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.