The wind was kicking up a fair amount of dust, the sun was pretty fierce, and the crowds seemed daunting.
But it still felt incredible to be standing alongside the Parthenon and the other ancient buildings of the Acropolis in Athens; it’s perhaps the most memorable symbol of the classical Greek society, circa 480-330 B.C., that’s long been considered the cradle of Western civilization.
I’ve only traveled outside the U.S. a few times in my life, but I’d always wanted to visit the Mediterranean region, my interest fueled by historical novels, history books, travelogues and perhaps the ancient Greek plays I once read in college. I’d always wondered if the Mediterranean was as blue as it appeared in pictures.
In late spring, I got the chance to find out when I went with my family — my wife, Joyce Tousey, and our son, Sean, and daughter, Marissa — to Greece for 11 days. We had racked up enough Frequent Flyer miles through one of our credit cards to cover our airfare, and we had some additional savings to make the trip affordable. As well, the Greek economy, thanks to increased tourism, appeared to have recovered somewhat from the government’s serious debt problem of the past several years. We’d been talking about a trip to Greece for awhile; with my college-age kids moving to establish their own lives, now seemed the time to do it.
None of it would have been possible without my wife’s great planning skills in crafting the trip via the internet. Her, um, Herculean efforts produced a detailed but manageable itinerary that covered Airbnb and car rentals, ferry and airline tickets, and a list of interesting places to visit. I tip my hat to my better half.
The trip began in Athens, which Joyce had visited some 30 years earlier; her memory was of a rather dirty city that sat beneath an oppressive white haze. But the streets around our Airbnb apartment, near the Acropolis, were quite nice — some had been redesigned as a broad pedestrian promenade for the 2004 Summer Olympics — and we had nothing but blue skies and warm days in Greece, a real treat after the soggy April and May in these parts.
The concentration of historic sites near the Acropolis was quite astonishing, allowing us to walk nearly everywhere (we also took a few rides on the city’s subway system). There are significant Roman ruins in particular scattered near the base of the Acropolis, including several monuments. Some Roman emperors were great admirers of Greek culture and, as Roman emperors were wont to do, built memorials to themselves in Athens influenced by classical Greek architecture.
There’s Hadrian’s Arch, for instance, named for the Roman emperor who had it built in A.D. 132; nearby is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the largest in Greece, begun in the 6th century B.C. but finished by Hadrian around A.D. 132. Fifteen of the temple’s massive Corinthian columns, nearly 56 feet tall, remain today, one lying on its side. Even in the clamor of a modern city, you cannot fail to appreciate the grandeur of these kinds of historical treasures or wonder how they were built with nothing but manual labor and hand tools.
Elsewhere in the area we visited Greek and Roman agoras (marketplaces), including one with the 34-column, Greek Temple of Hephaestus, now 2,467 years old and still amazingly intact. We explored some back alleys filled with shops, Greek Orthodox churches (and a Byzantine church dating from the early 10th century) and trim, pretty apartments with balconies. All around us we heard a mini United Nations of languages: French, Italian, German, Chinese, Russian, Greek and others I didn’t recognize.
We were also regularly waylaid by English-speaking restaurant staff and owners, standing in front of their eateries, who assured us their food was the best in Athens (some of it, like the eggplant-potato casserole moussaka I had in one place, was very good indeed). One guy, when he learned we were from Massachusetts, said he had a cousin in Peabody.
It actually sounded legitimate. I’m sure plenty of folks in Greece know of Boston, maybe even Salem and its infamous witch trials. But Peabody?
Our last morning in Athens, we had to jump on the subway at 5:30 a.m. to make a ferry connection in the busy port city of Piraeus, just south of Athens. We headed across the (very blue) Mediterranean to the island of Santorini, which has become a magnet for tourists; on a typical summer day, they can outnumber residents by about 6 to 1. Many are drawn especially to the town of Oia on the northern tip, where white-washed houses and blue-domed churches run up to and spill over the edge of steep cliffs in a kind of charming jumble; it reminded me of the illustrations of crazy-quilt villages from Dr. Seuss books.
Hundreds of people come to take photos at sunset from one particular spot in Oia — an insanely crowded spot indeed — where the sun’s waning light burnishes the sea and the island in impressive shades of red, orange, pink and more. If you’ve ever seen a picture of sunset in the Greek islands, it may well have been from that very vantage point.
Marissa, who had been hankering for a family trip to Greece ever since seeing “Mamma Mia!” in fifth grade, was determined to get some pictures herself (she’s a talented photographer who contributed many of the images for this article). So we joined a steady stream of people walking along a beautiful brick promenade that wound past an endless line of souvenir shops, art galleries, clothing stores, restaurants, small hotels and perhaps a few private homes, with views of the sea to the left. It seemed more theme park than town.
When darkness fell and all the pictures had been taken, the whole mob shuffled slowly back down the promenade, like commuters in a New York subway station at rush hour. Not really where I wanted to be on a vacation (but Marissa did get some great sunset pics).
But the crescent-shaped Santorini is a fascinating place from a geological perspective. It’s actually the largest island of a roughly circular archipelago that includes a few smaller islands and, in the center of a lagoon, a volcanic caldera. What was once a single island blew itself apart some 3,600 years ago in a titanic eruption that’s believed to have destroyed early settlements throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The volcano has erupted a few other times, and an earthquake in the 1950s also devastated towns on Santorini.
The eruptions have left dramatic, 1,000-foot cliffs on the island’s western side, at the base of which all the huge cruise boats dock. This makes for quite a scene, as hordes of tourist buses and cars snake up from the boat landings on narrow roads that switchback to the cliff tops. The eastern and southern sections of the island are more gently sloped.
During our visit to Santorini, we went on a small schooner that took visitors across the lagoon to the caldera and another small island, Thera, that were once part of the larger version of the island. To get to the boat launch, we walked down a steep, cobblestone path about ¾ of a mile from Santorini’s largest town, Firá, and I witnessed what seemed a timeless image, with a modern embellishment: An elderly Greek man, with a bronzed, leathery face and a fisherman’s cap, chattered on a cell phone as he led a train of donkeys and their riders up the steep path.
Not far behind this caravan was a poor guy who appeared to have one of the worst jobs in the world: sweeping up the plentiful amounts of donkey dung.
This gentleman seemed a symbol of a larger issue — the growing divide between island residents and tourists, some of whom have very deep pockets. While a significant increase in tourism has helped prop up Greece’s struggling economy in recent years, Great Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported in June, the numbers of visitors to Santorini (5.5 million in 2017) may be overwhelming the island, where traffic on the few main roads was very heavy. Vacation villas seemed to be going up everywhere; the water supply is also increasingly strained.
It’s not clear who’s truly benefiting from the tourism boom, either. My son, through a chat group, met a young woman, Stavroula, who was working as a server in a Santorini restaurant seven days a week, sometimes more than 70 hours a week, all summer long. Sean calculated she was earning the equivalent of about $3.82 an hour (the minimum wage in America was last at that level in 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Labor).
Still, I enjoyed most of my time on the island. We stayed for two nights in a whitewashed villa in Perissa, a town on the southern tip of the island, where the owners gave us a huge breakfast, a worn but free rental car, and a free shuttle to and from the port on the western side of Santorini. My wife and I were also able to hike right from our door up a mountainside to the site of an ancient settlement, Thira, that has a mix of Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins. Standing on the site’s windy ridge, looking across the empty sea, it was possible for just a moment to imagine what life might have been like there thousands of years ago.
From Santorini we took another ship south to Crete (“Kreta” in Greek), the largest island in Greece. Crete, for me, was the highlight of the trip, a land laced with history where remnants of so many civilizations — Minoan, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Turkish — can be found. The island also has miles of beautiful beaches, craggy mountains up to 8,000 feet high, and plenty of scenic countryside marked by gorges, olive groves, vineyards and the occasional small forest.
We stayed in an Airbnb apartment in Heraklion, Crete’s largest city and port, on the island’s northeastern shore. The apartment owner, Andy (we never got his last name), met us and then took us to a nearby market to buy some food, and he also left us with some fruit and a small bottle of his own olive oil (his family has a farm outside the city where they process the olives). Like nearly everyone we met in Greece, he was gracious and friendly and had some English. “In Greece,” he told me, “we like to eat, and we have long meals.”
Heraklion is smaller than Athens, but it was more of a challenge to get around because we were no longer just on foot. I was driving a rental car, a stick shift with the rear gear in an unfamiliar place, and the roads were jammed, with cars often parked on both sides; traffic lights seemed few and far between. It was a bit harrowing, and even with a GPS system to help guide us, we found it hard to maintain a sense of direction. For a visit to Crete’s main archaeological museum and a Venetian fort near the city’s center, we ditched the car and took a bus.
Right outside Heraklion is one of Crete’s main attractions, the Palace of Knossos — the capital of Minoan Crete, dating back some 4,000 years. It’s a partially reconstructed structure based on historians’ best understanding of the Minoans, considered the earliest advanced civilization of Europe. It was fascinating to see recreations of frescoes on some of the walls whose images seemed reminiscent of art from ancient Egypt; I wondered what kind of contact may have taken place between people of the two civilizations.
I would have liked to spend more time hiking some of Crete’s trails but had to settle for some car trips to a couple beautiful spots. We wound our way along narrow, twisting roads through the Dikti Mountains to the Lasithi Plateau, a 3,000-foot valley surrounded by higher peaks; it’s been farmed since Minoan times, and traditional metal windmills with canvas sails can still be seen there. Lasithi is also the site of Dikteon Cave, where legend says Zeus, the king of the ancient Greek gods, was hidden as a boy by his mother, Rhea, from his father, Cronus, who liked to eat his offspring. Great story — but two other caves on Crete claim they’re the source of the legend.
We also spent an afternoon on Kommos beach on Crete’s southern shore, on what’s known as Mesara Gulf, a sunny stretch of sand with just a scattering of other people. The water was surprisingly warm — this was early June — and mountains came right down to the water to our north, making it by far the most dramatic beach I’d ever been on.
On our way there, we got a look at part of Gortyna, a village with a well-preserved Byzantine church from the 6th century; right next to it was a Roman theater, Odeion, originally built about 50 B.C. Behind the theater stands something even older: a wall of stone tablets engraved with the “Laws of Gortyna,” 600 lines of text from the 6th century B.C. that’s believed to represent the earliest code of law in Greece.
Crete is full of this layered history; the centuries of different civilizations and invaders — most recently the German and Italians during World War II — have also given the island something of a tough, independent streak, with its own distinctive poetry and music (and reportedly the highest rate of gun ownership in the European Union). But just as in Athens and on Santorini, we found people welcoming and helpful. A waiter in a packed pizzeria we went to our first night in Heraklion found us a table; with a little English on his part and our Greek phrase book and dictionary, we were able to get around some initial confusion to place our order.
He also brought us a free dessert, explaining that part of his job was to make customers happy: “If you’re happy, then I’m happy.”
We were happy indeed.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.