5/14 (Wednesday) (what?) (already?) I made it to Kokkinogeia! …I think. I’m at Tainaron, in any case. Five hours, forty-five minutes, including some time spent wandering in Vatheia.
Now I’m at a little taverna, the “Akron Tainaron,” on a small hill near the shore. It feels like the end of the known world, a nowhere place, the restaurant at the end of the universe, perhaps. It’s by the sanctuary to Poseidon Tainaros, the “Death Oracle,” all of it. No English here, I’m afraid, but the wind is nice and strong, I’m drinking the most American victory drink possible, I think, the restaurant has rooms to let, and I know enough Greek to rent one. So all is well.
I left Geroliménas at 6:15 AM. The sun was already rising, and hell, it was breathtaking. “Dawn’s rosy fingers…” I think I finally understand that formulaic line.
Cape Tainaron, in the distance…
10 km to Vatheia!
A few words about Vatheia. As you approach from the west, it rises up on a rocky spire, seemingly separate from the surrounding heights, looking almost out of place, with towers like great gray eyries , broken walls clawing at the air above.
The road curves steeply up, around, around, and finally…through.
It is a dead place. It feels abandoned – it is abandoned, but recently so. It seems like people simply gave up on this place, like it could’ve been left behind only weeks ago – if not for the overgrowth, the rotting wood, the rust… I saw a two coats on a coatrack through a door hanging open, cloth now almost shroud-like, seeming almost like apparitions…I walked into what must’ve been a bar, cloudy bottles of Coke and orange soda haphazardly gathering clods of dust, cigarette butts moldering in an ashtray on a rickety rusting table. There was a sink behind the bar, a bottle of dishwashing soap laying in a collection of crumbled plaster.
I came to a room with a bed, window slightly ajar. The doorway was slightly shorter than I am – I had to duck. The adjoining room had a bedframe and a bookcase, plastered walls, light filtering thinly through the window. There was a kitchen and a small bathroom, garbage can still with a plastic bag…
There was rust, there were weeds, there gates hanging loosely like rotten teeth, doors fallen in.
A few buildings – can I call them houses, even? – looked at least partially lived-in, judging from the fresh padlocks on the doors. Perhaps people come back in the summer; I don’t know. But I couldn’t tell. Stairs petered out into nothingness, overcome by earth and disintegrated mortar, reeds, weeds, thorns. The tops of the towers stared out raw and ragged with empty eyes.
Was this the very same place that PLF extolled for its hospitality? Which tower was it on whose roof he ate dinner with Vasilio and her family, where he “felt as if he wanted to stay forever”? Was this truly the same town?
It was around 9:30 or 10 in the morning, and I was beginning to feel uneasy. I pulled the rusty metal chain to ring the bell at the church, well-maintained, in the empty town square. It made a pitiful voiceless noise. No answer. The stones seemed to swallow all noise. Even the buzzing of insects was muffled.
I didn’t want to see any more of it. The silent waiting heaviness was too much – “Come back, come back!” it seemed to say. “Bring them all back, make it the way it was once, when we were alive…we are waiting, we are waiting, we are waiting!”
I left. Some distance down the road, while the towers were still in sight, a dog half-herded, half-chased me away. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” I muttered. And after that, I didn’t look back.
I was beset by flies in the hot sun. Traveling light meant that I only had two and a half sets of clothes stuffed inside my tiny backpack, and so two days of sweat in my clothes, jacket stained and faded – that must’ve been it. There I was, walking on a road littered with dung from cows, donkeys, mules, sheep, goats – and they wanted to perch on me.
You can get used to lots of things after a while. Maybe it was the heat, the sun, the weariness in my limbs, but eventually, I began to talk to them, curse at them, call them “Socrates and his disciples.” “Ah,” I said out loud, “you’ve got another one! There’s Plato, and that one, you can be Xenophon. Alcibiades, making trouble as usual…that one is Critias, meaner than the others…”
It was about this same time that I named my two bags: the larger, Mavromichalis; the smaller, Mourtzinos (which means “little bulldog”) – names of two famous families that feuded in “the good old days,” so to speak…
At some point, as the road leaned toward the shore again and I could see Tainaron bulging up ahead like a whale’s back, I came across a Greek couple at the roadside filling water jugs from a pipe gushing water into a basin – a spring! The sound of it was exquisite. “Kalimera!” I said. Fumbling with my bags, I produced my water bottle. “Parakalo?” I asked, gesturing toward the water. The man smiled and nodded. I took two huge gulps from my water bottle and filled up the rest, drank some more, and filled it up again. “Efharisto poli, geia sas!” I said, smiling. And I continued on my way.
Greece, and walking around Greece, is making me friendlier, I think – I’ve been greeting people as I pass, whenever I can, including to a grave-looking old Greek gentleman in a beekeeper’s bonnet, who looked up, surprised, and said, “Geia, geia,” gruffly as I went on my way. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m simply becoming starved for meaningful human contact of any sort….
In any case, the wind picked up as I headed farther and farther south – the land smoothed out into gentle hillsides, tall and bulging, traced with the rubble walls that formed terraces for cultivation, long ago. My pace quickened and I smiled – because as I walked downhill, the last leg of my journey – Tainaron came looming, bouncing into view with every step. The wind whipped my hair up and lifted my spirits. I was there!
And now I’ve ordered something called “maridha” – which as it turns out, is a plate full of small white-fleshed fish, fried whole, heads and everything, just like my grandma does them… I suppress a wave of homesickness.
It’s quite windy here. I can see why Corinth was – and still is – so important; no one would want to sail around this cape in bad weather, if this is what it’s like even on a clear day like today.
The exhaustion is already fading from my feet, it seems.
-later-
The thing about the “Sanctuary of Poseidon Tainaros,” as it’s signposted. I’m pretty sure it was converted into a church at some point – there’s a clearly later apse added onto the east end, and barrel vaulting, too, all in mortar and rubble with some pieces of reused masonry (spolia!). The north wall has the expected ashlar (big and rectangular) blocks, limestone, but the rest of it seems like there were repairs, it’s mostly fallen down…and it doesn’t seem to have been a temple in the traditional sense. That is, I couldn’t identify any pronaos/naos/opisthodemos plan (this is technical stuff, don’t worry about it – the three room structure of a typical classicalish temple), no columns, no altar. True, a sanctuary doesn’t necessarily mean a temple, but it was all very perplexing.
You enter from the west. In the back, through a small doorway, there are what seem like pieces of small columns, and a flat slab of rock. People have left little mementoes there – tickets to museums and archaeological sites, brightly colored buttons, shells, bits of cloth, odds and ends. It was oddly touching – here at the end of all things, visitors have left pieces of themselves, of their stories. I left my bus ticket.
The “Death Oracle” seemed more promising, though there’s also not much remaining. A path leads down from the sanctuary, sloping slightly eastwards, gently down to a pebbly beach, then turns into a rocky overhang – a shallow cave, darkened by smoke stains and the shadow of fig trees. There are three distinct indentations in the rock. The largest one has the remains of limestone doorposts in a rubble wall; the middle one is small with a tiny pool, still and green with algae; the third is narrower and taller. The sound of the waves and wind filters through, softened and mixed with the rustling of reeds. There is a stillness here. The ground is damp – perhaps the sea sinks underneath, and bubbles up in the dim little pool and in the earth…
There were other structures here, built around it, cut into the rock, I think – it’s so hard to tell; limestone wears away so easily, and the winds and waters here are strong.
-later-
I wake from a nap at 10:30 PM. There’s a full moon tonight, an unearthly glow about the cape…a cruise liner ablaze out in the distance, lights flaring out in revelry, into the semidark. I can see the outlines of the coasts, clearly. The light is pale and cold and the wind is fierce.
I would not want to be in Vatheia in such light.
Winters here must be terrible. I, in my little bed of fragrant white sheets, cocooned in a fuzzy blanket of the type that seems widespread in Greek hotels and guesthouses – I can hardly imagine what the winters must be like, if even now the wind shrieks through the walls, through every crack and doorjamb. No visitors in the winter – places like this go by high/low, on/off seasons. Storms barreling in, watery Eurus or Notus casting down their burdens, moaning and screaming, seas cresting in great froths of spray, gurgling and spitting, each current its own Scylla, its own Charybdis – the salt crusting everything, the woodwork, the steel, the concrete, the stone…all of it trembles.
ta hypomnemata 