Ionian Sea
Sailing across the Ionian Sea to the Peloponnese, Greece’s southern peninsula, we suddenly lost an hour of sleep as we moved into another time zone. Luckily our excursions began a little later than usual so everything worked out. We sailed into the small western Peloponnesian port of Katakolon under somewhat sunny and very breezy skies. There was a rush of crew and some guests down the gang plank to take advantage of the one card phone by the ship; the local internet outlet, alas, had been closed by the police as part of a clampdown on electronic gambling in Greece. Soon we were on three buses for the quick trip to the Merkouri estate where since 1870 a local family has been producing excellent red and white wines as well as olive oil. Wandering through the old barns past the family’s two St. Bernard watchdogs we viewed a great array of farming equipment from the 19th century in their private museum before we heard some talks on producing wine and oil in the 21st century. The high—in several senses—of the morning was sampling local wines, cheeses, and olive oil under the plane trees in the family garden before heading back for lunch (!) on the ship.
After lunch we set out on our major excursion to the great panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia, a site so important for its athletic competitions every four years that the ancient Greeks usually stopped all wars for several months so that folk could travel from one end of the Greek world and the other to this modest community on the Alpheus River about a forty minute drive from the coast. From 776 BC to the end of the fourth century after Christ when the Roman emperor Theodosius closed the games down as a relic of a forbidden pagan era—they honored Zeus, king of the gods—athletes competed for the honor of at first the simple prize of an olive wreath. As time went by, however, the games became professionalized and the runners and wrestlers came for the rich cash prizes that made them attractive. Indeed one could have a profitable career as a periodonikes, a man who traveled from games to games (and there were many in the Greek world) competing in his chosen sport. The athletes were always men and in fact women were not even allowed to attend the games as spectators. Top sport for the elite was chariot racing, but for the common man it was the pankration, a form of wrestling in which almost anything went except killing your opponent.
For centuries Greek states and individuals vied with one another to contribute buildings and facilities to the games. The result was one of the richest collections of statuary in the Greek world, a collection alas now represented only by the stone bases; the bronze statues were carried off to Rome or at times simply melted down in the early Christian period for the value of their metal. Archaeological excavations since the 19th century, mostly by the Germans, have revealed most of the site: great temples to Hera and to Zeus, a high ash altar, porticoes to house pilgrims and donations, treasuries to display gifts from a dozen cities, administrative buildings, and the center piece of the site, a two hundred yard long stadium for the contests. Some of our group ran the course in record time, partly inspired by a desire to get out of the unexpected rain that began mid afternoon. Indeed the sanctuary was a rich green from the very wet fall instead of the sere brown one usually sees in Greece this time of year; the scent of freshly mowed grass is not a common experience at Olympia!
The most famous object of veneration was a forty foot high gold and ivory statue of Zeus, a creation of the great Athenian sculptor Pheidias around 430 BC; ancient writers said the work was so impressive that it added a new dimension to religion and it came to be counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World along with the pyramids of Egypt. Luckily depictions of it on local coins and a few descriptions by ancient writers give us an idea of its appearance; the statue itself was removed to Constantinople, the new eastern Roman capital after AD 330 and it vanished in the Middle Ages. We were, however, able to see the workshop of Pheidias (later turned into a Christian church) in which German excavators uncovered the actual signed drinking cup of the artist. An Athenian mug of ca. 430 BC has the name “Pheidias” inscribed on its base.
We were fortunate in our arrival date because the museum had already been partially closed in preparation for renovations that will take at least eighteen months; we were, however, able to see the great pedimental sculptural groups of the Zeus temple, some of the most important Greek statues ever uncovered as well as the Winged Victory of Paionios and the famous statue of Hermes and the infant Dionysos, a masterpiece by the fourth century BC Athenian sculptor Praxiteles. Indeed some of us had that gallery all to ourselves for a time and were able to look at some of the sculptural details like the tool marks on the back of the statue that have lead certain scholars to assert that it may be a later Roman work—we decided we were not convinced.
And now as I write this entry we are heading out of harbor into a force eight gale to make our way up the west coast of Greece past the sites of naval battles like Actium and Lepanto that changed the course of history…
