… and visit lots of new places! We’ve been to Athens a few times, so on the first of our two days in Piraeus, we opted to take an excursion to Corinth to visit the amazing canal built by the same company that built the Suez Canal. The Canal is 4 miles long, 70 feet wide, and has walls 170 feet high. It connects the Aegean and Ionian seas. The shops at the Canal had a “Palm Reader” based on Rome’s “mouth of truth”; simply insert the proper number of euros, place your palm in the mouth, and your future will be read!
Corinth is also the site of ancient ruins from the 6th C. BC, and a later Roman city from 44 BC. The remains are quite ruined; below are the Temple of Apollo’s remaining columns, and the ancient baths. There’s a nice museum documenting Corinth’s 20 centuries of life. The museum was robbed on April 12, 1990 of 285 ancient objects of various types as well as a million drachmas for museum staff salaries. In September 1999, 266 items were recovered in Miami, FL, and 8 more were found in NYC by the FBI. All were returned to the museum in January 2001.
We drove from Corinth to Mycenae, with mighty ruins of the kingdom which was the most powerful in Greece for 400 years. Mycenae was discovered by the famous German explorer Heinrich Schleimann when he tried to document the location of ancient sites mentioned in Greek history and legend. He uncovered shaft graves here which contained vast quantities of gold objects, as well as clues to the entire Mycenean civilization. We entered through the Lion Gate, built in 1250 BC, using a unique triangular arch which pre-dated the Roman true arch. A long walk up a fairly steep slope brought us to the ruins of the palace complex used by the Mycenean kings. The view was breathtaking (literally, the walk was pretty strenuous, and slippery in the light rain which fell).
A short bus ride took us to the Tomb of Agamemnon, the Greek Commander in Chief during the Trojan War, also known as the Treasury of Atreus for reasons that were never explained. This amazing structure is a landmark in European architecture. Built around 1250 BC, it has a triangular arched entrance like the Lion Gate, but this one is more than 30 feet high, with a lintel block that weighs 120 tons! The inside is the most incredible sight - a high circular ceiling rises to a point in the center, leading to its nickname as the “Beehive Tomb.” The contents of the tomb vanished long before the first account of the structure, but traces of bronze nails show the inside was originally decorated in some way.
We headed back to the ship for a brief rest before heading out again for a nighttime sightseeing tour of Athens, with dinner and a show. The tour was great but the dinner and show left something to be desired.
The second day, cool and sunny, we called Mike, a cabbie our friends had used the day before; he drove us to the new Acropolis Museum, at the foot of the Acropolis. A visually stunning building, the museum houses all the artifacts previously kept in the small museum on top of the Acropolis, as well as many more objects. It’s a wonderful museum.
We next set out in search of a street of bead and jewelry component stores; a friend had spied these shops the day before and gave us a business card for one of them. They were wonderful, and the beads, esp. strands of natural stones, very reasonably priced. Beads in hand, we headed off to take photos of the city’s most striking Neo-Classical buildings, including an Art Museum, and the public Library (below, with pigeons).
We left it to Mike to make the most of the time we had left. He drove us to the top of a hill overlooking the Acropolis, with wonderful views of the entire city of Athens (below, Frank and Mike, who looked a little like Frank Raschella!).
We had just enough time to make it back to the ship before we set sail for Katakolon!
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