Month: June 2025

From the start of my interest in the ancient world, I have wanted to see Athens. All I needed to do was wait to be invited to a conference in the area so that I could score free travel and accommodations! Unfortunately, no invitation has come my way, but now that we are in Europe, it is not so expensive nor so time-consuming to travel there for a short visit. We found a decent hotel in the Monastiraki neighbourhood, not far from the acropolis, and checked off the list of typical tourist activities: an early morning visit to the acropolis (beat the crowds and the heat!), then the acropolis museum to see the artifacts on display, the agora, and the Panathenaic Stadium. We also attempted a visit to the Byzantine and Christian Museum but it was closing just as we arrived. Along the way we popped into several churches. The rich iconography of Greek Orthodox churches are quite a change from what we have seen in Bavarian Catholic towns; there was no shortage of apocryphal imagery for me to document. One of the highlights of our trip was a play performed on a rooftop in Plaka with the Parthenon, lit up in the night sky, as its backdrop. And we took our usual bus trip out of the city, this time to see the ancient site of Mycenae, the theatre at Epidaurus, and the port town of Nafplio.

From Athens we flew over to Crete. We stayed in the capital …