Guess what. A Greek Oddity recently turned fifteen years old! It began life on Blogger, migrated to Posterous, which then became Posthaven. Eventually, I threw myself into the confusing world of WordPress where I fumbled my way through to creating something that almost resembled a website. It’s not perfect. It’s not slick. But neither am…
I’ve thrown myself into a frenzy of projects since reaching retirement age. The latest? Building an Android app for independent travellers to Greece. Plan Your Greece is now on Google Play.
Ask anyone how to get from A to B in Greece and the answer is almost always the same: hire a car. But after thirty years of travelling Greece by bus, ferry, and Shanks’s Pony, I’d argue it’s not always the only option — or even the best one. And I say this as someone who once wheel-spun a Suzuki Celerio into a rut on Lipsi while a man on a digger watched and smoked his cigarette.
Eleusis sits about 21 kilometres west of Athens, close enough for a day trip and easy enough to overlook. Most people do. But for nearly two thousand years, this was the most sacred site in the ancient Greek world — home to a set of secret religious rites that promised initiates something no other cult dared offer: a better outcome after death. Nobody who took part ever revealed what happened inside. This post is an attempt to piece together what we think we know, and what it felt like to stand there.
Athens needs no persuasion. After six nights in Nafplio, I was ready for it — the noise, the layers, the familiar streets and a few places I had been meaning to get back to for years. This post covers the final stretch of a two-month trip, from leaving Nafplio to a few days in Athens that reminded me exactly why I keep coming back.
Nea Kios is an eight-kilometre taxi ride from Nafplio sitting at the tip of the Argolic Gulf. But with any place beginning with Nea, there is always a back story. This one leads to a small museum that few people know exists, a square full of quiet symbolism, and a story about what happens when an entire community is forced to start again somewhere new.
There is something reassuring about a KTEL Argolida timetable. Clear, very specific, and somehow always full of confidence. The bus from Kranidi would connect at Epidaurus, deliver me to Nafplio by 13.26, and say nothing whatsoever about the forty-two gold steps waiting at the other end. This is Nafplio approached slowly, by bus, on foot, and along a railway line that no longer runs.
Every trip has a moment that becomes the one you remember most. For this one it was a table in Preveza, Papoutsakia, Greek salad and people who between them had served in Somalia, sailed the Ionian and cooked the meal. Before that there was a cargo ship, a pilot boat, a Gaza march on the harbour front and a very good fish taverna in a bougainvillea-shaded alley. This is how the Ionian Bound series ends.
After Zalongo, the day was far from over. Ioannis had arranged a meeting with a former presidential guard beneath a remarkable plane tree beside the Bridge of Arta. Then came the bridge itself, lunch on the lagoon at Koronissia, and the vast archaeological site of Ancient Nicopolis. A day that covered Roman triumphs, folk legends, Early Christian mosaics and a Stoic philosopher, all in the company of people who know this region better than any guidebook.
The Dance of Zalongo had been on my list for years. Getting there involved 410 steps, a long-standing battle with vertigo and a friend who would have called me something unrepeatable if I had tried to back out. What happened at the top was not what I had prepared myself for. Not the climb, not the monument, and certainly not the moment when two people began to sing.
Some days of travel arrange themselves neatly around a guidebook itinerary. Others are shaped entirely by someone who knows the place better than any guidebook could. Our friend Ioannis from Epirus Traveller took us from Preveza into the mountains of Tzoumerka for a day that covered a Roman aqueduct, a wax museum unlike anything I have seen before, a monastery built into a cliff face, a village of silversmiths, and a stone bridge over a turquoise river. I am not good with bridges. I crossed it anyway.
Most people walking Preveza’s waterfront turn back before the town runs out. The walk around the tip of the headland takes a couple of hours, allowing for refreshment stops and general mooching. It passes an abandoned military camp, two fortresses built by Ali Pasha in the same year, and a stretch of coastline where the Battle of Actium was fought in 31 BC. The Pantokratoras Fortress at the far end had its doors open. We went in.
