A TRAVELER’S GREECE
Hellenic Walks
Exploring the History and Culture of Mainland Greece
by
William J. Bonville

EXCERPT

PROLOGUE

This is not just another travel book. Nor is it your standard history book. It is a literary adventure that takes you exploring the history and culture that made Greece what it was and is. Sit with Agamemnon in the palace chamber where he gathered his chiefs to plan the expedition against Troy. Stand on the knoll at Thermopylae where remnants of the Spartan three hundred were cut down by a storm of Persian arrows. Toe the mark at Delphi, Epidauros and Olympia, then let imagination revel in the crowd's roar heard from two millennia past. At Mystras stand in contemplation above the double-headed imperial eagle marking the spot where the last emperor of the line that began with Julius Caesar underwent the ritual of coronation before marching off to meet death and empire's end battling Turks on the walls of Constantinople.

That is what this book is about. It is see and get a feel for the history of it all. It aligns perceptual, emotional and intellectual values such that these Hellenic adventures can be a traveler's most memorable experience, plus be a good read for his armchair cousin—or for the traveler himself as retrospection from the vantage point of his own favorite armchair at home.

Ah, but you have been to Greece already? Then join our traveler through the pleasures of retrospect. Let your travels live again in the mind's eye, now seen more vividly than before as you gain more than a post card's view of things. As to what you may expect to find: This book is not intended to show all of Greece to all possible travelers. The intent is rather to capture the essence of Greece that lies in its principal historical, geographical and cultural features. It achieves that end by means of a narrative locked into a highly-structured, self-guided motoring/walking excursion that fits within the limits of time and money that most travelers have in common. Why? So a literate working stiff like myself, with dreams about travels in Greece, can fulfill those dreams sans turning life and bank account upside down. Each chapter includes how-to and what-to directions and advice crucial for facilitating a traveler's first-time visit to a place.

Such detail makes the book useful even for the least experienced travelers, including those who ordinarily would dare venture into unfamiliar lands only on escorted tours with a pack of fellow tourists—and that is exactly the sort of superficial travel experience this book allows the hungry minded traveler to escape. These pages also serve backpackers or aficionados of the Grand Tour equally well. The final chapter tells you how to work out your personal travel plan.

But note: prospective travelers planning a first trip to Greece must accept a cautionary note. A Traveler's Greece does not deal with the nuts and bolts of travel (hotels, restaurants, money changing, etc.). The importance of such details for the traveler, whether novice or old trekkie, is not denied. Indeed, myriad nitty-gritty details are what make the well-known Michelin, Fielding, Fodor, Frommer and similar guides so valuable. Why try to duplicate them? Buy and use your favorite to supplement what you find here—which you won't find there. Read the first chapter, A Traveler's Greece, on the way to Athens. You already read it at home? Read it again for effect and familiarity as you approach your adventure in Hellas.

Read the introduction to the chapter on Athens in your hotel while unwinding from the trip and adjusting to the new time zone. Other chapters also have introductory sections that are best read aloud as you and your companion(s) drive along or perhaps in your hotel before retiring the night before a new adventure.

Also understand that in Greece you are in the "siesta" region of Europe. Normal business hours are from 7:30 or 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Many stores reopen at 5 p.m. for a couple of hours on some days. Best advice is to consult your concierge for detailed information on these matters in the various cities and towns along the way. Customs differ slightly from place to place. Many museums and archaeological sites in the cities follow business hours, opening at 8 a.m. or so, closing at 3 p.m. or even sooner. Some of the important museums and sites, however, remain open all day (although some buildings at the sites may close earlier). Practically all are closed on Mondays. That means you must plan to be up and on your way early each morning so as to visit the sites before siesta time; and you should schedule Mondays "free" or for the move to a new location. Otherwise, use Mondays for shopping and relaxation, or attending to mundane personal matters.

The Greek National Tourist Office (GNTO) in New York provides free brochures on all the areas you will visit (see a current Fodor's Greece, your net browser or a similar source for address or phone number). The pamphlets include detailed hotel information, maps, etc. Order them well in advance of your trip so that you may have them in hand for planning as well as traveling.

A further note: You will save money by renting your car at home, well in advance of your trip. As for hotels, choose before leaving home. Make reservations in Athens if you are traveling in high season, and preferably locate near Syntagma Square. The Syntagma vicinity is most convenient for our walks in Athens.

Once you leave Athens, if you are uneasy about proceeding into the hinterlands without hotel reservations, then before each move have your concierge call ahead for reservations at the hotel (or alternate) that you have preselected. If you find yourself stranded with no accommodation, get assistance from the local offices of the tourist police (tel: 171) which are located at police stations. Even on a tight budget, take a taxi from the airport to your hotel in Athens. Taxis are cheap and the convenience is worth the pittance more of cash.

Finally, your first venture out should be to the Greek National Tourist Office located just a couple of blocks off Syntagma Square at 2 Amerikas Street (phone 210-322-3111), you may find all sorts of brochures, bus schedules (intra and intercity lines), train and ferry schedules, and all about what’s doing in Athens and Greece. You can also make a currency exchange at a bank on the square if you did not do so earlier at the airport. On the way back to your hotel, visit the Greek version of a deli and obtain a couple of plastic liter bottles of drinking water. Local labels are cheap and as good as the name brands.

Point: Athens has good tap water, but get adapted immediately to drinking bottled water and using care with raw fruits and vegetables. The standard bugs in Greece aren't the same garden variety you are used to at home. Imodium AD notwithstanding, there is no advantage gained by courting intestinal distress.

A TRAVELER'S GREECE

Recollections of Greece have something of a dreamlike quality. The mind's eye glides across a field of splendid visions: Stately temples crown some soaring acropolis. Another perches high on a rocky headland rising precipitously from a sun-drenched sea. Less spectacularly, a solitary column, rakishly sporting a Doric capital, is framed by a rock-strewn hillside against a slate-blue sky. Such impressions are more than the stuff of dreams. Even the casual visitor comes away from Athens with perceptions of the Parthenon, gleaming softly in the sun atop the ancient citadel that was parent to the modern city. Further afield, no less unforgettable on the cliffs of Cape Sounion, the temple of Poseidon presides majestically above Homer's "wine dark sea."

Removed from our work-a-day milieu, a sensitive traveler soon discovers that these marvels of ancient Hellas evoke a contemplative mood, one so pervasive that everything else about Greece —the people, the everyday goings and comings of travel, even the most prosaic places and sights— all take on a measure of that same dreamlike aura of nostalgia. Little wonder that memories of Greece have the complexion of pleasant dreams.

Nevertheless, some of our more sophisticated travelers might frown on such sentimental recollections. Not that they deny the real connections between reveries and the living presence discovered as Greece. Rather, they say, such dreamy visions relate to a time —the Classical Age of Greece— that was quite different from what our idealized fantasies make of it. Proof enough is that our nostalgia dotes mainly on an era that lasted little more than a century, a mere flyspeck of time when viewed against the grand passages of history. For that alone they brand our romantic visions as much ado about a great deal less than we choose to imagine.

Yet for the general traveler such visions do count for something. They lend credence to another point of view: It wouldn't matter a whit if the Greece of nostalgic remembrance had endured but a single day. Suppose we are in fact left with little else but an impression. The impression is one of a remarkable articulation of human spirit cast in stone. It doesn't matter whether that spirit flowered for a day or a millennium. Of lasting importance is the way of life and thought invented by those ancient Greeks and sustained for what amounts to little more than a fraction of a millennial wink. That was their gift to us, a gift that became the foundation for what today is Western culture and civilization.

Our Greek Inheritance

The ancient Greek experience is like a friendly spirit haunting our every move, every thought, every nook and cranny of our present. The cultural influence of our Hellenic antecedents is so pervasive that it easily goes unnoticed. Some Greek names are as familiar to us as those drawn from recent history. Other Greek names have crept into language itself. All of us have been bemused by "Platonic" relationships and endured the "Spartan" conditions of a remote campsite. More is involved, of course, than mere words. "Draconian," for example, is the cultural recollection, embedded in language, of the ruthless severity of a system of laws imposed upon Athenians by a lawgiver named Draco. Less understood is that Draco answered the pleas of the citizenry for an alternative to anarchy and strife. More, Draconian law became the first giant step toward the idea of a free citizenry governed by lawful limits. That path led first to Solon and finally through Rome, London and the French Enlightenment, providing substance to the concepts of human freedom embodied in the United States Constitution.

Pericles, addressing his fellow Athenians in his famous funeral oration over the remains of the soldiers killed during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, speaks no less meaningfully to us: "We have a form of government not fetched by imitation of the laws of our neighboring states; which —because in administration it grants respect not to a few, but to the multitude— is called a democracy. Wherein, though all men are equal in point of law for their private controversies, in conferring dignities of public charge one man is preferred over another, though according to reputation and virtue, not because of his family; and is not held back through poverty or obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service for the commonwealth. And we not only live free within the administration of the state, but also with one another."

As for those high flying temples: They testify to the Greek genius that invented architectural styles and structural modes copied as late as today in our courthouses and schools, banks, churches and homes. The sum of our debt to those old-time Greeks is impossible to gauge. Language may be as old as man, but Greek wit taught us the rules of its use and its function as a logical structure for reason. The language invented by Greeks created the conceptual vehicle for thought whenever it extends beyond everyday Anglo-Saxon (or French, Russian, or whatever) into the realms of science, scholarship and philosophy. We use those latter terms in their fundamental sense, comprehending their root meanings of knowing, learning, and the love of wisdom —all first understood and taught by the Greeks. Bertrand Russell impishly asserted that all philosophy since Plato has been but a string of footnotes to the Dialogues of Plato. In a similar vein, scholars of all ages have employed the ultimate put-down for starry-eyed neophytes convinced of their discovery of some "new" idea.

"Oh, yes, that," the masters smile condescendingly. "The Greeks had a word for it, you know." The Greek way with words is a lasting part of our heritage. The skeleton of the language you read on this page contains a multitude of bone slivers that etymologists call Greek roots. Through that heritage of language and its defined structures the Greeks bequeathed to us the intellectual tools by which we are able to rationally manipulate the most complex concepts of science, politics, philosophy and much more. Despite the vast scope of the Hellenic influence implied by all this, we have equally extensive cultural debts to other ages and peoples. Among them is an inheritance from an entirely different Greek experience. A thousand years before Plato, Greece enjoyed another cultural flowering no less significant than its Classical Age. Out of that earlier civilization came crucial ingredients of the traditions upon which classical Greece itself was founded. We know it as the Mycenaean Age, named for a Peloponnesian city that was—according to Homer—the power center of that civilization. Mycenaean culture spread throughout Greece, its islands, and the near shores of Asia. That fact is clear both from archaeology and the famous "catalog of ships" recited by Homer in his epic description of the Achaean expedition against Troy. Other intimations are found in Homer's story of the accident- prone adventures of Odysseus enroute home from the victory.

Another phase of our Grecian heritage evolved from the shipwreck of the Classical Age in the storms of the Macedonian and Roman conquests. The incomparable Alexander, and subsequently the emperors of Rome, were so enamored of Greek civilization that the instruments and influences of Hellenic culture were carried to the ends of the known world. The result was what historians call the Hellenistic Age, during which the entire world known to the West was Hellenized. While the conquerors brutally reduced the temporal powers of the Greek states to ashes, they raised Greek cultural achievements to a pedestal upon which they remain to this day.

Later, as the Roman Empire reeled and disintegrated under the assaults of barbarians and internal rot, Greek language and traditions —particularly the Greek Orthodox Church— were primary bonds cementing the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) into a viable entity that endured another thousand years.

Greece: History of a Cultural Milieu

Against that background, one of the oddest facts of history has to be that a Greek nation as a political entity never existed until a century ago. The history of Greece thus is not of a country or even of a people. It is the history of a cultural milieu that maintained a fuzzy sort of focus within a region where now one, now another tribe, regional faction, city state or foreign conqueror gained political ascendancy based on the force of arms. Some invaders left practically nothing to tell of their passing —other than ruined temples and plundered cities. Others were mighty waves of humanity that brought huge new populations into large sectors of Greece and its islands. These included Slavs, Albanians and Turks. They penetrated even into the southern extremes of the Peloponnese. In a land so torn for thousands of years by countless invasions, foreign occupations and cruel repressions, it seems miraculous that a sense of Greek nationality persisted and ultimately bore fruit in nationhood.

The Hellenic spirit appears to be so durable that invading hordes inevitably assumed Greek language and customs. The consequence was that their descendants became no less "Greek" than the bona fide descendants of Spartans, Phocians, Argives and other peoples of the ancient Hellenic communities. The original warrior cast of Greek character must have had something to do with that "miracle." Those original Greeks were themselves invaders, fearsomely bellicose and aggressive. The first wave swept down from the north about four thousand years ago. They displaced and eventually absorbed the Pelasgian and other tribes that held the land in the dim and distant past. That initial wave brought the Ionian tribes. Later came the Aeolians and Achaeans —the latter gaining immortal fame through Homer's poetic account of their expedition against Troy. Finally came the Dorians, fiercest and most warlike of the lot. While that militant spirit may have been central to the "miracle" of Greek identity, just as certainly it was responsible for the failure of the Greek tribes to convert their sense of ethnic identity into nationhood. The Greeks, in short, were as ready to fight each other as to battle foreign invaders. And they did so with gusto. The fratricidal wars between Greek and Greek raged on and off for centuries, creating bitter enmities that became insurmountable barriers in the way of nation building. Thus an innate bellicosity prevented Greeks from achieving a political sense to match the ethnic universality of their language and culture. That temperamental reason alone prevented them from becoming a nation until modern times. Even then, Greece has been plagued by bloody civil wars and periods of political anarchy that bred the rule of tyrants as recently as the past few decades.

For all their fractiousness, the ancient Greeks developed a common ground of culture. They shared religious traditions and language, tribal customs and relationships that were fundamental to the Greek experience. Beyond that were complex cultural interchanges stemming from commerce and the activities of itinerant architects, artists, artisans and traders, teachers and even politicians. Neither should we ignore the effects of centuries during which Greek states exported mercenary soldiers, not only from city to city among themselves, but to barbarian lands in Africa and Asia.

The courage and prowess of the Greek infantryman and sailor became legendary —and a valuable export commodity. The common culture certainly had many shades and tones. The various city states were not only independent politically, but different in thought, interests and material character. The fantastic building programs of "imperial" Athens, based on its commerce, industry, and powerful fleet, were entirely alien to the character of agrarian Sparta.

The contrast between those two leading Greek states is illustrative of the differences between all the states, large and small. That broad diversity of cultural faces among the ancient Greek city states is obscured by the appearance of a common "Greek Way." A modern student finds the notion best expressed in Edith Hamilton's delightful study entitled, The Greek Way. But the idea is centuries old. Thank the Romans for that. Roman fascination with Greek culture focused on the experience of Athens, particularly upon the Age of Pericles and the fabulous inheritance of architecture, art, literature, philosophy and political traditions that became the spiritual inspiration if not the birthright of every Western generation since. Little wonder that Athens became the "university town" of the Roman empire for centuries.

Just as Pericles was taught by Anaxagoras, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle and the Younger Dionysius by Plato, the schools of Athens became the "Groton," "Exeter Academy," "Harvard" or "Oxford" serving the children of patricians and emperors of Rome. That long Roman experience in Athens had the effect that the Attic dialect was turned into "classical Greek" and remains so to this day. Little wonder, then, the primacy of Athens in the image of Greece in the Western mind as well as in the eyes of modern Greeks themselves. It was no accident that Athens, for a thousand years a second-rate city and often little more than a drab village, was chosen to be the capital of the modern state. Neither the great powers who were proxy parents of that state, nor the new Greek kings themselves, doubted for a moment that Athens was the only site deserving of political preeminence.

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