Days 9,10,11,12 - Aegean Sea Cruise

Let's Go Cruisin' in the Greek Islands!

After Delphi, we will head to the capital city, Athens. We will have an introduction to Greek nightlife that night in Athens with our "Greek Evening." Our more extensive visit to Athens, however, will be after our 4-day cruise. (See the next blog posting for information about Athens.) On Day 9 (Monday), we will board our luxury cruise ship in the Port of Pireus and begin our cruise around the Aegean Sea. We will enjoy four days of lots of good food, six interesting ports of call, and the experience of being at sea.

Unlike the trip up to this point, our cruise will not include pre-planned guided visits. Though there will be various opportunites to visit places of cultural and historical importance, we may as a group or part of a group opt not to do some or any of the extra visits. We will have to make our own arrangments to get to and pay to get in some archeological sites and other things that require a fee.

The Greek Islands are incredibly beautiful places, with deep blue sea and sky and many houses and buildings are whitewashed to reflect the bright sun.
Many tour members will just want to relax in the islands after a week and a half of rather intense historical immersion in Italy and Greece. Each port we visit will have picturesque medieval towns with narrow winding alleyways and whitewashed houses. One can stroll, shop, watch and meet people, and look for interesting places to eat.

The opportunities to snag some Greek Island crafts will be a temptation for some. Just mixing with a very international crowd will be interesting. The Greek islands are a draw for tourists from all over the world. We will be hanging out with Germans, Danes, Swedes, British, Japanese, Indians, French, Spanish, Italians, you name it, you will hear many languages in the islands - even Greek!

I will present the six ports (five Greek islands and a mainland city in Turkey) in a clockwise order from Athens. I am not absolutely sure this is the order we will go in, but I think so.

First is the island of Mykonos (MEE-koh-nohs). This is the least historical and perhaps most "quaint" in a touristy way. Mykonos is well-known as a "party island," although much of the hard-core nightlife will happen after we have left. Our visit will be during the day. As we dock in this harbor, we will see the quintessential Greek Island village with its fishing boats, marina cafes, and white windmills on the hill behind the village.

Both the windmills and the town pelican are landmarks. Mykonos is perhaps a rather staged and theme-parked version of what Greek Island towns once were (and still are on some less-visited islands) but you'll get the idea.

Besides eating, we will probably spend our time ashore wandering the interesting sidestreets and alleyways. Use sunblock and stroll to your heart's content.




The next port will be in Kusadasi, Turkey on the west coast of that country. Turkey is a country with a radically different culture from Greece. The town of Kusadasi is basically a resort town with hotels, restaurants, shops, and nearby beaches. Though Turkish is the local language, this place is as international as the Greek Isles. You may be more likely to hear German or English than Turkish when you first come ashore.

Kusadasi is also noted for its proximity to the ancient city of Ephesus, about 10 miles away. Ephesus was a major Greek-speaking city, first colonized by Athenians, but which later became an important trade and cultural center in the Roman Empire. It had a forum, an amphitheater, and many temples, but especially, the Temple of the virginal huntress and sister of Apollo, Artemis ("Diana" to the Romans). The Christian apostle Paul founded a church here in the First Century and came into much conflict with the local craftsmen when he opposed the worship of Artemis and the making of idols, which gave a strong local sense of identity and brought much income. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians is one of the books of the New Testament.

Like Rome and Pompeii, one can see ruins of ancient Roman baths. The ruins of Ephesus are in relatively good shape - somewhat better than in Rome itself.

Ephesus is also famous for its ancient Library and Theater.

After Kusadasi, we will sail a short way to the Greek Island of Patmos. where Saint John, one of Jesus' original disciples was exiled late in his life and where he wrote the visionary final book of the New Testament, Revelation.

We will arrive in the main village of Skala, in the middle of this small island. Not far away is a famous Byzantine monastery and a Cruaders Castle.

Patmos is perhaps most famous for the "Cave of the Apocolypse" where John was said to have gotten his vision from God and written the Book of Revelation.

This medieval picture depicts John receiving these visions.

Our next port of call is the larger island of Rhodes. Rhodes is the largest island of the Dodecanese ("dodeka" means "twelve" in Greek ) and Rhodes is one of twelve islands in the Eastern Aegean. Rhodes is famous for a huge statue that stood at the entrance to its main port in ancient times - the Colossus of Rhodes. This was a gigantic statue of the sun-god - Helios and was as big as the Statue of Liberty in New York. It was built in the 200s B.C. and destroyed by an earthquake a couple of centuries later.

Rhodes has a very fortified main town as it was a key stopover by European Crusaders during the Middle Ages on their way to Jerusalem. As you leave the harbor area you can head into the walled Old Town. The less-historic New Town is to the right. The Old Town is not even close to being laid out as a grid. It's easy to get lost in its maze of streets. Old Town Rhodes is the oldest inhabited medieval town in all of Europe. Let's just "get lost" together as we follow the footsteps of medieval knights.

For our next stop, we cross back west over the Southern Aegean to the "big island" of Crete. The largest city is on the northwest coast, Heraklion (sometimes also spelled Iraklion). Heraklion is a modern Greek city with an extremely old past. A thousand years before the heyday of Athens and Sparta, a rather advanced civilization, the Minoans, lived on Crete and several other islands in the Aegean to the north. We don't know exactly what they were called; the name "Minoan" was applied by the early British archeologist Arthur Evans, who used the name of the mythic King Minos, who had a labyrinth (maze) with a Minotaur (a half-bull/half-man monster) in it. The Minoan civilization was Europe's (and maybe the world's) most advanced culture in the 3rd milennium B.C. The Minoan civilization, which began in the 2700s B.C., ended rather abruptly in the 1400s B.C. One can visit the palace of Knossos, not far from Heraklion, and one of the earliest archeological digs. People talk of the Knossos as being the "Home of King Minos and the Minotaur" but that is pure speculation.

Knossos as it appears today for visitors.

What many now believe spelled the end of the Minoan civilization was a huge volcanic eruption on the island of Thira (today called Santorini) 90 miles to the north of Crete. The island of Santorini was one big volcano and it literally blew its top in the mid 1400s B.C. The mountain-sized tsunami this eruption would have caused, let alone the ash cloud, would have doomed the nearby island of Crete.

Here is a current map of Santorini. Imagine its shape 3500 years ago with the whole island filled in and being about 10 miles across. That blue water in the middle of the cresent is the ancient caldera (crater) of the volcano filled in with sea water. The little island in the middle is a barren lava flow that is the result of more recent smaller eruptions that bring lava up to the surface.

Santorini is one of the most breath-taking places on Earth! When one gets a mental image of Greek Islands, the sunset on the caldera of Santorini comes to mind. The whitewashed houses of the main village of Fira (FEE-rah) cling to 1000-foot high cliffs overlooking the sea. We will arrive at a small port at the bottom of the cliff and can take a cable-car (unless you want to walk or take a donkey up the old switchback path) up to the village.

From in the village, we can stroll the alleyways and get views along the cliffs. There are no bad views! Santorini has its own archeological site, Akrotiri, which shows Minoan-era village life. I doubt we will have time to visit it.

What we will have time to do (besides, of course, eating, shopping, and strolling) is time to contemplate not only the wild, wonderful beauty of this special place, but contemplate its past. In 4th-century Athens, the phiosopher Plato wrote about an advanced lost civilization called Atlantis. He wrote how the "Atlanteans" were wiped out in a cataclysmic act of nature. There have been many theories about who the Atlanteans were, where they lived, and even if they existed at all. One of the more widely-held theories is that Atlantis was the Minoan Civilization on Crete and the eruption of Thira - Santorini ended it.

As you stroll Fira and look out at the calm Mediterranean Sea, think of lost civilizations and how vulnerable we can be on this fragile planet.

Sitting beside a blue-domed Greek Orthodox church may seem far away from volcanos and minotaurs, but may we be reminded how life and civilization gets rejuvenated out of the ashes of destruction.