October 30, 2013
–The weather is still hot during the day but the mornings are cool so I wear a sweatshirt when I leave the hotel. By 10:00 I am in my t-shirt. I have driven through hundreds of orange groves in two days.
–The ruins in Ancient Corinth are vast and the typical jumble. The Temple of the Corinthian Apollo is Doric. Lots of Roman stone. St. Paul was here.
–Akro Korinthos, 3 km up the mountain from the site, is massive. I have walked the walls. Easily as large as the outer walls of Dubrovnik…5km if I remember correctly. Walls built on walls…Mycenean, Byzantine, Ottoman and Venetian. Everyone knew a good site for a fort when they conquered it. Impregnable and all but hewn from the living stone. Few people there today. Some workman digging a new drainage ditch. They are stone-faced when I say “kali mera.”
–I have seen more Golden Dawn graffiti here than anywhere in Greece. Lots of spray-painted Greek meanders…this is a ubiquitous symbol. It is on my bathmat in the hotel where I sleep. It’s on tourist swag. Now it means something else, something terrible. They have taken a design everyone knows as good and twisted it with their broken thinking.
–Nafplio is not Paros. The mainland is not the Kyklades. There is a roughness here, less open than the Greece I know. Fewer smiles. Gruff.
–Epidaurus tomorrow and Schliemann’s second site at Tyrins. My last full day here and I want to make the most of my little car. I might brave the winding mountain road to Ermioni for lunch after visiting the theater.
October 31, 2013
–Epidaurus, Tyrins…quiet but there are still buses and tourists. Mostly older groups and I seem to be shadowing a school group of American kids. They were at my hotel too. Quiet as mice. A nice thing to experience. Corinth yesterday and the theater today. Also the Nafplio museum…
–The winding road to Epidaurus and grove after grove of olives and oranges.
Epidaurus: ancient script. Leica M8, Voigtlander 28mm, f/2.8, 1/2000, ISO 320
–A group of Russians at the theater…testing the acoustics with pebbles. Wonderful. Tyrins on the way back to Nafplio. Not much to see but an observation: the technique used to build the large Mycenean walls is the same as the wall building I have seen all over the Kyklades. No walls here, nothing crisscrossing the landscape. The Mycenean civilization was large.
–Blue domes are now terra-cotta tiles. I had forgotten that about the Peloponnese.
–When I was a boy, about 5 or 6, my grandmother gave me gifts from her time in Greece: a small model of a Greek house with a windmill, a komboloi, an Evzone figurine. She planted this seed. She was here.
–I am still enjoying my short DoF exercises. The stones, greenery and blue skies are perfect for this. Shooting at f/1.8 to f/4 only…
JDCM
A column section from Epidaurus. Leica M8, Voigtlander 35mm Nokton, f/2.0 at 1/4000, ISO 360