July 19, 2008
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A (slow) Train Trip Around the Peloponnese INSIGHT GUIDES, for whom I wrote and/or edited 25 books altogether decided to publish one about railway journeys and my assignment was to encircle the Peloponnese in western Greece. I was already familiar with most of it, having written Greece on $5 a Day for Frommer in the Sixties, but this was a trip needing adequate supplies: food, drink, radio, plenty to read, infinite patience. When I took this epic 10-hour journey more than 20 years ago first class cost about $12 from Athens to Kalamata, about halfway. This was 25 percent more than second class which was crowded with backpackers and Greeks with bulky packages.
To the north of Corinth is Loutraki, an attractive hot springs resort whose bottled mineral water is sold throughout Greece. But the train continues westwards, meandering for a long time through the Corinth suburbs, and then within a short stretch halting at a succession of ten sleepy stations. There are 42 stops altogether. For miles the train runs only a few yards from the sea with occasional fishermen to be seen offshore. At Egio, an enormous plane tree near the shore, is said to have been noted by Pausanias during his travels. Plane trees are a common site sheltering the squares of small towns, their widely spreading branches (up to 30 meters) offering unmatched cooling shade. Five kms beyond mountainous Kalavitra, reached via funicular, is the Agia Lavra monastery, at 2,800 feet, where the call first rang out in 1821 for Greeks to end the long Turkish occupation of their country. The original revolutionary banner is preserved at the monastery along with a bible donated by Catherine the Great Patras, the largest city in the Peloponnese and where the boats from Italy dock, features a ruined 9th century fortress which was owned successively by Franks, Venetians and Turks before being handed over to the French in 1828. Across the Gulf is Messolonghi whose mountains were Lord Byron's first sight of the Greek mainland in 1809, and where the heroic poet died 15 years later. "If I am a poet", said Byron "the air of Greece has made me one". Naturally, this sluggish journey can get a little tedious with sightseeing done merely from the train windows, but I carried on with my reading because I had previously visited most of these landmarks, even Olympia—site of the first Olympic Games back in the 9th century BC. At the tiny town of Pyrgos there was a considerable flurry in this otherwise uneventful journey as most of the tourists got off the rain, crowding the platform before seeking transport for the half-hour trip to the famous site. Destroyed by an earthquake in the 6th c. it lay largely forgotten until Baron de Coubertin revived the Games in 1896. In the nearby village of Olympia, the Museum of the Olympic Games contains mementoes and a series of specially designed postage stamps. Onwards the train crawled as I gazed longingly at the largely deserted beaches nearby which separate many of these western Peloponnese towns from the Ionian Sea. A superlative sunset suffused the area around Messinia, which Euripides called "a land of fair fruitage (suffering from) neither the blasts of winter nor yet made too hot by the chariot of Helios". His contemporary, Pausanias described it as a "blessed land, so hospitable, fertile and bright", adding somewhat ungrammatically that it is "the place where the beauty of nature completes the antiquities and history". Certainly there is plenty of that- fortresses everywhere including traces of the fortified Mycenean palace at Hora of King Nestor, who appears in The Iliad, the ruler of a wealthy state which he sent to fight in the Trojan War. And—more ancient history--the crystal-clear waters gushing into the Mavromati, our next stop, are from the stream in which legendarily the nymphs Ithomi and Neda bathed the infant Zeus. Southeast of Kalamata is the peninsula of the Mani, a rocky, barren terrain whose early inhabitants felt safe only in stone towers. They built many of them, the most the most famous being Pirgos Dirou halfway down the coast. Near the southern tip, Cape Tenaro with its huge lighthouse, is the village of Marmari where the cave of Hades was believed to offer entrance to the Underworld, into which went Orpheus to ask for the return of his wife Eurydice who had been fatally bitten by a snake. Time for a walk up the train to the snack bar, shared by both classes, to find only beer, soft drinks and potato chips. Fortunately I had packed my backpack with sandwiches and cookies. The cultivated land between Kalamata and the mountains is green with succulent cactus and palm trees but after Zergolatio much of the line is a solitary track where the train sounds its raucous horn every few moments all the way to Diavolis. Winding around verdant mountains, in probably the prettiest section of the trip, it overlooks a wide, tree-filed valley to the east with a little stream far below. After a short tunnel or two and bridges over ravines the train emerges from the hills with the briefest of stops at Paradise, a name strangely unsuitable for a dusty whistle-stop in the middle of nowhere. The track descends 2,000 feet towards the east coast, bypassing the lovely seaside town of Napflion for a stop at Argos whose place in history derives mainly from the Argive school of sculptors whose star was Polyklaitos (c. 550 BC) some of whose works are at Olympia. His gigantic statue of Zeus' wife Hera which was much praised by the Roman historian Strabo has long since disappeared but reliefs of it survive on ancient Argolid coins. A few miles south are the ruins of ancient Lerna where Heracles is reputed to have killed the Hydra, a dragon with the body of a snake and nine heads. Of the Labors of Heracles--recounted in a 2nd century narrative by Plutarch--six took place in the Peloponnese. In the lake at nearby Simfalia he is reputed to have destroyed the man-eating, iron-winged birds and at Nemea to have slain the Nemean Lion, an event celebrated in the 5th century BC with biennial games. The famous red wine of Nemea is still called "Heracles' blood'. Once an impressive temple to Zeus stood at Nemea, but it was already in ruins when Pausanias visited in the 2nd century. Northeast of Argos and southeast of Nemea, are the impressive ruins of Mikines (Mycenae) its name derived from "rich in gold", the spoils of war piled up behind the Lion Gate and its immense Cyclopean walls by Mycenaean warriors. But by 1100 BC Mycenae had been destroyed by fire, its legendary history a later subject for the playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some of its ancient treasures, including the golden mask said to have been owned by Agamemnon are preserved in the Archaeological Museum in Athens. Aeschylus (525-456BC), who fought at Marathon where his brother was killed, tells the story of Agamemnon in his drama Oresteia which depicts the fall of Troy. There is one last Peloponnese landmark to be noted, This is the beautifully preserved amphitheatre of Epidaurus, on the coast, where the words of the immortal dramatists as Aeschylus and Sophocles (496-406BC), are still performed every summer. Aristotle credits Sophocles, who wrote Antigone, with introducing "the third actor" into drama. At Epidaurus, the acoustics are so perfect that even the most distant of the 12,000 spectators can hear the words spoken on stage without amplification. Asclepius was believed to visit invalids here in the two-storey sleeping sanctuary at Epidaurus, bringing them dreams which would reveal a cause for their malady. Worshippers left behind in representations of various body parts of the kind still found in Greek churches.
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