Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 26

Alas, Callisto

Greek religion was weird. It was a mashup consisting of various local traditions shoe-horned together, with myths having many variations depending on who you asked, and even the nature of the gods seemed somewhat protean, with very different versions of a god being worshiped in different places. The cult state of Artemis worshiped in Ephesus doesn’t much look like the typical image of Artemis from the Greek mainland, though both feature wildlife. Artemis was both a protector of wild anim...

Last Night in Athens

It’s our final night in Greece. We left the Callisto three night ago, and now we’re back at our B&B in Athens, just hangin’ out and seeing the sights.

The Callisto experience was delightful but intense. Every day new sights to see, new ruins to meander through, new artifacts to admire, all with people whose interest in archaeology and history mirrored our own. Plus our boat followed nautical tradition in serving up three enormous meals every day, to which were added as many gallons ...

More Bouboulina

Turns out that Bouboulina has also been immortalized as a Playmobil playset. That’s how you know you’ve made it.

Bouboulina’s granddaughter was a chip off the old block. During World War II she established an organization to smuggle Allied servicemen out of occupied Greece, along with bits of intelligence. Like most Resistance heroes, she was arrested and shot by the SS, in her case just weeks before the iiberation.

Bouboulina!

Behold Bouboulina, sea-captain, freedom fighter, and the first woman ever appointed an admiral (and in two navies, Russian and Greek!).

I encountered this statue on the island of Spetses, where her house has been turned into a museum by her descendants, who still own it.

She was born in a Turkish prison, where her father had been imprisoned for participating in the Orlov revolt against the Turks– in which Catherine the Great provoked a rebellion in Greece, not because she gave a d...

Crab Wise

Callisto has made a crabwise sideslip in order to avoid the 30+knot windstorm that’s about to crash into the Cyclades, and now we’re moored in Nauplion harbor in the Peloponnese. Any land excursions will occur safely on the mainland. So the only actual Cycladic island we visited was Santorini, as seen above. Spectacular but very much a victim of its own success, with no less than four cruise ships in the caldera (and this was a slow day. Normally it’s like eight).

I’m continually a...

He-e-e-re She Is!

Lively

Behold the mighty Callisto, on which we’ll be spending the next week or so, exploring the archaeological treasures of the Cyclades.

Weather promises fair for the next few days, after which the sea may get a little, um, lively. We may not be hitting the beach of Despotiko in the rubber boats after all, but at the very least we’ll have ourselves an adventure.

Dead Greeks

Today was a visit to the National Archaeological Museum, which I’ve visited on every trip to Greece. And here’s the golden death mask of a Mycenaean king, which Heinrich Schliemann decided belonged to Agamemnon. (Turns out Agamemnon lived four hundred years after this guy kicked the bucket)

Contemporary critics of Schliemann thought the mask looked too Teutonic, and accused Schliemann of forging the mask and making it look like himself. Let’s just agree to call them idiots.

Be ...

Cycladic Enigma

From the Museum of Cycladic Art, one of the thousands of marble effigies found across the islands, all made pretty much in this style. Most were found in graves, though so many were looted nobody knows where most of them were dug up. Most were doll-sized, but some (including this one) were nearly life-sized.

The Cycladic bronze age culture produced these for several hundred years. Nobody knows who these ladies were: they could be a goddess, images of someone dead, a conductor to the...

Portraits

Now here’s a Roman for you, the product of the merger of Roman portrait traditions with Greek painting and Egyptian funerary customs. Nothing seems to be known about the subject, save that (from the narrow white stripe on his tunic) he would seem to be a member of the Equestrian Order. This might have been an Egyptian funerary portrait, in which case the painting would be placed on or in the casket, or it might be a portrait of a living person. The point of origin for the pictures, if kn...