This is a longer post, but it has great pictures!
Our first stop on the Peloponnese trip was to the new archaeological museum in Kalamata (yes, the olives!) which was built to house the finds from the Griffin Warrior Tomb recently uncovered outside of Pylos, as well as other finds from the surrounding area. One of the more fascinating parts of our semester is being able to compare and contrast so many different museum exhibitions and give serious thought to hows and whys of exhibition design and execution. But in any case, the artifacts and displays were engrossing and exciting.
And just as exciting to many of the students (and to me) was the fact that the area where we were traveling was the epicenter of filming for Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and so on. In the photo above, you can see fully functional replica of Odysseus’s boat at the right side of the pier in Pylos, as well as a smaller black-hulled boat on the left side of the frame. There were a lot of crew swarming around Pylos for the two days we were there, and the film crews also made it a little tricky for the students to see all of the castle at Methoni when they visited there, but there were no major star sightings that we heard of.
While the students were having a free beach day in Methoni, Christina and I were able to rent a car and visit Soulinari, the village where her father grew up, and the nearby village of Kremedia/Fourzi, where Christina’s aunt, uncle, and cousin live. As always, it was great to catch up with the family.
Despite the hubbub surrounding Nolan and his new film, our trip has also been the occasion for much rehashing of Zack Snyder’s The 300, with many opportunities to quote from the film, though as you might imagine, the students ultimately found more opportunities than quotes. This photo is of our students posing beneath the statue of Leonidis in Sparta, which is situated next to an athletic field. Further in the background, next to the fields, is a nursery school with dozens of small children on the playground. Passing by them on our way back from the Spartan acropolis, I mused aloud about whether modern Spartans expose the weak children on the playground rather than on the slopes of the Taygetus Mountains nearby, which I suppose is more or less what happened when I was growing up in Ohio.
We then paid a visit to the mountain monastery of Mystra, which is essentially the remains of a Byzantine city atop a mountain overlooking Sparta. The students in our program have been giving on-site presentations throughout the semester, and this photo shows Livia Z. giving her presentation about the site and in particular about its art and architecture.
On our way to the larger site of Messene, we stopped at the cyclopean city walls of Messene and contemplated once again the labor and ingenuity necessary to build these kinds of structures that can endure so long after the cultures that conceived them have vanished.
Christina and I (and the students) were deeply impressed by the ancient site of Messene. The city stretches for acres and acres and includes an amphitheater (above), temples, fountain buildings, a smaller political amphitheater, as well as a stadium and gymnasium. Simultaneously, the site showed off the loveliness of Greece in the early spring with small and riotous flowers in red, white, and yellow.
Within the bounds of the ancient gymnasium and the palaestra, our students practiced boxing and pankration.
Our bus made a brief scheduled stop at a beach on the way to Ancient Olympia. This is a beach where conservationists routinely mark the egg beds of sea turtles. It was a lovely day to stand on the shore, no matter what was going on in the world or in our lives.
We finished off our Peloponnese trip with a visit to the extensive site of Ancient Olympia. This photo shows a small section of the tunnel arch through which competitors entered into the stadium. As is traditional, we were all given the opportunity to engage in an impromptu footrace on the actual stadium race course. For some, there was the thrill of victory; for others, the agony of defeat.
This past week also included a day trip to Ancient Corinth, where site Executive Director Dr. Chris Pfaff showed us around the exterior grounds, pointing out the archaic, Roman, and later Byzantine points of interest. It was a windy day, but that made for some dramatic views of the site and its surrounding geography.
Acrocorinth looms behind the students in this shot, shrouded in clouds. Chris Nolan filmed here recently, using the amazing and indubitably cinematic Frankish citadel as a stand-in for Mycenae. Sure, the citadel that still stands atop the mountain is over two-thousand years younger than the citadel of Mycenae and sports utterly different architecture, but Hollywood.
Ioulia (the Associate Director of the Corinth site) and her graduate student giving us the hands-on introduction to some of the artifacts from Corinth. We were able to examine ancient representations of body parts (hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc.) that were used as part of the healing sanctuaries to Aschlepius. We also got to look at a couple of ancient curse tablets (in the orange box).
I posted about this on Facebook earlier, so I won’t say much here, but Christina and I lost Nibbler this past weekend (on Sunday afternoon, our time). She had been in decline since the summer, and this past week she chose to leave us on her own terms. She wouldn’t eat, and it became harder for her to move. This period was mercifully short, and she was surrounded by love and care when she passed away. This is precisely why we brought her to Greece with us, because we couldn’t bear the thought of being that far away from her during this time. We’re so grateful to everyone who helped make sure that happened. It means we can focus on the eighteen years of utter joy that we shared with this superlative tiny panther.
My students and I are discussing Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis today, and the finale includes a heart-wrenching discussion of mourning and why Iphigenia doesn’t want Clytemnestra, her mother, to mourn her once Iphigenia has been sacrificed so that her father(!) can appease the goddess Artemis and finally set sail for Troy. Her daughter asks Clytemnestra not cut a lock of her hair or cry at the grave (which will be a sacrificial altar). And then we come to this:
CLYTEMNESTRA: I don’t understand. I am not to mourn for you?
IPHIGENIA: No. I shall have no grave.
CLYTEMNESTRA: What of that? It is not the grave we mourn, but the dead.
This is what kept coming back to me as Christina and I dealt with the loss of our beloved Nibbler while surrounding ourselves again and again with the monuments of people long, long dead. It is not these things and places that hold our attention, not of themselves, but rather our imagination and/or memory of those connected with them. We are mourning for Nibbler because of who she was to us.
Our love for her is the sanctuary she leaves behind to mark her passing.