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katsarisAs some of you may have realized already, the "bellybutton of the world" that I mentioned two posts ago, is ofcourse Delphi, the Omphalos -- which I visited the week before last with my father. And I called it an "outie" because, as bellybuttons go, it was rather taller than I expected.
Greek geography's not my best subject, you see. I know the rough location of cities, but if you are looking for someone who can name all 52 nomous, each of their capitals and all their major agricultural products, look for someone else. So, I knew where Delphi was -- I just had no idea it was also mountainous. Or atleast not *so* mountainous. :-)
So, I've been expecting everything there to be roughly on a level with each other -- what the ancients had built instead was -
a temple for Athena
and training grounds (gymnasium) over that.
and treasuries over that
and altars over that (including the places where all the seeresses prophesied and so forth)
and a temple of Apollo over that
and a theater over that
and a stadium over that.
It took us a while to go all the way down from the level of the road down to the temple of Athena and the gymnasium, then back all the way, and up the mountain to see the rest (and the museum ofcourse). More than once I thought we'd reached the top of what was there to see, and there was another long walk to see the next item over.
Lots and lots of inscriptions -- pretty much every rock was inscribed with some words of dedication from some emperor or non-emperor. Pretty much none of those words of dedication had spaces between them to separate them -- which made them hell to read.
One amusing bit in the whole day was as we were driving to Delphi -- we had missed an exit we ought to have taken a quarter (or so) earlier, and my father ofcourse wanted us to go back -- looking at the map however I thought that if we took a smaller road ahead of us, it'd be a shortcut.
Well, that smaller road in two minutes became a mere dirtroad (homatodromos), and in another two minutes or so we saw sheep grazing up ahead.
None of us wanted to go through the sheep, so we decided my suggestion was a bad idea and simply backtracked :-)
Another amusing part was much of my dad's running commentary at Delphi -- with Hercules as the common motif. From the initial simple (at the sight of the gymnasium -- and this is a rough translation ofcourse) "Here's where Hercules was fighting all those armies" at which I think I responded simply that I don't remember any visit of Hercules to Delphi from mythology, to the more elaborate when we came to a fork in the road and were uncertain which way was which "Hercules came to a similar choice when he had to choose between the paths of virtue and villainy", all eventually leading up to a running monologue (after an hour or so of climbing up and down the mountain) about how did the ancients manage to walk everywhere, and how they constructed roads, and how they constructed *forests*, and how they placed these mountains inconveniently, and about Hercules uprooting trees with one hand and planting them elsewhere with the other ----
At about that time I dissolved into semi-hysterical laughter and had to stop a couple minutes to calm down. :-)
A fun time was had in short. And no worries: all the pounds I must have lost from climbing up and down the mountain, I quite shortly regained when we stopped for lunch later on. Mmm, tzatziki. And fries. And lots and lots of meat.
Nasty bitter olives however. Why would someone want to eat bitter olives? Ugh.
Greek geography's not my best subject, you see. I know the rough location of cities, but if you are looking for someone who can name all 52 nomous, each of their capitals and all their major agricultural products, look for someone else. So, I knew where Delphi was -- I just had no idea it was also mountainous. Or atleast not *so* mountainous. :-)
So, I've been expecting everything there to be roughly on a level with each other -- what the ancients had built instead was -
a temple for Athena
and training grounds (gymnasium) over that.
and treasuries over that
and altars over that (including the places where all the seeresses prophesied and so forth)
and a temple of Apollo over that
and a theater over that
and a stadium over that.
It took us a while to go all the way down from the level of the road down to the temple of Athena and the gymnasium, then back all the way, and up the mountain to see the rest (and the museum ofcourse). More than once I thought we'd reached the top of what was there to see, and there was another long walk to see the next item over.
Lots and lots of inscriptions -- pretty much every rock was inscribed with some words of dedication from some emperor or non-emperor. Pretty much none of those words of dedication had spaces between them to separate them -- which made them hell to read.
One amusing bit in the whole day was as we were driving to Delphi -- we had missed an exit we ought to have taken a quarter (or so) earlier, and my father ofcourse wanted us to go back -- looking at the map however I thought that if we took a smaller road ahead of us, it'd be a shortcut.
Well, that smaller road in two minutes became a mere dirtroad (homatodromos), and in another two minutes or so we saw sheep grazing up ahead.
None of us wanted to go through the sheep, so we decided my suggestion was a bad idea and simply backtracked :-)
Another amusing part was much of my dad's running commentary at Delphi -- with Hercules as the common motif. From the initial simple (at the sight of the gymnasium -- and this is a rough translation ofcourse) "Here's where Hercules was fighting all those armies" at which I think I responded simply that I don't remember any visit of Hercules to Delphi from mythology, to the more elaborate when we came to a fork in the road and were uncertain which way was which "Hercules came to a similar choice when he had to choose between the paths of virtue and villainy", all eventually leading up to a running monologue (after an hour or so of climbing up and down the mountain) about how did the ancients manage to walk everywhere, and how they constructed roads, and how they constructed *forests*, and how they placed these mountains inconveniently, and about Hercules uprooting trees with one hand and planting them elsewhere with the other ----
At about that time I dissolved into semi-hysterical laughter and had to stop a couple minutes to calm down. :-)
A fun time was had in short. And no worries: all the pounds I must have lost from climbing up and down the mountain, I quite shortly regained when we stopped for lunch later on. Mmm, tzatziki. And fries. And lots and lots of meat.
Nasty bitter olives however. Why would someone want to eat bitter olives? Ugh.
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So your father's a Hercules fan I take it
Date: 2004-05-30 03:27 am (UTC)Actually I have a theory that Superman is simply our age's iteration of Hercules, and the reason that he remains one of the enduring Eternal Champions while other warriors come and go is that he's the Superhero with Human Weaknesses - he can't fix everything, his family life is one continual slide from crisis to crisis, he may be born with all this superior power but it doesn't make his days any better, and unlike the Teflon Heroes (say James Bond, Theseus), who don't seem to ever suffer any lasting angst for the things that go bad, Hercules/Superman is always wrestling with it.
Walking archeological sites is always very strange, they're never what you expect them to be. (you can usually tell a novel written by someone who visited a place and someone who didn't.) I can safely say that our ancestors probably did have those well defined leg muscles you see on the kouroi! Hey, did you read that thing a few years back about how they now think that the inspiring vapours [read mind-altering chemicals] seeped up through the stone, that the "debunked" image of a great chasm by which the pythoness sat (which didn't exist) comes from a combination of bad translation and lack of geology knowledge? I love it when the debunkers get debunked in turn...
BTW, those bitter olives are considered to be a mandatory part of a lot of Greek food here. I have to pick them out of salads and "Greek Pizza" and even then they leave a nasty aftertaste like anchovies. "Italian Food" in the US isn't very Italian either in my experience.
Re: So your father's a Hercules fan I take it
Date: 2004-06-15 07:19 pm (UTC)Where olives are concerned, I don't often eat them myself. Usually I eat them only on such similar outings, but the ones I had happened to taste before this time were much sweeter, or atleast non-bitter. As mentioned before, it seems some varieties of olive are naturally bitter and I had simply lucked out earlier. :-)
And as for Theseus -- hoo boy, I had once made a reasonably long ramble about him and even that one was missing out a lot more I could have said. You can go to this page: http://www.s8.org/cgi-bin/ag_read.cgi?New_Olympians,_The, and search for the words "ramble about Theseus" in order to find my post.
In that ramble, I presented Theseus as a really disfunctional *villain*. :-) I had based that opinion of mine based on tidbits from real mythology not very often heard (as the fact that when himself was 50 he kidnapped 12-year old Helen, and according to some versions raped her) but partly I admit I was also basing it on the ("Gargoyles"-fandom related) assumption that the Minotaur wasn't actually eating any people, which makes that whole excursion of Theseus a bit unjustified... :-)
*g* Spinning that assumption of villainy further on, I also imagined (a tidbit I don't mention in that ramble I linked) that Theseus' black sails which led to
Denethor'sAegeus' death, were actually a intentional signal to some conspirator in Athens to arrange for that convenient "suicide" which coincided with Theseus triumphant return to the city...I really turned Theseus into a villain in my mind in that one. :-)