After a day spent searching for an electrical wheelchair repair shop, we stopped for some ruin therapy at Ancient Corinth. I had low expectations because it is so close to modern Corinth, a suburban ruin, and hadn’t anticipated that much of it would be still unsorted and unrestored, so unlike British archaeological sites where much is made of a few neolithic stones in a field.
We started with the Temple of Apollo:-
We decided in the afternoon to set off into the mountains to see the Temple of Apollo Epikourios, a place of pilgrimage for the early Greek Revivalists and described and recorded by C.R. Cockerell. It is impossibly remote, now protected by a huge surreal canvas tent which somehow adds to the quality of its fragile survival, stripped of its sculptural decoration, but still magnificently fine, hiding inside.
This is the tent:-
This is the temple inside:-
It was cold and wet when we drove across the hills to see Ancient Messene, one of the less well known of the classical sites and fairly empty of tourists, but on a huge scale, still in the process of being reconstructed and looking like a Poussin even in the drizzle:-
The town of Argos has seen better days, once a rival to Sparta, now a one-horse market town.
This is its museum, closed for the foreseeable future:-
We crossed the hills to Epidaurus and its great theatre, less romantic than Mycenae, but still deeply impressive despite the crowds, on such a massive scale with its seats of mottled stone:-
Nearly as impressive as the remains of Mycenae is the Treasury of Atreus below, a great tholos tomb heavy with the noise of bees and the biggest dome for more than a thousand years:-
It was a brilliant, bright sunny afternoon when we went to Mycenae, high in the hills and unspeakably magical, empty of tourists, full of wild flowers and the memory of Heinrich Schliemann excavating in 1876 and finding the Mask of Agamemnon in Grave Circle A:-
We spent the morning wandering round the back streets of the first Greek capital, established in December 1822 after the Greek War of Independence and full of rundown houses with classical detailing:-
Although I studied Greek at school and Greek history at university, I have never previously been to the Peloponnese, to the landscape of Mycenae and Corinth, to the ruins of Bassae and Epidaurus, to where the Spartans and Athenians fought the Peloponnesian War. So, it was with a slight frisson that I crossed the Corinth canal into the mountains towards Arcadia:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 