The Fathomless Shadows

This past weekend was Easter weekend, as I’m sure you know, but you may or may not have known that this year is one of those rare years when the Gregorian and Julian calendars align, meaning that all christians celebrate Easter on the same Sunday. Easter is big in Greece and is often focused (beyond the religious significance) on a family gathering featuring a roasted lamb or goat.

Christina’s family resides in a small village (χωριό) called Fourzi between the city of Kalamata and the coastal town of Pylos. Christina’s mother came to Greece for the long holiday weekend, and we all drove from Athens to Fourzi (in some truly horrendous but mostly well-behaved traffic) for a three-day visit with family.

We met the family at the farm, gathered around the table, and did a passable job (if I do say so) of alternating between English and Greek as necessary to keep as many folks in the conversation as possible from one moment to the next.

The meal was excellent and the company warm. It was a table full of roasted goat and chicken, beets and beet greens, potatoes, bread, and home-made wine.

We’ve been very lucky in that we have had the opportunity to see Christina’s family several times in the past couple of years, and we are grateful for each and everyone one of those chances.

The village has a lot of familial connection and personal memory associated with it, but I have to say that Pylos grows on you pretty quickly, too. I thought it might feel empty after the hustle and bustle of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey movie shoot in March, but the influx of family for so many households meant that the town square was overflowing all weekend long. It was nice to see and hear, even though the church bells for the holy weekend were right outside of our bedroom window.

Back in Athens after the holiday, we started the final week of the program with a visit to a honeybee farm!

Greece is a major producer of honey, and this farm did a spectacular job of making us feel at home, teaching us about bees and honey in Greece, and then letting as have some first-hand experience with a tasting of a variety of local honeys.

All of this took place in a suburban and yet still secluded bee farm filled with bee boxes and wild flowers.

We even got the chance to suit up and see what life is like inside a bee box on the farm. I was impressed that no one in our group was overcome with anxiety or trepidation getting that close to a thousands of bees. They didn’t have us do a swarm transfer or anything like that, but we were still staring at frames covered in hundreds of bees. And when we were done with that, the bee farmers served us an amazing “light lunch” on their back porch, a lunch that I am still musing about.

Our time is winding down here in Athens, and Christina and I are trying to pack as many social engagements as we can into this final week. It will be emotional and wonderful and exhausting, I’m sure. I’m not sure if I will be able to post before we get back home, but I will write a wrap-up post, and you can stay tuned to the blog over the summer to hear more about how the film project is coming along.

So, yeah, you’re a film professor who gets the chance to live and work in Greece for three months. Are you going to make a film? Obviously. At least one. I am not here for the filmmaking–technically, I am here to teach a course on mythology and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and other Weird Wave filmmakers–but I am not going to pass up such a singular opportunity. That would feel like a real waste.

Of course, filmmaking is often complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Whatever this project was going to be, it couldn’t be any of those things. It had to be simple, take up virtually no extra time, and cost next to nothing. The very straightforward approach to these limitations would be to make a documentary about our semester abroad program. It is an elegant solution, but it’s not one that I respond to emotionally. I very much appreciate a good documentary, but I have never really thought of myself as a documentarian. Even when I have been interested in a naturalist narrative style, I have never really felt the pull to make a doc.

But, most of you who know me know that I am y0ur man for fake documentary and found footage. When done well, these films tickle some deep interest on my part (the tension, I think, between reality and fantasy). Without a doubt, there are many films that use these tropes poorly, and I respect those of you who have simply been burned too many times by atrociously bad found footage horror. I get it.

But this is what I have to work with, and I think I am working with a very solid and effective premise. It is a fake documentary that is not at all fake right up until the moment when it very suddenly is, and my goal is for that moment to be seamless, invisible. If I can make that moment disappear for the average viewer, then I will be able to deliver the goods when it comes time for the big moment at the end of the film. It is a narrative sleight of hand that requires some basic planning and then some effective execution.

Yes, some of you are asking very good questions about the ethics of documentary filmmaking in this case. The students and my colleagues know what I am doing and are signing releases. Everyone seems excited about it. It makes the students eager to sit for an interview now and then.

I know this description is light on details about the “story,” and I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way. I don’t want to spoil the story at all. Suffice it to say that it is a fake documentary about semester you’ve been following on this blog, but throughout it all, the film professor is quietly engaged in a search for a prop from a famously unfinished horror movie by one of the lesser-known Greek Weird Wave filmmakers. Finding this prop might mean renewed professional prospects, but it also could be very dangerous. It’s valuable to all the wrong people.

Is it going to come together? I have no idea. I have hours and hours of beautiful footage. There is still a lot of work to be done on some key elements. I’m currently in a suspenseful sort of dance/negotiation for the mysterious prop. And there is no script. I’m going with my gut on this project.

If it works, it’s going to be amazing. If it fails, I’m pretty sure it’s still going to be a glorious failure (at least to me). In either case, I did the right thing by taking this artistic chance when I was presented with it.

Also, just because I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this, I include this photo of three whole shelves in the fantasy/scifi/horror section of Politeia Books in Athens. Three whole shelves devoted to Lovecraft in Modern Greek.

At the end of last week, we took the circus to Crete, which is officially the only Greek island the program gets to during the semester (though folks are free to go to others when they have time). We began our trip in Heraklion with a visit to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which has amassed a wonderful collection of artifacts, most of which focus on the Minoan civilization.

I loved looking through the museum at all of the physical evidence from Minoan society and setting that alongside what I know mythologically about Minos, Knossos, the minotaur, and so on. I can see how someone might come looking for myth and walk away disappointed, but for me it’s the opposite. I don’t want to eliminate myth through scientific evidence; I want the tension between the two to lead me somewhere else. I want the synthesis of these things, and that synthesis happens inside me and it happens in art I produce. In a lot of ways, a museum visit like this is a recharge.

While we were based in Heraklion, we also visited the ancient site of Knossos and the Minoan palace there. Knossos is a site that has a number of sections reconstructed and decorated so that the visitor can try to have some sense of what the architecture looked like in its day. This is a somewhat contentious practice, because reconstructions are inevitably interpretations, but they are interpretations that are quite literally written in stone (and cement and stucco), but our knowledge of ancient societies and sites is considerably more malleable. It makes you wonder whether these beautiful mock ups are hindering current work in the field. But it also offered our students a perfect opportunity to think in earnest about those ethical questions.

From Heraklion we moved to Chania on the western end of the island, near Souda Bay and the NATO naval base there. Our hotel was quite close to the Crete National Stadium, which was the start and finish line of the 2025 Crete Marathon. Christina and I stumbled upon it while we were out for a walk one morning. I’m actually kind of glad we didn’t know about it, but we’re crazy kids, and we would have registered for one of the races, no doubt about it.

Chania is absolutely charming. Architecturally, it’s mostly a Venetian town with the remains of the Byzantine city bastions and fortifications ringing the Old Town, all of which protects the picturesque bay.

Chania also has its own fairly new archaeological museum with a very nice collection, including the Mitsotakis (yes, that Mitsotakis) collection. This collection includes a small sealstone with a Minotaur figure carved on it. The sealstone is dated to 1350 BCE, which is exceptionally early for depictions of the Minotaur, and this raises questions about the reliability of archaeological evidence that comes from private collections.

The trip to Crete also included a trip to the utterly gorgeous Elafonisos Beach. This beach has just this year been rated the #1 beach in the world according to Tripadvisor. This wasn’t the reason we went, but it was in accord with the general philosophy. This beach sports enchantingly pink sand, which is the result of micro-organisms that have a symbiotic relationship with the seaweed. What we hear is that during the summer you can’t see the sand for all the bodies reclining on the beach. While we were there, just before the start of the season, there were only scattered visitors and one kite surfer.

On our way back from the beach, we took the opportunity to stop our enormous tour bus next to a cliff so that we could climb 257 steps to visit the Cave of Agia Sofia. I enjoy caves quite a bit, and this one might even be a good one for folks who are usually uneasy in them. The cave mouth is big enough that the vast majority of the space has natural light.

Finally, before we left Chania for Athens, we stopped at both Eliftherios Venizelos’s tomb and the Venizelos mansion museum. Venizelos is a towering figure in modern Greek history (the Athens airport is named after him), and he came from Chania, so there are more than a few sites of interest connected with him in the area.

We’re happy to be back in Athens for a week or so before Easter comes and we head back down to the Peloponnese to spend time with family. Next time I’ll tell you a bit more about the film project I’m working on while we’re in Greece!

This week our group made a visit to Thetis Authentics Ltd in Athens for a marvelous hands-on workshop. Thetis Authentics is a company of artists and experts who specialize in authenticating ancient pottery. They also have the capacity to create bespoke pottery in the ancient styles.

If what you want is a newly crafted custom piece of your in any of the many ancient styles, then you can contact their Attic Black workshop and talk to them about what you’re looking for, from classic red and black figure ceramics to even more ancient pieces in the geometric or even Cycladic styles.

They also run these workshops. We had so much fun with the artists at Thetis Authentics. When we arrived, they showed us a couple of brief videos that oriented us to the ancient techniques and science behind red and black figure ceramic decoration. And from there, they sat us down around a large table, gave us tools and examples, and set us to work. First, we had rectangular tablets on which we painted red figure technique images on one side and then a black figure image on the opposite side.

Once we were done with the painting, each of us was given a sizable block of clay, and the table was strewn with a collection of figurines, everything from votive offerings to small oil lamps. Brian (one of the students) and I worked from the same raised-arm votive figurine, which Christina worked from one of the crossed-arm figurines, because she said it spoke to her. We all had a great time, and more than a few of our students showed artistic talents that had not made themselves known previously to us.

All of our painted tablets and hand-crafted figurines will be fired over the weekend and we will get to pick them up next week. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll include photos of our completed work next time around. For what it’s worth, this was a group of college students who pretty much to a person found themselves perking up when they were asked without much warning to engage in hands-on art creation. They were focused, intent, creative, and (maybe because of all the clay and paint) not very apt to check their phones.

This weekend we are on the island of Crete for visits to Knossos, Gortyn, Chania, and all sorts of other amazing places. Photos to come.

This past week was so full! It wasn’t just that we did a lot (we did); it was that there was such a variety of things. Bring it on!

Last weekend, Christina and I met up with our friend Maria (see below for more on Maria!) for a hike in Kaisariani, a gorgeous wooded mountain region on the eastern edge of the city of Athens. The mountainside has a Byzantine monastery, glorious views of Athens, and miles and miles of hiking trails. We saw hikers, mountain bikers, trail runners, and at least one film crew while we were there. I’m certain Christina and I will make it back for another hike before the end of April.

Tuesday, 25 March was Greek Independence Day, and we made a point of walking down to the center of the celebratory parade with the students. We positioned ourselves about a block away from the Parliament building and Syntagma Square, which is the real epicenter of the event. Though we arrived about an hour before things kicked off, we missed our opportunity to stake out a spot right on the curb. It was difficult to get a good view (the photo above is of half a dozen enormous main battle tanks, by the way), but it was a fantastic day for people watching, too. I realized while we were experiencing the parade that I don’t have much experience with parades of this sort outside the U.S., and though American 4th of July parades have military aspects to them, they are not usually actual displays of current military strength. But this was unit after unit of the Greek military marching, driving, and flying through Athens. There were jeeps, armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers, surface-to-air missile launchers, and flight after flight of low-altitude military aircraft flyovers. You saw all of this equipment, but more pointedly you felt it in your chest. It made me think a lot about how the Greeks experience the parade and what they are thinking and feeling three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and two months into a very different NATO dynamic (to put it mildly).

On Wednesday, we all met up near the sundial inside the Athenian National Garden for a plant walk guided by Maria Christodoulou (Bucknell ’05), The Greek Herbalist. As I have mentioned before, the National Garden is where Christina and I often get our runs in, because there are miles of trails inside all of the fantastic greenery. But before our tour this past week, we didn’t know much about the greenery itself. Maria focused more on the various tree species in the park, because we’re not quite at the right season for herbs. I’m generally not one of those folks who can identify trees for you when we’re out and about, so I was grateful to learn some new things!

We met this fellow inside the museum for the Kerameikos Archaeological Site on Thursday. The Kerameikos was both the potters neighborhood of ancient Athens (due to the rich supply of clay from the nearby river), as well as its graveyard.

After spending time in the small but fascinating museum of Kerameikos, we toured the site itself, where our archaeologist Prof. Scahill asked the students to make more connections between the art and architecture of the monuments we were seeing with the other ancient structures they have already studied. Does that square grave monument looming above the students look like one of the Parthenon metopes (the centauromachy, in particular), or maybe part of the panathenaic games Parthenon relief? I think it does.

Last Friday we visited the Archelon Sea Turtle Protection Society in Glyfada, a coastal suburb of Athens. We had the chance to learn all about the three species of sea turtle that visit Greece’s coastal waters and in particular the species that nests on the beaches. Archelon is essentially a turtle hospital and rehabilitation facility, and it was amazing and uplifting to see people taking direct action to keep threatened population alive and to help it thrive again.

Maybe I’ve already mentioned that Athens is a city of cats. (There are a lot of dogs here, too, but very few neighborhood strays.) I’m sure lots of folks have cats at home here, but cats are everywhere on the streets and in the parks, and it seems like a popular pastime to provide food, water, and shelter to these lovelies. In fact, despite our routine warnings about “passengers” on these cats, our students are very quick to pet them or let them curl up in their laps when we are on archaeological site visits. We have at least a dozen neighborhood cats that we see more or less daily within three blocks of our apartment. These four are just some of them, but they are among the most entertaining for their Olympic piling skills.

This past week has been spring break for the program, and that meant no classes (except for the Modern Greek course that I am taking as a student) and no student activities. Most of them have gone off to see other parts of Europe and will reconvene here in Athens over the next couple of days.

For us it meant the arrival of our friends Andy and Christen. We’ve been close for over twenty years, and we’ve all been fortunate enough to remain excited by and able to travel. The four of us have met in Ireland before, and we have done a fair amount of traveling together within the United States. This year we had the opportunity to host them in Athens for several days.

We started off with a brief trip to Nafplio in the Argolid region of Greece a couple of hours outside of Athens. Christina had already been there with the students on the one trip during which I stayed home to look after Nibbler when she wasn’t doing well. This trip allowed her to share most of those sights with me and our good friends. We enjoyed a couple of days and one night in scenic Nafplio where we enjoyed great seafood, walked the picturesque streets, communed with neighborhood cats, and generally enjoyed ourselves. While in the area, we also paid a visit to the Argive Heraion, the ancient theater of Argos, we drove by the Acropolis of Tyrins, and we sat for a tasting at Skouras Winery.

Back in Athens, we shared as many sights as we could with Andy and Christen (the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, Plaka, Anaphiotika, the National Gardens, Kolonaki, Syntagma Square, Monasteraki, and more!) and did our best not to miss on opportunity for a stroll or a meal for the rest of the week. We were able to cap off their visit with a morning at the weekly laiki, or open-air street market, which is full of amazing produce stands, as well as other stalls for clothes and household items.

Next week is a return to classes, but it is also Greek Independence Day on Tuesday, so look forward to plenty of parade photos next time!