Athens and Santorini
(If you click on the smaller images, full-size pictures will display)
Peregrinations about the places in the land of the Odyssey accompany some of the photos
Square photos below will enlarge if clicked on, and you can scroll through the gallery by then clicking on the arrow at the middle right of the photo.

Aegean Sea (an embayment in the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Turkey). It was first known in Greek as the "chief sea" (αρχιπέλαγος)--this is where we get our word for archipelago, which now refers to any small-island grouping. The Venetians are believed to be responsible for the popularisation of the term--they formally ruled many of the Greek islands. Within the Aegean Sea are the Aegean Islands, divided into seven groups. The island of Santorini (where I voyaged) is part of the Cyclades group and is located north of Crete.

Impressive bronze statue of either Zeus or Poseidon (ca. 460 BCE), found at the bottom of the sea in north Euboea (the second-largest Greek island, in area and population, after Crete). Now inside the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, it is a sculpture in the Severe Style ("notable for exquisite rendering of motion and anatomy") of the Classical Period (source of quote is the museum's website--I love the description, as it precisely captures what's transfixing about this statue: the motion and perfect body).

Purple flowers (probably on Jacaranda mimosifolia trees, which are native to South America but grow well where there is no frost) --one of the only sightly aspects of "September 3rd," the street I walked along my first morning in Athens. It was about a 45-minute walk from my room in the Viktoria neighbourhood to the Acropolis.

The "Boxing Boys"--a fresco from Akrotriri kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. I saw it before going to Akrotiri and know which house it was in in the ancient city.
Akrotiri was a Minoan Bronze-Age settlement destroyed by the Theran eruption about 1627 BCE. Like Pompeii it was entombed in volcanic ash, and many frescoes, such as this one, along with other forms of art and objects, were well-preserved. (Akrotiri was much older than Pompeii at the time of eruption. Pompeii, an ancient- Roman town near Naples, was covered in 4 to 6 m of ash and pumice by Mount Vesuvius in CE 79--contrast this with the mid-2nd millennial BCE encasement of Akrotiri.) Akrotiri wasn't discovered until 1967. Some historians speculate that it may have been the inspiration for Plato's fictional island of Atlantis. Plato wrote more than a 1000 years after Akrotiri was abandoned from a volcanic event so large (one of the largest in recorded history) part of the island did collapse into the sea. Imagine for a second where Santorini is: It's positioned in the middle of the sea--already--between the mainland of Greece and Crete in the south. I can imagine growing up in a culture hearing about the city that submerged. In Plato's dialogue on the hubris of nations that mentions Atlantis, Atlantis is held up over against the ideal Athenian society. Akrotiri had become commercial and rich in trade before the eruption. Perhaps by the time its memory telephoned into Plato's mind, its fiction was a bit like Las Vegas.

Like Sedona, Arizona, only redder and with water, this is Santorini's Red Beach. The colour is due to the iron-rich rocks formed from the volcanic eruption. In contrast, Sedona's more orange "red rock" is a result of a unique layer of sandstone found only in Sedona. It's much older than the volcanic lava debris of Santorini, given that Sedona's sandstone was deposited somewhere between 299 Mya and 252 Mya.
Square photos below will enlarge if clicked on, and you can scroll through the gallery by then clicking on the arrow at the middle right of the photo.

Legend has it that Aphrodite was birthed out of the sea. Gazing out at these soft waters, it is not hard to image how the ancient mind conceived of her sensuous body emerging like a rolling island in the distance.
Aphrodite features in a feud that results in the Trojan War and plays a major role in the Iliad.