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Ancient Mediterranean Sites

March - April 2024
A dream cruise to Croatia, Greece, and Turkey: Diocletian's palace, the original Olympics site; the island that inspired TEMPEST, the Acropolis, Knossos, the Fortress of Rhodes, St. Paul's Ephesus, the ruins of Troy, and the Blue Mosque. Read more
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  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
    Day 1

    Like Lou Reed Says

    March 29 in the United States ⋅ 🌬 43 °F

    “It’s the beginning of a great adventure.”

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
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    Day 3

    Sorry Aeneas: we got other plans

    March 31 in Italy ⋅ ☁️ 57 °F

    Antenor was a counselor to King Priam; like his war foe Odysseus, he was known for being “crafty”. He joined Aeneas in the escape from the flames of Troy, but when their expedition for a new homeland reached the eastern shore of a boot-shaped peninsula, Antenor and some comrades said farewell; he broke ground of what would become Padua, and at the end of a long reedy strand, his chum Clodius founded the town now known as Chioggia. Since becoming the mainland port nearest Venice for Viking Cruises, it has probably become better known than ever in its history - despite having the largest fish market in Italy, the world’s second oldest tower clock (1300s), and a unique broad-apsed beauty of a church, San Giacomo. We savored a Easter morning stroll through its authenticity and humility, a contrast to the mad tourist love of its northern neighbor on the lagoon, La Serenissima. The thunderous peals of the bells of San Giacomo were the perfect expression of Buona Pasqua - Happy Easter!Read more

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    Day 5

    “This is Illyria, lady.”

    April 2 in Montenegro ⋅ ☀️ 59 °F

    We anchored in Gruzh, the same place Rebecca Wells and her husband are staying when she says “I can’t bear Dubrovnik.” (BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON) and then proceeds to describe in detail how exquisite it is. Ragusa, as it was known for centuries under its Illyrian name that was changed because it sounded too Italian, has become infamous for the strangling choke of tourist love. (Thanks, Game of Thrones.) Come in early April, when the scent of blossoming sour oranges suffuses the cool town air and bask in the Adriatic sunshine. And do not fail to walk its UNESCO walls, that both comprise and protect its heritage. A perfect day in a perfectly splendid place.Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
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    Day 6

    Only pigeons and fig trees

    April 3 in Montenegro ⋅ ☁️ 63 °F

    The best experience of Kotor is approaching it, then leaving it -because it sits at the bottom of a fish-hook-shaped fjord that is gaspingly beautiful. Folding cliffs are fringed at the shore by red-roofed Montenegrin villages, every one featuring a church you ache to visit, several buildings that look damaged and long abandoned, and a trendy cafe or restaurant where you can hear strains of Europop or Muzzein Muzak. We sailed in on glassine water with long threads of cirri still glowing pink
    from the sunrise; we sailed out as the currents turned silver, evening cumuli glowered, and the winds from the Adriatic beckoned us to Greece. Kotor itself could be stored in a corner of Dubrovnik, which could be stored in a corner of Venice. It’s a stone grey striving second cousin who points your attention to modest attractions, but oozes self-effacing humor and unctuousness. Here the hard history of the Balkans is less well-disguised and the damage of war and earthquakes less well-repaired. Our hilarious guide Radi, who always addressed us as “Dear and Beautiful People”, traded heavily in ironic jokes and English malapropisms that you came to suspect were part of the shtick. He pointed out one building, a formerly fine home bombed in one of the endless wars in this part of the world: “Now inside is only pigeons and fig trees.” And indeed many figs have sprouted in Kotor’s crevices and two other cruise ships were in port: Kotor’s fruitful years may be ahead.    Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
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    Day 7

    Greek memory is long

    April 4 in Greece ⋅ ☀️ 61 °F

    Today we sailed into the home of the richest mythology in the world and moored on the island that is believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s TEMPEST. Already everything seems touched by prehistory story telling. Greeks decline to call this place “Corfu,” a Venetian perversion of a Byzantine word. This is Kerkyra, given by Poseidon to his beloved naiad and named for her after he abducted her from her family of river gods and made passionate love with her enveloped in Kerkyra’s lush beauty. Now she has branded a ferry line that brings visitors to her shores to marvel and romance. The island’s succession of conquering rulers have each left a stamp here, from the architecture of Matthieu de Lesseps to the British planting of the cumquat, but Kerkyra remains as she has always been: proudly and ferociously Greek and “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that delight and hurt not.”Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
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    Day 8

    The Wonder that was Zeus

    April 5 in Greece ⋅ ☀️ 68 °F

    Pausanias was a Greek adventurer and geographer who was the earliest travel blogger, 2nd century AD. It was he who first branded the Seven Wonders of the World. Our journey is visiting the sites of three of those: today was the first. We were ready for the large cylinders of collapsed columns and monumental ruins and the grassy seating of the stadium where naked men competed in feats of fleetness and strength - but we didn’t expect the Olympian Archeological Park to be such a garden spot. PL: “Before I would never have thought to see this: now I can’t imagine missing it.” The famous statue of Zeus by Phidias, who also sculpted the so-called Elgin Marbles, was a wonder to Pausanias, but we knew that after presiding here for 900 years, that gold-and-ivory marvel disappeared, destroyed either in a cataclysm at the site, or looted to Constantinople and lost there. What we didn’t know is that the original sculptures of the pediments on Zeus’ temple, the work of a team of artists whose names are lost to time, are preserved and displayed in the museum here in a small Greek town as well as anything at the Pergamon or the Getty. The two pediments offered inspiration to young athletes on two virtues in physical contest: fraternity on the east (the myth of Pelops, who founded the ancient games) and ferocity on the west (the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs). Athletes only in imagination and craft, we were inspired for sure.Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
    Day 9

    The Forge of Athens

    April 6 in Greece ⋅ ☀️ 77 °F

    We sailed into the grand and ancient port of Piraeus at dawn: the growing light revealed an enormous billboard celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis, which by saving the city state of Athens also saved the future of world civilization: the founding of democracy, the invention of philosophy, the creation of the art of drama, to name just some of the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks. We crafted our own excursion in Athens, taking the Viking shuttle bus to Hadrian’s Arch , then walking to the foot of the Acropolis hill, up the crooked streets through Anafiotika, down to the Roman Agora and Monastiraki Square to our main destination: the Ancient Agora park and Temple of Hephaestus, the famously lame god of fire, metallurgy, and craftsmen. (According to Homer, it was Hephaestus who created new armor and a magnificent shield for Achilles after Patroclus died in battle dressed as his beloved friend) The stoa, which is an ancient word for shopping mall, was built by King Attalos and beautifully restored in the 50s and is a great respite from the heat (more of that later). The Temple is monumental magic and the best preserved in Greece. Dedicated also to Athena Ergane, goddess of craft and weaving, after it was completed in 415 BC, it came to be surrounded by forges and workshops, mortals laboring in its shadow to soak up the inspiration of the gods. The day’s less happy note was that it was at least 83 degrees in Athens, and we’re told in August temps are now reaching 120. It may be time for a new temple and lots of sacrifices to Gaia.- who actually had cults here before the disfunctional Olympians and their quenchless thirst for bling took over.Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
    Day 10

    High City

    April 7 in Greece ⋅ ☁️ 70 °F

    Is the literal meaning of “acropolis,” and the multi-cultural population of a city visits it every day, In 480 BC, sixteen year old Pericles, his friend Sophocles, and their precocious tag-along pal Phidias stared up at the ruins still smoking on the hill where the Persians had burned and looted the Ancient Temple, along with just about everything else. “They’ll be preserved, no one will be allowed to cart them away, so we never forget,” said Sophocles. “Not this time” Pericles replied. “We’re going to build the biggest temple in the world.” “Need a sculptor?”’ asked Phidias. This graphic novel is pretty much accurate. Things to remember: the Parthenon was the treasury for Athens: in fact Phidias’ colossus of Athena inside concealed large reservoirs of gold and other precious materials. The religious building was the Erechtheion, named after the ancestral King Erechtheus, who founded Athens. The friezes that were on the Parthenon show the procession which will end in the sacrifice of Erechtheus’ youngest daughter Chthonia to make come true Apollo’s oracle that Athens will defeat its enemy Eleusis if he does so. (Sophocles’ frenemy Euripides wrote a play about it that was dramaturged by Socrates. Most of the play is lost.) Many of those friezes were looted in 1800 by Englishman Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and his abetting wife and are on permanent exhibit in the British Museum. The new stunning Acropolis museum exists precisely to refute the classist British assertion that the Greeks don’t know how to take care of their own heritage. And if you tour the museum you will never hear Lord Elgin’s name without the words “stole” or “thief”.Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
    Day 11

    Dreams Come True, And Die

    April 8 in Greece ⋅ ⛅ 73 °F

    When I was 12 years old, I was torn between being an actor or an archeologist. My parents gave me a large coffee table book about Crete and Mycenae and I pored over it for hours, dreaming of Knossos. Today that dream came true, and didn’t disappoint. To reach for a metaphor to grasp the phenomenon of the Minoans: they were the Anasazi of Europe (2600 years earlier). They built a sophisticated culture distinguished by terraced living communities, astronomical and geographical literacy, extended trade networks to other continents; they surveyed and built long straight roads (in the case of the Minoans, paved ones), created and played organized sports, and designed and built multi-story structures. They dwindled and disappeared for mysterious reasons, and those
    structures baffled and intrigued the cultures that discovered them. The native Americans who
    came upon Chaco Canyon named the disappeared “the ancient ones” and adopted their building style, while never equalling its masonic mastery, The Mycenaeans and other seafaring Greeks filled the empty palaces and open questions with prodigious Greek imagination, creating stories, stories so compelling they would come to be almost believed. They invented a king, and named the lost civilization after him: Minos, cuckolded “stepfathers” of the Minotaur, and later and judge in Hades of the worthiness of souls. What was lost was a civilization that treated women at least equal to men, if not exalting them: women appear to have been major players in sports like bull dancing, and priests in a religion that was a self-aware animism, revering the natural world and insisting that human authority live in balance with it. As our bus returned to Heraklion, we couldn’t help but mourn their loss and speculate what the world might be like now if their enlightenment and “eudaimonia” had survived    Read more

  • TravelerAncient Mediterranean Sites
    Day 11

    The Minoan Art of Living

    April 8 in Greece ⋅ ⛅ 73 °F

    The work speaks for itself.,.,

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