This is the third installment of Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown’s recent travels to Greece. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Next day, I made the walk again to the Altis museum and paid the entry fee, but this time turned right, into the Altis proper, the actual ancient Olympic venue. The Altis as it is today is an amazingly beautiful and calm place, with its well-preserved ruins, its long history, and its shady groves. Earthquakes have toppled the temples, and once maintenance had stopped, overflowing of the Alpheus and its tributary stream covered the Altis in silt, thus covering and preserving to a remarkable extent a great deal of the area.

Given my wretched cold, all I did was a short, slow wander past the Philippeion, the unique round temple, or tholos,  erected by Phillip ll to celebrate his victory at the battle of  Chaeronea in 338 BC, where he crushed a Athenian and Theban coalition and effectively put an end to the old order, establishing Macedonia as the dominant power in Greece. The old city states, as remarked above, had exhausted themselves in the endless Peloponnesian wars, and Sparta had depopulated herself with the constant thinning of its ruling ranks by incessant war.

Wikipedia remarks, “Of special interest to Greeks is the Pelopion, tomb of the quasi-mythical king Pelops, who gives his name to the Peloponnese and was ancestor of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the Greek kings of the Trojan War.  The tomb suggests that he may not have been entirely mythical.” Score one for the old myths!

As the Games were the Olympic Games, and as Zeus was the main god, his temple was the focal point of the Altis and its ceremonies. As there is little or no marble to hand, the temple was built of the rough local stone, then plastered over to resemble marble.

I sat for some time, simply being quiet and trying to be receptive to the spirit of the place, a strange mix of present quiet and silent ruins but also of thoughts of the busy, dusty past where Greeks of every city competed during a sacred truce that allowed even city states at war passage through each other’s territory on the way to the Games. Before the actual Games, the Altis would have been noisy and dust with activity, as athletes were required to train under official supervision by the  hellanodikai (“judges of the Greeks”) for a period of one month – and latecomers were disqualified. This was presumably a sort of “anti-doping” measure to ensure that no overly innovative training methods were used, the goal being to equalize the athletes as much as possible.

The stakes were high, although the actual prize was simply a crown of olive leaves, cut from a sacred grove in the surrounding area. Cheating was punished by whipping and fines, and egregious offenders had to pay for a statue of Zeus to be erected, the zanes, which stood along the terrace wall as you approached the entry tunnel – a forceful reminder that these were sacred games, that you had sworn the Olympic Oath before the statue of Zeus, and thus cheating was an actual offense against the gods.

Victors had on the surface, only their olive leaf crowns and their honor, but then as now, the rewards for a victory could be huge: in a few cases city walls were breached so the victorious athlete could enter the city through a special portal. In Athens the victor dined for free for life. The glory was undying, and today the names of more than a few of the ancient victors are still known to us.

After sitting among the ruins and “thinking into” the history and the people, my cold took over. Back to the hotel for a rest, dinner in a nice open-air restaurant close by, then early bed and a taxi in the morning to Nafplio, passing through the Arcadia regional district, a truly beautiful area of rolling terrain and groves of trees, which really does seem to evoke something of the spirit of the 17th and 18th centuries’ more romantic yearnings.

Oh, the pleasure of the plains!
Happy nymphs and happy swains,
Harmless, merry, free and gay,
Dance and sport the hours away.

…For us the summers shine,
Spring swells for us the grain,
And autumn bleeds the wine.

— Libretto to Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Words by John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Hughes.

Once through Arcadia, it was a something of a startling thrill to pass road signs saying “Sparta, 50 km.”

Nafplio

Nafplio, located by the side of a beautiful bay in the Argolic Gulph on the eastern side of the Peloponnese, was the first capitol of Modern Greece. (The Argolic Gulph, from ancient city of Argos (Aργος), one of the oldest continually inhabited in the world, and the oldest in Europe. The Argolis is one of the regional units of modern Greece.)

From my hotel window, I had a wonderful view of the bay, and my goal for the visit was to see the Mycenaean ruins at Tiryns – the “strong-walled Tiryns” of Homer – which lies close by, as well as the Mycenaean bridge at Arkadiko, 15 km east of Nafplio.

Alas, my cold reached its climax, and I saw nothing but the inside of my room, the hotel breakfast room and a convenience store 50 meters away, where I bought some rather tired sandwiches in lieu of going out to a restaurant. The hotel staff were extremely kind, going out to keep me supplied with orange juice and bottled water. Throughout the trip, I have always found Greek hospitality to be more than “professional nice,” but genuine friendliness and kindness, and the staff at the Harmony Rooms warmed me with unaffected kindness and concern.

From Nafplio I took a taxi to Porto Heli to catch the ferry to Piraeus and Athens. As it was the day before Easter, churches along the way were busy, and whenever we drove by one, my driver would cross himself, something I had also seen in the drive from Patra. The Greek Orthodox church seems to be much more a part of daily life than anything we see at home.

The driver had no idea where the ferry docked, so we asked directions, letting me off on a street parallel to the harbor where after asking several people I discovered that this was, indeed, where you catch the ferry, though there were no discernable signs indicating anything. In due course, a ferry did arrive, and behold! It was even the right one! Waiting for it I got my only sunburn of the trip, and was intrigued to hear a sung service from a church close by, which lasted the entire three hours I waited.

Next — Part 4: Athens

Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the US Cross-Country team in 1989. He was the first American to take over technical services for a foreign team (Slovenia) and worked also for Germany and Sweden. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training; the latest was The Complete Guide to Cross-Country Ski Preparation (Mountaineers Books) which has gone through two editions and a Russian translation. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement.