end, but we got straightened out and found the house.  And we were gobsmacked.

We were expecting perhaps a small house, no doubt beautiful if it belonged to Rosemary, but nothing like this.  Can you tell that Annabel is amazed?  The first shot is into the living room, the second out the living room door, the third looking back toward the island from the roof, and the fourth the living room and kitchen itself, into that same door.  Don't worry, there will be more of the house and pool later.  But you won't get any more interior pictures.  And it's hard looking at it from outside to get a sense of just how big it really is.  Rosemary owns it with her sister, who has a large bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room of the living room.  Then there is the whole other wing where we stayed, two more bedrooms with their own bath. And there are more rooms and the garage in back that we never explored.  All of this on 8000 square meters of land, most of it planted in olives, on top of a headland looking east across the channel to Naxos, and with spectacular views in every direction.  Perhaps you can get some sense of the exquisite landscaping from those pictures.  We were there at a good time, as flowers were blooming again after the hot, dry summer.

One reason the house doesn't look as large as it really is is that it keeps a very low profile.  Paros is very windy, and the house is on top of a headland exposed to the north wind, so it's built close to the ground with its back to the north, opening to the south so that the large patio and pool areas are reasonably sheltered.

Reasonably sheltered.  Remember those rough seas I mentioned?  It was extremely windy, the windiest conditions I've every been in for more than a few minutes, and when the wind failed to die down after nightfall as I'd expected it to, we wondered if it was just always like this, and if so, how people could live in it.  It turned out that this was an unusually windy day, and from Saturday morning on it got more and more calm, until by Sunday afternoon the water was like glass.

But we're still in Friday afternoon.  And Annabel is determined to go for a swim.  There are beaches on both sides of our headland, one in a small village, the other more isolated (and also somewhat protected from the wind), so we gave in to Annabel's request and went swimming here.

Annabel is on a mission, you see, to extend the beach season as long as possible.  She made it into the ocean four times and the pool twice during those three days, sometimes under hazardous conditions, as you will learn.  Swimming in a warm ocean, in a protected cove, on a cold and windy day, was nothing, although I was the first to be driven out of the warm water simply because my head was absolutely freezing.  It was very much like being at Chena Hot Springs in winter on a -20 day:  your body is loving the warm water, but your head can only take so much of the cold.  We did a little beach-combing while we dried out, and then headed back up to the house to shower and dress.  But as evening came on Annabel was determined to get wet again, and put her suit back on and went in the pool, perhaps more to prove something than out of any anticipation of actual enjoyment.

I show you pictures with both Alex and me huddled in the background not merely to emphasize how cold it was, but also to show views both of the house and of Naxos across the way.  I got a little obsessed with the wind for a while, and the point of the third shot is to show the whitecaps in my wine glass.   The water was crashing at the other end of the pool as well, but I didn't take a shot looking that way.  Annabel didn't stay in long once she had proved her point--she took another shower to warm up, and we headed down to the beach and village in the other direction for a delicious dinner.

Oh, but notice that swimming suit, which Alex purchased for Annabel in Matala on Crete, because the suit she brought to Greece was getting too small for her, because the suit she was supposed to bring to Greece she left at the gym in Fairbanks.  That little pink bikini was too big for her and fell off at every opportunity.  More on that later.

When we woke up it was still windy, but the wind died down gradually all day, as I said.  We had two days to explore the island, and decided to break it up into north and east on Saturday, south and west on Sunday.  We headed up to Lefkes, the largest inland town and a former capital in the days of the pirates when there was something to be said for not being on the water.  This village is absolutely beautiful, built on the slopes of the central mountain (and perfectly framed at night in our bedroom window below), with lots of tiny streets, the classic white-washed houses trimmed in blue (and occasionally other colors), a large church currently under reconstruction, and, of course, tons of cats.  There was actually a greater density of cats on Paros than in Athens, and that's saying something.  Annabel's camera battery died, so I had to take this one of a particularly aggressive kitten.

I could have wandered around Lefkes taking pictures for many more hours, but I was a little self-conscious about pointing my camera at people's windows.  The town was eerily empty.  We thought it was just because it was Saturday morning, but we heard later that there are actually lots of empty houses, some owned by people in Athens, others just unoccupied.  Levkes is rather forlorn, although blindingly beautiful.  Plenty of cats wandering those tiny, winding streets, however, as I believe I mentioned, and a lot of care taken with the appearance of the streets and houses, either for touristic purposes or because the people who do live here make the effort out of civic pride or aesthetic sensibilities.

We had one more stop to make before lunch, the fabled marble quarries of old Paros at Marathi, which produced the marble for the Venus de Milo, among other projects.  The signs billed them as "Marble Ancient Quarries," so of course that's the term we used for them, full name only.  We couldn't go down into the underground part, but Annabel climbed all over the upper sections.

We found out that night (from the same person who filled us in about Lefkes) that the white marble is all long gone from Paros, and the beautiful stone used in the floors, lintels, bathrooms, and elsewhere in Rosemary's house had come from Naxos.  Which only increased the sense of melancholy I was feeling about Paros, a version of what I've been feeling often about Greece in general, something to do with the glories of the ancient past and the frustrations of the present economic situation juxtaposed in a way that is not really ironic, as I would tell my students, or even tragic exactly, but is certainly poignant.

That's a lot of pictures for you to download, and we're only about halfway through our time in Paros.  Perhaps it's time for a break.  We'll eat lunch in Naoussa while you let your download link cool off.  And for those of you who've been studying your map of Paros all this time, Naoussa is on the north end.  Wait, you don't have a map?  Well, why didn't you say so?

http://www.parosweb.gr/map.htm

Rosemary's house is by Ampelas, on the northwest coast.  See you soon.