Our overnight ferry ride was uneventful, except our room was really cold. About 1:30 I woke up and closed the AC vent in the room, and it slowly began to warm up. Ton was sleeping in her coat when I saw her in the morning. (Our room had bunk beds.) We escaped from Athens easily and arrived in our destination for the day in less than 2 hours.
Crete was a good deal of fun. We enjoyed visiting the island, and liked the food and the people there. The port cities are picturesque, and the mountains are rugged and beautiful. The people in the mountains are rough looking but very welcoming. We recommend Crete to anyone. We spent way above our budget per day, because shipping François there was expensive, and unlike most places we visit we ate out almost every day on Crete. But the food was wonderful.
Our destination for today was Corinth, which was an ancient Greek city, that was razed by the Romans. About 100 years later the Romans decided it was a good location for a city and rebuilt the town to their standards. So the ruins of Corinth you see today is primarily Roman not Greek.
After Ton and I settled in to the campsite, and ate breakfast we headed over to the Corinth site to take a look. After my attempt at amateur archeology yesterday, we went to a real archeological site today.
It is early in the tourist season in Greece, so the site was pretty quiet. There were three groups here when we arrived, two from the US and one from Chile. It turns out Corinth is a popular site with Christian groups as the Apostle Paul stayed here for about 2 years converting the Romans to Christianity. He wrote a lot of letters to the people of Corinth that are quoted in the New Testament. At one point one of the tour groups from the US broke into a religious song.
The ancient site is pretty extensive, and we found it more interesting than the site at Knossos we visited a few days ago. There was no attempt to reconstruct anything. It was just presented as found, we enjoyed that.
The ruins had an excellent museum attached to it. The site was originally excavated by the American Archeological Society of Greece and many of the statues and mosaics they discovered are on display in the museum.
The museum has been in existence since the 1930’s and was designed by an American architect from Chicago. It is famous for being the scene of a famous crime. In 1990 a gang of thieves broke in, bound the one security guard and stole over 230 pieces of ancient art as well as 1,000,000 drachmas of cash (sounds like a lot, but I don’t know what the exchange rate for the Greek Drachma was in 1990). The antiquities that were stolen were shipped to the US with the intention of selling them to private art collectors. The Greek police and the FBI worked together to identify the thieves and recovered all of the stolen goods which were returned to the museum in 2001.
One of the Greek workers in the museum took a liking to us, and went out of his way to show us a couple of his favorite pieces. His English wasn’t great, but the pride he had in the museum was obvious.
After a nice afternoon in the museum we headed back to the campground just ahead of a rainstorm. While we were walking back Ton saw a very nice lemon tree full of lemons. She stopped to take a picture of it when the owner saw her, she laughed, walked over to the tree and took four or five lemons off the tree and handed them to us with a smile. Ton made a nice dinner that I enjoyed with fresh squeezed lemon, and we spent the evening listening to Kris Kristofferson and having a nice chat.
I would have loved to have visited Corinth. As you might have guessed, being the clever folks that you are, that Paul was my namesake. I did visit Ephesus on one of our cruises and that was a big thrill for me, standing in the arena on the very spot where Paul preached. From any perspective he was a remarkable man. When I look at a Bible map and see all the places he visited, it makes my feet sore and makes me feel a little bit lazy.
It was a nice site and a lot of it was focused on Paul. Apparently there is a tour of all of the sites that Paul visited in Greece that takes a week. So you can sign up in the future.