Nafplio / Ναύπλιο

One of my earlier memories is traveling to Israel when I was seven, where I encountered soldiers and towering pipe playgrounds; soda water sweetened with fruit syrup and a house with two pianos; the hot, crowded streets of Tel Aviv and above all the ruins of an ancient storybook past. At one point, we were left with Grandma Evelyn and Grandpa Izzy while Mom and Dad went to Greece. They came back saying it was one of the most beautiful and romantic places they had ever been—that’s what I remember: that it was a great, great time. Maybe they said this because my grandparents resented them for running off without the kids and it helped justify the act. But I still have pictures from this vacation, and I still have memories from images of their glowing faces among all that white and blue; and they continued, separately, to speak joyfully of Greece after Dad moved out the next year. So maybe they meant it.

And now Stephanie, Sophie, Amelia, Maisie and I are here, in Greece! We weren’t so far from the border when we travelled to Montenegro this Spring, but still, logistics of getting here this time were complicated enough to give Stephanie and me a few tense nights. After having a three night island stay northeast of Athens cancelled on us and facing further logistical obstacles with ferries that reach other ferries, we ended up deciding to stay entirely in the Peloponnese, and so, to drive to Venice, take a ferry to Patras, spend the first three nights in the coastal town Nafplio, to drive south once more for three nights, and to designate our final night open, but as a possible stay on the Corinthian Bay near Delphi—a possibility I have since nixed after discovering what Greek driving is like.

I am writing now from the coastal village Otyli, which probably you’ve never heard of and, I will say tentatively after being here a half an hour, you can also probably forget (I hope I’ll be eating my words in the next blog entry). We’re staying in a house overlooking a beautiful bay, a drive away from anything else we might do; and with the sun beating down on our three balconies and a breeze blowing into our rooms, I can use the quiet to write a blog I won’t be able to post for a week. How strange to simply write, to follow one idea to the next without structuring thoughts around pictures or links, without attending to formatting or research, without fighting the whiplash of a website’s unstable code!

We have come to the end of our year, and this is our last hurrah. Thoughts of our life in Seattle have increasingly bled through to our thoughts and conversations like strands of waking life in a dream. Here we are in Greece, away from home. But when for many months we’ve pictured Munkácsy Mihály utca, hegedű and swimming lessons as our place in daily life, home no longer conjures such clear lines.

We arrived in Venice on June 17^th early enough to spend the evening revisiting canals and piazzas, taking the train from where we were staying in the outskirts. We stayed in a district of villas in a villa, wanting to give something to poor Sophie who would be spending her birthday waiting to board a ferry, and so happily wandered through the tall, frescoed ceilings and absurd baroque furniture and dark, paneled walls before taking the train to the old city. Some of the smaller details in the villa were worrisome, like a lack of toilet paper in the bathroom, or bugs travelling towards beds; but in the end, we were comfortable, the girls had a Jacuzzi bubble bath, we discovered life outside Venice, including a Saturday market and the biggest calzone Amelia or I had ever seen, and breakfast pies and cakes were very pleasant.

When we visited Venice with Dad and Wendy over Christmas, it was wonderful but it wasn’t always stress-free. Everything was of course expensive, including meals Stephanie and I would pay for in exchange for lodging paid for by Dad and Wendy, so dinners were a strain on their generous hearts and I’m too much of an ass to say once and for all, Don’t worry about the price we’re on vacation! Also, we had an incident with our enormous van on the way in, which set a jarring tone; and clogging the labyrinthine streets with seven people wasn’t always relaxing, especially when we often let the girls lead, and maybe they led to dark, urine-stained corners a few too many times. Venice in Christmas was also so much fun, and climbing towers together, riding out over water and down canals, emerging in open parks on the boardwalk or in Lido, breakfasting in the girls’ room with an elaborate spread every day, peaking into and sharing those sudden surprising edifices and bridges and discoveries inside buildings was the biggest part of our time there in December. But this last weekend, we five popped into a restaurant, walked from the train station to the Rialto Bridge to San Marco and back, and it was easy. We didn’t expect anything, we didn’t need anything; and we could sit with our gelatos on the square and think of Greece.

 

I also discovered a new game, which is called, taking pictures of strangers. It’s so easy to do in the marvelously touristed San Marco Square because who’d possibly think that a camera pointed towards them was actually pointed at them? Here’s a deliberately grainy collage of couples unknowingly celebrating Sophie’s birthday eve in Venice.

 

The ferry we caught from Venice down the Adriatic Sea had the size and features of a small cruise ship, a first experience for Stephanie, and for the girls, who wandered the decks again and again, thrilled by the snack bars and romper slide and disco lounge and especially the airless four-cot berth where we five crowded for the two nights voyage. I had been on one cruise before, also a Greek line though we sailed to Alaska up the Inside Passage to Alaska. Among the many differences between that boat and this, other than luxury and size, was an event planner. And old people in starched shirts and pressed trousers. But the Venice-Greece ferry had several important features you would never find on a cruise liner: cargo capacity for three floors of cars, RVs and a couple dozen 18-wheelers; deck space for a younger set with air mattresses and sleeping bags; and a dog kennel on the top floor, below the disco. Yet there were similarities enough that walking from the genteel murmur of leather–chaired conversation to the heaving belly of a hairy man asleep on a doublewide air mattress beside the stairs was still disconcerting. Cruise ships have equally pronounced contrasts, though they’re better hidden. A young sailor invited Lauren to see his quarters back on our cruise of 1992, and she described shocking hot conditions for the staff living on the boat.

On the first night, the girls ate baklava and a three-scoop sundae from the snack bar to honor Sophie’s twelfth birthday. I was grateful to Sophie for the delight she expressed at the sticky pastry when there was otherwise no cake, no party, no friends. The way she shrugged off her birthday was a little heart-breaking. She sweetly passed the treats back and forth to her sisters, and then we all went to bed.

My favorite moments happened on the boat’s helipad, a huge, untenanted space on the back of the boat we didn’t discover in all of our round and round explorations the first day. While Stephanie was working, as she did for much of the voyage, the girls and I saw daylight coming from the end of a long hall of sleeping berths and followed it into a huge field of blue in the open air, about eight other people in all this space, mountains rising giants in every direction, vicious winds of the pool deck cut and tamed before reaching us here in a soft breeze. The absolute best moment happened after we brought Stephanie to the helipad and played something the girls called cut the pie, using the enormous circled H as our court, tracking lines in the soot to mark the axis of our paths.

From these generous decks we would soon be watching the sun set over Corfu in our first glimpse of Greece. And when we woke the next morning at 4:30, I’d go down into the ship’s bowels and wait for an orange-vested man to holler linkslinkslinkslinkslinkslinks rechtsrechtsrechtsrechts and maneuver me towards a skinny ramp over a dense corridor of cars and pick up the girls waiting half-asleep outside.

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It is now one day later in our sleepy town in the south, and it seems I will be eating my words about a place you can forget. We’ve had a great time here, and Stephanie’s quest for an island visit has been satisfied by the quietness, the many tavernas and beaches, the mountains and the people who live so far from airports and cities. An interesting consequence of being contented, though, is that I have no great urge to write as I had yesterday, and collecting my thoughts about Nafplio, Epidavaros and Mycenae, which were buzzing when I quit yesterday, are lazing today.

But I want to describe Nafplio as I can, with the red petals that had fallen all through the marble streets, the tremendous fortress looking out over everything and our walk up the 999 steps to get there, and the small island reminding me of Dubrovnik which once housed the town executioners whom it was taboo to quarter anywhere else; I also want to say something about the beaches, and especially the twilight swim I shared with Sophie and Amelia in the still waters beneath mountains turning purple in the falling dark. So I will say a few things anyway.

It took us a while to get used to Greek time: In a walk alone at 10:00 or 11:00 at night, I was excited to see restaurants full, children biking and kicking balls and yelling games in the main square, the shops all ablaze and open. And the next day we had a knock on our door at two in the afternoon because Sophie’s violin was preventing neighbors from sleeping. By the end, we too were eating and walking the streets well into the night, though the girls never managed to sleep in midday.

Still, every morning found us in our pension’s breakfast room at nine o’clock, where we were given chocolate, tea and coffee and deep glasses of Greek yoghurt, plums and melon in honey or syrup. In the background, a parrot chirped in one corner, oranges were ground for our juice in another, and the owners’ little boy sat in a third corner watching YouTube and, every day, barking at what he saw there. The chirping and the barking seemed to belong together. Chirrup chirp yip! The girls laughed at me every day because I would finish my pot of coffee, about three good cups, and much of their hot chocolate which I mixed with it, as well as a tall glass of orange juice, and because I couldn’t stand seeing it go to waste, the equivalent of two of theirs as well. Saying, “I’m thirsty,” was usually good enough for another laugh.

Nafplio is a wonderful place, full of history and vitality, beauty and welcome. If we did nothing else but stay in town and wander the streets or follow the walking path around the bay or visit the historical buildings found there, we’d be happy, but we also visited sites nearby that said, yes, it’s Greece all right, and Jesus was late to this party.

In Epidavaros we toured the 3,000 year old theater, a huge and stunningly preserved piece of architecture set in the mountains. Just a short walk down the hill was our first archaeological site, a hospital and baths and temples and a long stadium. But the real star was the theater: being in the shelter of the mountain air over the stone, the click of someone’s keys and the purr of voices carrying over a vast arena, our delight and purposes maybe not so unlike a visiting audience so many millennia ago.

In Mycenae, we learned about Cyclopean architecture, which meant huge rocks lifted, as though by Cyclops, and placed somewhat roundly and held their by their own weight. We saw the famous Lion’s Gate—the first carved relief in Europe—so much heavier than the slab below it but distributing its weight because of its triangular shape. We saw tholos tombs, structures with imposing corridors leading to unnatural round beehive walls. Amelia and I walked our hands down and down and down the steps of a pitch black cistern, using the flash of the camera to guide us around curves and over slick clay steps.

And we revisited part of The Odyssey. We’ve been listening to a book on tape during our tour, which has made us very alert to the story as well as gods and monsters whose traces are everywhere around us. The Mycenae era is rich with the stuff of Homer’s song. Here in Mycenae lived the greatest king of the Greeks during the time of The Odyssey, Agamemnon, and it was his brother, King Menelaus of Sparta, whose wife, Helen—stolen to Troy by Paris—gave spark to the Trojan War. After the war, victorious Agamemnon returned here to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, who were then both killed by the royal son Orestes, as detailed in The Orestia—and several times in The Odyssey as a foil to faithful Penelope, or as a plot inducement for Odysseus as he spends a year with the lovely and accomodating sea witch Circe, or the seven years he spends with the too fond sea nymph Calypso: You could be rushing to a wife who will kill you dead! Come to bed, Odysseus.

In Mycenae, one of the last things we visited was the dread Clytemnestra’s tomb. But was she maybe right to fly from Agamemnon as he did her? Stephanie remembers that he had sacrificed their daughter to get favorable winds on their way to Troy. This makes Homer’s direful warnings less sympathetic. And with no one to stay Agamemnon’s hand those many years ago, had he doomed them all anyway?

Though the sun beat down, winds over the mountain where the ruins perched kept us happy, and the immediate rise of two peaks before us and the valleys of olive groves over hills and the scooped valley below made our walks through the old walls and piled stones dramatic and good. We walked by throngs at the Lion’s Gate, one after another, but mysteriously, these would disappear and the mountain seemed nearly our own.

 

I don’t know how Mom and Dad felt about the old stories or how they related to them when they were here in this blessedly beautful place. But we had a dog they named Circe.