The next morning, when I took these pictures, we spent an hour or so at the beach, where Annabel was only allowed to wade, but where the fabulous rock-hunting almost made up for not being able to swim.
I kind of hated to leave Nafplio--I can see why it's the most popular weekend destination for Athenians--but we still had lots to see. This was Sunday, election day round two, and some sites were closed, hence the relaxed schedule and our opportunity to wander around for the entire morning. Nafplio is on one side of a peninsula, with the castle on top looking out to the water both directions, and this beach on the other side of the peninsula from the town. We took an attractive, relatively new walkway all around the base of the peninsula, although we'd heard that it was closed. Turns out on the other side, the town side, there were signs to that effect, and warnings of falling rock. But from our side this was the first notice we had of anything potentially hazardous.
The drive from Nafplio was gorgeous, up into and through the mountains, to a small town way up in Arcadia, the original Arcadia, with nothing around but sheep and farms, and almost nothing open, although the proprietors gladly opened up their restaurant for our bonanza of thirteen customers (seven students, three Fitts-Heynes, Michael, Vassia our Athens Centre rep, and Vangelis our skilled driver). There was one other thing nearby, a temple of Apollo that was lost, found, lost again, found again, and is now being carefully restored under the biggest and most heavily engineered tent I have ever seen. Barnum and Bailey have nothing on this particular attraction.
Our twenty-minute drive from Andritsen to the temple passed by a number of circular stone threshing floors, dramatic features in the landscape since ancient times, but no longer used for their original purpose, of course. Michael filled us in on their role in Greek culture, including supporting annual dances celebrating the harvest, leading Greeks to dance in circles even to this day. Here's a picture of one (the stones here covered with grass, so not as dramatically set against the landscape, but in the middle of a working farm--I accidentally captured the farmer in the picture), and another shot of the very cute pension in which we stayed in Andritsen.
The next morning we drove through some more beautiful mountains, then dropped to the coastal plain and the wide river valley on which Olympia sits. When we pulled up to the site, we could hardly make our way to the gate for all the tourist buses and hordes of people with numbered stickers on their lapels. Turns out that Mondays and Thursdays are the cruise ship days. Luckily for us, they were all just finishing their tour and heading for lunch. Once we'd fought our way through all the people streaming in the opposite direction, we found ourselves almost alone in the huge site. One of the highlights is, of course, the ancient Olympic stadium, the real Olympic stadium. Annabel challenged all comers to a run, but only Courtney was brave enough to take her on. Here they are at the starting line (cut in the stone) and then posing together on the winner's podium stand.
The site was impressive in size and quantity of ruins, but I really would have had no idea what I was looking at if it weren't for Michael's guidance. For instance, the altar of Zeus was just an ash pile where the remains of the burnt offerings were left, and into which small offerings of clay and bronze were thrown. Although it got pretty big by the time the site was no longer being used for sacrifices to Zeus, there's currently nothing there but a grassy, empty space, perhaps a little greener than the surrounding grass for having been well fertilized over the millenia. The remains of the huge temple of Zeus were pretty obvious, and all the more impressive for having been left lying where the earthquake put them. But even with the guidance of the signs I wouldn't have known that the statues and columns that had once perched on this particular series of bases were paid for entirely by fines against cheaters in the games. Apparently there has been cheating for as long as there has been athletic competition. Gives new meaning to the term "spirit of the Olympics." They even had banned substances, I gather, although the most common form of cheating was bribing the opposition.
We toured two of the three museums, the museum of the ancient Olympic Games, organized in preparation for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and containing game-related artifacts loaned from all over Greece, and the main archeological museum of Olympia, which included stunning sculptures and all kinds of offerings. The first picture below is a drinking cup picturing a runner in the same starting position earlier assumed by Annabel and Courtney (and even earlier in this very blog, in Delphi, by Annabel, Mackenzie, Meredith, and Kerri). The second picture is a sampling of the thousands of small items that were found beneath the site of that ash-pit altar.
The last thing we did before leaving Olympia was sit in the middle of the large center room of the archeological museum while Michael told us stories, three stories mainly, with a few juicy digressions, and we looked at the pedimental and frieze sculptures all around the room. First the by-now familiar story of the kentauromachy, the battle with the centaurs, which we had seen depicted in other places include the Parthenon and Delphi. This was the best version, both Michael's narrative and the one in stone that we were looking at, which included very realistic scenes of those nasty brutish centaurs groping the womenfolk and biting the arms of the noble Greeks who attempted to fight them off.
The second main story was less familiar, the story of Pelops and his chariot-race win over King Oinomaos for the hand of his daughter Hippodameia. Oinomaos would only surrender his daughter (and kingdom) to a suitor who could beat him in a chariot race, but he always won by running his opponents through from behind with a spear, and then finished up by mounting their heads for trophies on the city walls. Pelops had the assistance of his former lover Poseidon (the first time I ever heard of a homosexual dalliance between god and mortal, among all those heterosexual ones), who supplied him with excellent horses, but he hedged his bets by accepting the offer of Oinomaos' chariot driver to throw the race, in exchange for first crack at first prize, Hippodameia. Pelops won, Oinomaos cursed the driver, Pelops killed the driver rather than handing over his new bride, and the driver cursed Pelops, which curse eventuated in such doomed offspring as Menelaus and Agamemnon. And that's only a very short summary of a very small part of the story. For instance, one of Pelops' descendants was Herakles (Hercules to you Roman-lovers), and his twelve labors were also depicted in stone around the walls of the museum room as well as recounted for us by Michael. My favorite of the labors was the one involving temporarily relieving Atlas of his burden, depicted below (with that hero-loving goddess Athena looking on), right after a shot of the entire Pelops pediment.
We left Olympia on Sunday morning, still relatively early, for the long drive back around the west and north ends of the Peloponnese (and yes, you guessed it, the peninsula was named for Pelops). We had only one stop on the way, at a seaside temple of Hera north of Corinth, a very isolated and gorgeous setting (once again--those Greeks and their sanctuary sites!) with three people fishing from the rocks, a couple making out in a shelter high above, but otherwise our group alone on the site itself. Once again we were blessed by the gods, through the aegis of their faithful servants at the Athens Centre.
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