We have just finished our second weekend trip as a group, on the trip this past weekend we visited the Peloponnese. This trip continued to showcase the beauty of Greece. I have truly fallen in love with this country over the past month and every new place that we go to visit continues to amaze me even more with its beauty. As I have mentioned in my previous posts I have a passion for photography, especially landscape photography, and each day I spend here I am given the privilege to try to capture it. I am grateful that I have gotten the chance to visit this beautiful landscape. Each week on Sundays I spend time color-grading all my photos from the last week; this past week was my largest batch of photos. With over 800 photos from the last week this blog is no place to share them all but I will highlight some of my favorites as they tie into some of the places that I have gotten to visit in the last 7 days but I have so much more to share. I am trying to figure out a modality to further express these photos more publicly so I may build a much larger internet presence to further publicize my work.
Our first stop of our trip to the Peloponnese took us to Mycenae. This is an ancient Mycenaean city and the origin of the name for the ancient peoples who lived in the Peloponnese. As this is the largest ancient site for these people it was incredibly interesting to see where and how these late Helladic people lived. The city of Mycenae overlooks the Argos plane a fertile plane which likely was where the lower class Mycenaean people lived. One of the interesting parts of Mycenae is the two famous Grave circles that were found at the site. These two grave circles are referred to as Grave Circle A and B. Grave Circle B although older (1750-1650 BCE) was discovered second which is why it is referred to as Grave Circle B. Circle B can be found on the outside of the walls of Ancient Mycenae and is designed to be walked by on your way to the palace. The interesting part about this tomb is that it likely marked the burial of a new dynasty of rulers moving to the site and marked the beginning of a period of ostentation wealth. We can see this further in the finds found at Circle A which was slightly newer (1700-1600 BCE) and can be found right on the inside of the walls to Mycenae. This site was filled with much more advanced and higher quantities of funerary goods.
Another interesting aspect of this site is the occurrence of Tholos tombs. These are a style of tomb that involves a mound that is internally supported which is then filled with dirt in-between funerary ceremonies. These tombs could be reused, but due to their prominence as a mound on the landscape the tombs were often looted and most of their large good that were originally buried have since been stolen. The site itself was very interesting and it was interesting to see how they were designed using a principle of what we call today as Architecture of paranoia. This style involved a heavily fortified structure with a secret back exit and internal spring. This was due to a period that was filled with fighting between locals and invaders which catalyzed the need for the palaces to be heavily fortified.
We then visited another Mycenaean site called Tyrence which may have acted as a port for Mycenae. The walls of the site like in Mycenae were cyclopean in style which mostly means that they involved huge boulders that only could have been moved and created by a cyclops. This style of wall is absolutely breathtaking to look at as the amount of manpower needed to move the stones must have been immense.
We then briefly visited the fortress of Palamidi which has become my favorite site visit to date. Arriving on this mountain top overlooking the city of Nafplion the views were beautiful. We arrived at the site and were given a brief history by Alex about the site, but it was not ancient at least in the classical sense, having been built during the 17th century AD. The site consisted of a series of bastions that allowed for multiple layers of defense if one were to fall during an attack. Alex (Gibbens not Knodell) and I split off from the group (other Alex had told us we could) and decided to hike straight to the top of the mountain to view the city and ocean from the peak of the fortress. I don’t think I could accurately put to word views from the top of the fortress. I have included photos I took from the top which hope do it some justice.
Overall, the first day of our trip to the Peloponnese was likely my favorite day I have had on this trip so far and I continue to look forward to more adventures that this beautiful country and it history have to share. As we go into the Easter week I hopefully will have plenty to say about one of the most important holidays in Greece.
