We started the day early, with a 0630 breakfast and 0715 bus departure. And then we had to go back, because we had forgotten our lunches. We also hit traffic on the Sacred Way as we headed to the isthmus, which delayed us further. We got to Isthmia late and met Dr. Elizabeth Langridge-Noti for the second time this trip (first time at Brauron, before the start of the blog). Undeterred by our lateness and the low capacity of the museum’s restrooms, we took a brisk tour of the site.
The surviving mosaic is rather expansive.
The baths mosaic was extremely impressive. The pictures don't really do it justice, but the sheer scale of the effort required to both create and preserve said work of art is awe-inspiring. The other amazing part of this site was the hysplex.
Good shot of the hysplex.
I've gotten really really excited a couple times on the trip but this mechanism literally had me hopping up and down out of excitement after we tried it out. It's our best guess at what the starting mechanism looked like at the Isthmian games. The reconstruction on site is a little rickety but very intact. Brad helped me take the slack out of the ropes on the standing posts and then I let them all drop at once. It functioned perfectly. It was so COOL! It's simple, elegant, and works beautifully. There's even a hole in the ground where you can stand so that you can hold the ropes low and they won't trip the athletes. I was in awe. Heck, writing this post on the way to Lechaion, I'm still impressed. And there is apparently another starting mechanism reconstruction at Nemea, so I am Excited with a capital E.
Eventually, there will excavations all over here.
Up next was Lechaion. This important Corinthian harbor appears to have been covered by a tsunami following an earthquake in the 600s AD. The site has been owned by the Greek government for decades but has not started excavation until this year. THIS YEAR! How cool is that!?!? Pretty dang cool. Dr. Paul Scotton, the excavation director, gave us a tour of what his team had done this year. The site is a confusing muddle of walls and foundations thus far, but he plans to come back with a team double the size of the current one. Seeing the trenches and the people actually doing excavation was really cool and got some wheels turning in my head for perhaps next summer.
Next up was a quick stop at the beach near Lechaion. I didn't swim, but I stood in the Gulf of Corinth and it was quite warm. Everyone wolfed down a quick lunch and we got back on the road bound for the high citadel of Acrocorinth.
From the summit. The north side of the isthmus is visible in the background.
James Herbst, the long time architect for the Agora excavation and the Corinth excavation, guided us through the site. The whole thing is a combination of Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian, and Ottoman building. The summit has the remains of earlier temples, one from the 7th and one from the 5th century BCE. The hike up was probably the steepest we've done so far, over some very slippery marble paving and rugged trails. But my goodness it was worth it. James offered to take us to the summit and about half the group accepted. The view! It cannot be adequately put to words. The breeze blowing hard across the hilltop, the tower and keep and destroyed temples that perch on the hill, the Peloponnesian countryside sprawling over hillocks with olive groves and fields. And the isthmus! The narrow neck of the land where Corinth once ruled. Both gulfs glittering and blue. It is at this moment that I am most irked with my technical problems because it was a sight that makes these words pale in comparison.
Then it was time to get down. At first, I tried to control my speed, but downhill takes a toll on the legs decidedly less pleasant than going uphill. So I let the momentum carry me down the hill at a bit of a run. I never really looked too far ahead, just saw the next stretch of terrain and moved my feet to hit sure and steady marks. On the way, Luke and I climbed atop the highest gate bastion and took pictures of each other from far down the hill. And then we were onto the bus, but not for long.
The bastion was quite tall.
We stopped on the way down the hill to meet Dr. Nancy Bookidis at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, the excavation of which she had supervised a few decades ago. We sat in the ancient theater on stone benches worn by close to 2500 years of exposure. The site has an interesting history, having been used by both Greeks and Romans for religious purposes. At one point, there were dozens of dining rooms that were involved in ritual meals all over the hillside. Later, in the last Roman period on the site, three temples stood higher up the hill looking at a building where curse tablets have been found. There is also a recently conserved mosaic in one of the temples.
Mosaic at the Demeter Sanctuary.
And then, back on the bus for one final stop at the Forum of Corinth. We were met again by Dr. Paul Scotton, our guide at Lechaion. He led us on a circuit through the Forum, dropping knowledge bombs as we went. At the Temple of Apollo, he pointed out the monolithic columns nine meters high on a base just shy of two meters. And it's the oldest standing Doric temple in Greece. The ancients were masters of stone engineering and this temple really demonstrated that. The interesting part is that the Greeks, even after being able to put up such massive single pieces of stone, switched to segmented column drums for their temples, presumably because it was easier than working with single pieces of rock.
Those monolithic columns are fantastic.
We kept going to the Peirine Fountain and used the power of the American School and some judicious rope moving to take a look inside, including at the fish frescoes that remain on the walls from the Roman period and the channels through which Dr. Scotton had wandered with Dr. Betsey Robinson searching for the source of the fountain. Their trip involved wading through chest high mud/bat guano mixture and took almost four hours, but eventually the source was found and sampled.
The surviving paint is still quite vivid.
Finally, we came to the southeast corner of the forum, where Dr. Scotton concluded with two points. The first was his theory that the trial of Paul, which supposedly took place to the west by several hundred meters, actually happened closer to the corner of the Forum, based on the architecture of the reconstructed southeast building. The second point was more speculative. Essentially, he said, we don't really have Greek Corinth proper. He thinks that the Greek remains in the Roman Forum are part of a religious precinct, rather than being the city center. As for the rest of the city, it's probably buried under the countryside on land that is currently pretty thoroughly inhabited. Which is a shame, since the land was offered to the American School in the 1920s and was declined.
Even though we'd been to five different sites, baking in the sun, I had a burst of energy as the day ended. It feels like I'm seeing the cutting edge of the field and I'm learning an absurd amount. I'm so happy that I'm on this trip and I can't wait to keep exploring the Peloponnese. To conclude, here's a picture of a puppy that I saw at the Forum, as the cherry on this massive ice cream sundae of a day.
Mom-dog with her pups. Adorable!
Thanks for reading.
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