Delphi

[katsaris]

As 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.