Say Feta

OK, so I didn't really plan on writing a blog post about the food in Greece. I know. I know. I've written plenty of food blog posts over the ten plus years I've been doing this so it's not like a food post is an unusual occurrence. Japan got one. England got one. New Zealand got one, for crying out loud. I've written about pizza in Italy and cheese in Paris and egg custard pastries in Portugal. Why can't Greece have one too? Well, it can. It's getting one. 

I start this post that way for two reasons. First, it's a get out of jail free card on the photos in this post. I didn't plan on writing a Greek food post so I didn't consciously take pictures to support a narrative. That's not a comment on our expectations for Greek food. I just didn't plan one. 

Second-ly, and way more importantly, the food in and around Athens was quite honestly amazing. Greece deserves a food post. When people ask me where I've traveled and have had the best food, I always say Japan. My answer may now be Greece. It was that good. No joke here. It was incredible. And way, way, way cheaper than Japan.

So before I continue and finish blogging about Greek temples...here goes a food post about Greece. With sub-par photographs.

Souvlaki, anyone?

So, a few big picture themes here: (1) lots of the best feta I have ever had in my life (and I already LOVED feta before this trip); (2) lots of olives (kalamatas, the BEST kind of olives); (3) lots of souvlaki; and (4) lots and lots of history and influences from other cultures that put Greek cuisine where it is today. Combine all of that with an awesome street food scene; low, low, low costs; and good and cheap Greek wine (I'm partial to the malagousia) and honestly, I could spend weeks roaming around Athens eating the food that the locals cook. Seriously impressive.

Now, for sure, we were serious about getting some good Greek grub before we arrived in country. I definitely had feta, pastries made from phyllo, souvlaki and baklava (I know...also made from phyllo) on my list along with a resolution to find the best I'd ever had of each of those foods. I also thought the food was important enough in this part of our Croatia and Greece trip to book a food tour on our arrival day in Athens. We've done this in a few places around the globe and have found they not only get us a good sampling of the local fare, but also get us a feel for neighborhoods around wherever we are traveling in addition to making connections locally and regionally through the history of what's eaten where we happen to be.

None of that makes any sense with my I-wasn't-planning-on-food-blogging statement but whatever. 

Our food tour idea (Greekality's Athens Street Food Tour, if you must know) totally worked as intended. It got us deep into the casual food and street food scene (and I really love some street food) around Syntagma and particularly Monastiraki Squares and gave us a place to head back for both lunch and dinner over the next couple of days. Our guide, Antonia, also gave us advice and tips for our next three days in town and also walked us through the history and some of the etymology of both the places we were visiting and the foods we were enjoying. She also below away some preconceived notions about food in Greece, particularly some things we get wrong over here in the USA.

Let me drop a couple of word origins here to get things going: any word with "aki" on the end is likely a diminutive of the original meaning (Monastiraki Square is a smaller version of an open space near the monastery in that part of town) and the addition of "pita" on the end of a word typically means a pie, particularly if it's a phyllo pie (spanakopita comes to mind here). Antonia also informed us about the dropping of the "s" on Acropolis and metropolis (it's pronounced Acropoli and metropoli in Greek) due to those two words being feminine in gender.

Our guide, Antonia, with some cheese (meaning feta, of course) pie.

So about that food. Let's start with dessert, shall we? I mean, why not. Dessert always comes last. Why not put it first for a change. 

If there was a dessert we had to have in Greece, it was baklava. Layers of phyllo sandwiched over and below layer after layer of finely chopped pale green pistachios and then the whole thing drenched in honey? Yes, please. Sad though it may sound, my measuring stick for baklava was a stall at London's Borough Market and I knew I was bound to get something better than that in Greece. So on the first night in Athens as the last dish of our food tour we were presented with a plate of baklava with orange cake and ice cream.

So was it a better version of the roll of baklava I had in London? No, it was not. And that's because the Greeks don't make their baklava with pistachios. They make it with walnuts. And in the spectrum of nuts, walnuts are not the same as pistachios. The Greeks also throw in a healthy dose of cinnamon when they are making their baklava. But honestly, it was really, really good. It was actually better than the stuff in London. By a lot. 

That's not to say that there isn't pistachio baklava out there that's better than the walnut variety that we had in Athens but this couple of bites was really good. We did actually find some pistachio baklava on the island of Aegina but that was not as good as the walnut and cinnamon stuff.

In case you were wondering, the Turks make the pistachio baklava. 

Baklava, orange cake and mastika ice cream.

Baklava was just one of four desserts we had on our first night food tour (I'm counting the orange cake and the ice cream as two separate desserts...). The ice cream that filled the left side of the baklava plate was made with mastika, a resin produced by the mastic tree on the Greek island of Chios. Apparently, despite the mastic tree existing in many places in the world, it only produces resin on the Chios just west of the coast of Turkey. I am betting we never find mastika ice cream in any other country in any of our future travels. The stuff you learn when you leave home...

The first dessert we had that night was the most disappointing...something called lukumades, which are deep fried balls of dough with honey topping (think donut holes but a bit larger). I found them too deep fried. They were crunchy when I expected soft and they left me with a greasy aftertaste in my mouth. But they came with a small dose of history: apparently they were served as prizes for the ancient Greek athletes at the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., which I guess makes the Greeks the inventors of the donuts, at least until someone tells us about an earlier version.

A "single bite" in Arabic is lukma, by the way.

The Lukumades napkin. In many ways better than the actual food.

More food, anyone? With or without history? For sure! The sampling of spanakopita and just plain cheese (meaning feta) pie we started our tour with was the best phyllo with spinach and cheese or just cheese that I've ever had. I don't know how anyone could eat a whole portion of one of these pies but I guess people do. Way too rich and buttery but awesome in single bite form.

The best we had on our first night, though, was a peyrnirli. I know what you are thinking...a WHAT? It's essentially a Greek pizza shaped like a boat, but there's an awesome and sad historical backstory.

The peyrnirli is not Greek. It's Turkish. Shocker, I know. The Turks! Again!

Apparently in the late nineteen-teens and early 1920s the Greeks and the Turks got into a bit of a war. The Greeks started it when they invaded western Turkey in 1919 and the Turks ended it when they kicked the Greeks back to Greece three years later. The Greeks invaded because they claimed the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian population living in western Turkey needed protection from the Turks. So when the war was over, the two countries agreed to swap parts of their population: the Turks sent 1.1 million Christians to Greece and the Greeks sent 400,000 Muslims the other way. When that happened, the peyrnirli made its way from Turkey to Greece. And in 2023, a couple of peyrnirli made their way from a table to my stomach.

I know it shouldn't shock me because it's happening still all over the world today, but what kind of leaders of nations want to send residents of their own countries away to an enemy and force people in their enemy's territory to uproot their lives and move to a new place? I guess maybe it would be welcomed if those people felt threatened where they lived but why would a nation allow that either? I know there are no good answers here. 

But that's apparently how the peyrnirli got to Athens. It's effectively a pizza in a different shape, right? Although (and I know you can't tell from the picture below) there's no tomato sauce. I love pizza, especially ones with pillowy soft crust that deflates gorgeously when you bite into them like these peyrnirli did. The olive ones were the best. Hey...we were in Greece.

Mushroom and truffle peyrnirli.

This post was never intended to be a blow by blow of our opening night food tour so while there's still time, let's make sure I don't do that.

We got amazing food pretty much everywhere we went in Greece. Whether it was street food or food in a restaurant or eaten outdoors or indoors, we generally loved everything we ate. Maybe not so much the koulouria, or Greek bagels (they were too dry, even when filled with cheese and bacon), but everything else hit the spot pretty much as soon as we bit into it.

It might be odd to reminisce about something as simple as a Greek salad but I'm telling you, the one we had in our four days in Greece was sublime. Tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, capers, red onions and fall-off-the-pit kalamata olives have never tasted so good in a bowl to me. It was so incredible that I ate all the cucumbers (which I do NOT like) without a care. Oh...and no lettuce. Get it right, America.

The best Greek salad ever. EVER.

But after all that, the food that will stick out as intimately tied to our experience in Greece was souvlaki. That's probably because we ate souvlaki four times in four days. It was the main course at dinner on our food tour and it was lunch, lunch and dinner the next three days. 

Let's start with the word, shall we. It ends in "aki" so if Antonia is to be believed, it's a diminutive of some other term. And sure enough, the Greek word for skewer is souvla. Souvlaki, therefore, is a mini skewer. Could be chicken, could be pork, could be beef and lamb mixture. If it's chicken or pork, sometimes it's cut off a rotating vertical spit and it might be called a gyro. If it's beef and lamb mixture, it's ground and cooked on a (small) skewer but it's never cut off the vertical spit and it's never called a gyro. Not in Greece. Not since a ban on beef importation in the late 1960s. No beef gyros in Athens.

If it's served as a sandwich, it's coming in a pita. If it's not, it's just on a plate with some sides. Rice and potatoes, maybe. Not rice OR potatoes. Rice AND potatoes. One starch ain't enough here. Throw in some tomatoes, some sauce (tzatziki) and some red onions and you got a meal. And yes, the sides come in the pita, too. Just not the rice. But for sure the potatoes in French fried form. And maybe a bit of paprika.

Souvlaki, anyone?

I don't think souvlaki was necessarily my favorite dish in Greece, but it certainly had me coming back again and again. There's nothing that's not good about this sandwich. It's quick, it's relatively healthy (ignore the fries) and it's super cheap. Our last meal of the trip was a couple of chicken souvlakis, a water and beer and it cost us less than $10. That's American dollars after conversion, not Euros. Less than $10!!!

If there are three memories from Greece about food, it's the feta, the olives and the availability and frequency of souvlaki meals. This is not complicated stuff. There's not a lot of advanced techniques required to make anything that we had to eat in Athens or in the area around the Greek capital. It's solid ingredients in the place where they are produced that have been paired together successfully over centuries. Other than the food tour, we made about zero effort to find the best Greek food around Athens and it was all fantastic. We've been eating kalamatas and feta every week for the month and a half we've been back from Greece. Can't get enough of this stuff. 

Better than Japan? Best food ever? Maybe. Our range was narrower than it was in Japan, if for no other reason than we spent 3-4 times as long in Japan. But next time someone asks me where is the best food I've ever had on our travels, it's at least Japan with a nod to Greece. 

One last Greek food tidbit. There are olive trees growing in downtown Athens. Greece leads the world in per capita consumption of olive oil. 17 liters per person per year. Serious stuff.

Last souvlaki in Greece. For this year, anyway.

The Acropolis

When we first started looking at a fall shoulder season trip for 2023, we centered our search pretty quickly on Croatia and Greece. I figured we'd pick one and save the other for some time later maybe five or six or more years from now. Hey, you can't always do everything you want with the limited amount of time off from work we get here in the United States so you have to make some tough choices in life sometimes.

But when we started digging into the itinerary a bit, it became apparent that we could probably do both in a nine-night trip if we just confined the Greek portion of our trip to the Athens area. I mean, if we can do Madrid, Barcelona and Marrakech in nine nights in 2014, it made sense to me that we could do Split, Dubrovnik and Athens in the same amount of time. So Croatia OR Greece became Croatia AND Athens.

I'll be honest here. The first thing I thought about when we settled on some time in Athens was that I was finally going to make it to the Acropolis. That was it. Nothing about the souvlaki and the baklava. Nothing about sailing on the Aegean Sea. Nothing about open-air movies. The Acropolis. First thought. Nothing else.

Dionysus (on the right) with a pitcher of wine. Acropolis Museum.

So, I get it. This is completely the thought of an architect (which I am). For as long as I can remember being taught anything about architecture, I've been told two things about Greek architecture. First, the Greeks were the civilization that pretty much invented architecture as a profession. Nobody before the Greeks really elevated and celebrated the architect as an individual like they did in Greece. Second, of all the buildings anywhere in the places that used to be called Greek, the most perfect manifestation of Greek architecture is the Parthenon, which is the main attraction on the Acropolis, the temples-on-a-hill complex right smack dab in the middle of the city of Athens. 

I HAD to go to the Acropolis. Finally.

So after splitting five nights in Croatia between Dubrovnik and Split, it was time to head to Athens. We landed at the airport at about noon on a Thursday afternoon. The very next morning at about 7:45, we were standing in lines (yes, lines) at the gate to the Acropolis waiting to get into what was for me the most obvious and essential thing to do in the city of Athens. Tell me I'm in the wrong here. You can't. Because I'm not.

Looking from the Acropolis back towards to propylaea. 

For me, everything about visiting Athens centered around Greek architecture. Sure, we did want some souvlaki and some baklava. And yes, we also wanted to get to an island off the coast of Athens. And we really did have seeing a movie in the open air on our list (we never got to that one...). But it was really all about the architecture. Love it or hate it, Greek architecture is pretty darned important to the history of building design since the time of the Greeks. 

The Greeks were for sure master builders and they spread their carefully considered and well-thought-out vocabulary of columns and capitals and pediments and triglyphs and metopes all over the Mediterranean as they spread their influence around the region. When their civilization declined, the Romans picked up what they had created and commandeered it for use in a prolific but sometimes clumsy way which spread the Greek architectural gospel even further. 

The collapse of the Roman Empire and the ensuing Dark Ages did no favors for the profession of architecture but what the Greeks had created popped up again during the Italian Renaissance whose architects revived and re-interpreted what they learned from Greece and Rome. Eventually, those ideas would spread to places like London and the United States, where architects insisted on using what the Greeks had invented for just about everything, including most of the Federal buildings in Washington, DC to courthouses and banks and all manner of structures all over American small towns. This stuff lasted and there's a reason for that. Maybe the American version isn't always faithful to the original but it's out there.

So every so often, it helps to go back to the beginning. Not just with architecture necessarily but that's what I'm referring to here. And for the profession I chose as the means to making my way in this world, the Acropolis is effectively the beginning. So, since we were in Athens, we had to see how to do Greek architecture correctly.

The Acropolis at night as seen from Monastiraki Square.

Before we arrived in Athens, we set ourselves up for as many looks at the Acropolis that we could think of. We found an open-air movie theatre (I know...we should have gone...) with a viewshed to the lighted acropolis at night. We booked dinner at a restaurant that promised framed views of the Acropolis. We even considered staying at one or two hotels with rooftop views to the Acropolis before we checked out the per night price and passed. In short, we conjured up every way we could think of to get a glimpse here and there.

Here's the thing about all of that: you can see the Acropolis from pretty much everywhere in the city center of Athens. The view is amazing and special but it's certainly not rare. Athens is pretty much flat-ish bowl or plate of a city with one or two very prominent unobstructed hills, one of which is the Acropolis. Seeing it around corners and through gates and in alleyways or over ancient ruins is not an infrequent sight. That doesn't mean it's not special because it certainly is. It's just not rare, that's all. 

We cancelled the dinner reservation with the Acropolis view by the way and ate Souvlaki for less than $10 total for two including drinks. Greek food is cheap. But that's a story for another time.

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

I honestly expected big things out of the Acropolis and especially the Parthenon. I mean this place had to be special considering the advance press that I had been fed in like every history and architecture class that I've attended that dealt with ancient architecture. Despite all the anticipation, though, I really expected that I would find it a bit boring. I mean we are talking about a gabled roofed building surrounded by the exact same columns over and over again with just two rooms under the roof. How good could this really be? It's not like we are dealing with anything complicated from a spatial point of view or anything. When it comes right down to it, I'm just not a classical architecture guy.

I shouldn't have doubted. And I'm shocked to be writing that despite how I opened the last paragraph. Maybe that was obvious from the way I finished the last paragraph. The whole Acropolis and especially the Parthenon were just an awesome couple of hours experience. You can't enter the buildings in any way. All you can do is look at the outside. They aren't even all there and all the ornamentation and color is gone. And it was just awesome anyway.

At its simplest level, there's not much to the Acropolis. There's a gate at one end (the propylaea) which you pass through on your ascent up the last part of the hill and when you pass through there are two temples facing you: the Erechtheion on the left and the Parthenon on the right. You are looking at the front corner of the Parthenon and the side wall of the Erechtheion. The side wall in view is the one with the famous caryatids, the six columns carved like women holding up the roof above the porch off the side of the temple. 

After all this time. After learning about this place more than 35 years ago for the first time, that's it. That's all there is. It wasn't always that way but that's how it stands today. There's nothing else up there once you pass through the propylaea other than a small, raised podium at the opposite end of the hill which has some awesome views looking back across the Acropolis. 

And I guess to Athens. I don't know about that last part. I was there to see the Acropolis, not Athens. Didn't even look.

The east side of the Parthenon. Built 447 to 432 B.C.

Before we set off for Athens, I made a list of everything I wanted to really check out at the Acropolis. I figured I'd focus in advance. That list was pretty short. It included the Parthenon, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. Little did I know that my list included everything on the top of the hill except for the propylaea. And that was OK, really. Picking those three was enough to focus on. There's plenty of other stuff to check out on the south slope of the Acropolis and there are lots of bit and pieces of other former structures at the top of the hill of you want to be more of a completist. I am sure you could spend days there looking at every piece of stone or partially complete temple or theater. Focusing on what I saw as the three signature buildings is enough for a first time visit, I feel.

It took a little bit of time to find Athena Nike by the way. She's actually located on a pedestal in front of the propylaea. I saw it before we climbed the last part of the hill and didn't even realize what I was looking at. But we found her once we circled the Parthenon and before we took a closer look at the west side of the Erechtheion.

The Temple of Athena Nike. Built 449 to 420 B.C.

Of the three temples I had on my list, I really had them ranked before we set foot in Greece as follows: (1) Athena Nike, (2) the Erechtheion and (3) the Parthenon. Construction was started on all three of these buildings within a 30-year span in the fifth century B.C. One (the Parthenon) was built using the Doric order, one of the three signature orders of Greek architecture. The other two used the Ionic order. When it comes to orders, I'm an Ionic guy all the way. The Doric is too plain for me and Ionic is overall just more elegant and lighter. 

And yes, just to be clear, on the basis of orders alone, I put the Parthenon, the thing that is supposed to be the most perfect Greek temple ever, in last place. Sometimes I'm not that smart, although ultimately any evaluation of "best" ends up being pretty subjective. The Parthenon, however, was the most impressive.

In my defense here, the Temple of Athena Nike is a little jewel box of a building. It's a tiny little one-roomed temple perched on a huge pedestal with four Ionic columns on the east and west faces. The pediment on the east side is about two thirds intact with some of the original frieze intact (or restored, I guess). But you can't get very close to it. As a building to visit, you have to admire from afar. There's no other option really.

Temple of Athena Nike (top). The Erechtheion; built 421 to 406 B.C. (bottom).

The Erechtheion is quite a bit more complicated. The reason it was on my list ahead of the Parthenon was because of the side porch of the temple with with roof supported by the six caryatids. They are spectacular, even though you cannot get really close to see them at all. This is a theme at the Acropolis by the way: lots of awesome stuff to see but cannot get really close to see it. 

If you get up the Acropolis and feel upset at all about not being able to get close to the caryatids, don't worry too much because they are not the originals. Most of the originals, including just pieces of one of the six which was destroyed by a stray Ottoman cannonball, are in the Acropolis Museum at the bottom of the south slope of the hill.

The Erechtheion is supposedly built on the spot where Athena and Poseidon battled to be the god of choice for the city of Athens. As a quick recap of that contest, both gods produced gifts to the citizens (I assume it wasn't called Athens then since Athens was named after Athena...) for their consideration. Poseidon produced salt water from a spring at a spot struck by his trident; Athena went with an olive tree. Clearly, Athena won.

Architecturally, the Erechtheion is the most complicated and confusing of the four buildings on the Acropolis (I'm counting the propylaea as a building here). Its main entrance is from the east via a six-columned front facade but it also has a couple of porches on the north and south and really the one on the north is like an annex with a separate portico and wholly different floor level. The star of the whole building is the porch with the caryatids to the south although it's not a porch in the sense we think of porches probably. There's no spatial connection to the main building; it's really just preserving space above the tomb of Kekrops, who was a mythical king of Athens.

I'm not completely positive how a tomb of a mythical king works. I assume it's just cermonial? I mean if there was a body, he wouldn't be mythical. Does that sound right? Kekrops, by the way, is one of two mythical kings of Athens whose tomb is at the Erechtheion. The other is Erechtheus.

Front (top) and porch (bottom) of the Erechtheion.

So then there's the Parthenon.

How is a building this simple actually this good? It's a rectangle in plan with just two rooms inside. There are eight Doric (read: very plain) columns on the short sides of the rectangle and seventeen on the long sides. Part of the south side of the building is collapsed (a result of Christian bombardment when the building had been converted to a mosque by the Ottomans) and most all of the sculpture that adorned the outside of the building (including within the pediments) is long gone (most of it's in London, of all places). Of the two rooms, one used to hold an enormous ivory and gold statue of Athena but that's long since been cannibalized for other purposes so that doesn't add to the luster of the building at all.

Maybe I'd been brainwashed by my education. I looked for the entasis on the columns (essentially meaning the columns "bulge") that makes them look like they are bearing weight. I looked for the entablature above the columns not being purely horizontal. I looked at the spacing between columns. I looked for the columns leaning slightly inward. And I'll confess, that almost all of these were impossible to see but I "knew" they were there.

I will say for the record that I am rarely impressed with architecture (and maybe I should have capitalized that) that is this old and (no judgement here) this primitive. But the Parthenon is truly impressive. Yes, it's simple. Yes, I looked for and believed everything I had been told that makes this building so remarkable. But there is also a very pleasing proportionality to admire and the details made all the difference. They are sophisticated. This is clearly not the first time a Doric temple has been built. I think the relationship between the column capitals and the entablature and the reduction in spacing at the end columns were really important to me.

Maybe it was the details. Maybe it was Athens. Maybe it was the anticipation. Maybe it was the sun. Maybe it was finally getting there. Maybe it was all of it.

Sunny side of the Parthenon in the morning, including a look at the columns and entablature.

The siting of these temples on the top of the Acropolis, by the way, is phenomenal. If there is one takeaway I took away from Greece, it was that that Greeks really know how to place a building on a site to gain the maximum impact on the visitor. 

When you are walking up to the propylaea, you can't see any hint of what is beyond really. If you are sharper than me, you'll notice the Temple of Athena Nike for what it is but really you can't see anything else. Once you emerge through the gate that is the propylaea, you are faced with the Parthenon on the right in perfect perspective. You can see the front facade and also gauge the entire size of the building by also being able to see its broad side. This kind of denial of view following up by revealing of objects or spaces has been a key element of architectural design for centuries.

At the height of its glory, you would have seen before you a giant status of Athena just ahead of you and maybe bit to the left. But beyond that on the left would have been the Erechtheion showing you it's most gorgeous feature (the caryatids) but not showing you its front face. To get to that, you'd have to be drawn into the plaza between the two buildings, taking in the full length of the Parthenon as you walked before you could circle around to the front of the smaller temple. I know there are just two things up there after the propylaea and how difficult is it really to put two things on a flat hilltop but these two really are sited perfectly.

I don't get this impression just from the Acropolis. We visited at least two more ancient Greek temple sites where the views of the main attractions were concealed, teased and revealed in epic fashion. And yes, that means there are two more blog posts about temples in Greece coming.

First view of the Parthenon (top) and sacred olive tree outside the Erechtheion (bottom).

If I can offer a pro tip from a one-time visitor to the Acropolis (is that even possible? a should it be an amateur tip?), it's get there early and beat the crowds. When we visited, they appeared to be testing out a timed entry policy that appeared to be either loosely enforced or not enforced at all to reduce crowding but there are for sure crowds. We got there at opening time and stood in line for about 15 minutes for tickets and then maybe 2 or 3 additional minutes to get our tickets scanned. 

The first place you come to after you pass through the property gates is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an open-air theater of what used to be an indoor theater donated to the city by Herodes Atticus, an early benefactor of the arts in Athens. My advice is to skip this upon entry and hit it on the way out. Get to the Parthenon and the Erechtheion before the hordes get there. Maybe you'll get lucky and get a sense of the place (and some pics) without a mass of people milling around.

Our route at the Acropolis took us through the main gate; up through the propylaea to the top of the hill; back through the propylaea; past the Odeon of Herodes Atticus; and down the south slope past four or five additional structures in various states of standing. At the bottom of the hill is the Acropolis Museum.

Floods of tourists (top) and the Theater of Dionysus with the Acropolis Museum (bottom).

If we could have spent days checking out everything on the top and sides of the hill that is the Acropolis, I am convinced you could spend an equal amount of time studying every object and watching every video simulation inside the Acropolis Museum. The amount of material in that place is daunting. I am sure all of it has value on some level. We couldn't handle it all so we focused (again) on material related to the three temples we targeted on the actual Acropolis along with any information that explained the development and evolution of the site. 

And maybe one or two other pieces that caught our eyes along the way. I love the sculptured panel of Dionysus that I've included as the second picture of this post. I don't know how exactly it fits into the Acropolis because I don't remember the caption next to the exhibit but I think it's really well done. I am sure its condition and the giant (and i do mean GIANT) cup of wine that Dionysus is holding in his right hand helps my appreciation of this piece.

One of the most valuable displays inside the Museum is a series of models representing the buildings on top of the hill at a few different points in time. The Parthenon we see today is not the original Parthenon. That building was destroyed by the Persians in 480 B.C. The new Parthenon was also co-opted by both the Ottomans as a mosque and by later Christians as a church. All these permutations are represented in a series of models which show the site in different conditions over time. 

These models, combined with the video presentation on the upper floor of the Museum which shows the construction and adaptive re-use of the Parthenon over time really paint a pretty complete picture of what was going on atop the hill for the last 3,000 plus years. Adaptive re-use here means everything from the construction to the destruction of "pagan" sculpture by Christians to destruction of the south side of the building by cannon-fire (also by the Christians) to looting of the sculpture by Britain's Lord Elgin (which is how most of the Parthenon's original art is in London). I guess Elgin was a Christian too. Those Christians...

Model of the Acropolis, 5th century B.C. Notice the giant statue of Athena.

As far as the actual pieces of stone inside the Museum, the stars are clearly the original caryatids. These alone are worth the price of admission to get this close to pieces of sculpture this important to the site. And you can get to within inches of them and they are not behind glass or anything. We for sure spent more time looking at these five ladies than anything else in the Museum. I got disappointment when I saw how far from the Erechetheion's porch we have to stand on top of the Acropolis. That was easily overcome when we found them in the Museum.

And yes...five. Not six. The sixth was swiped by Lord Elgin when he stole all the Parthenon's sculpture from the site and it sits in the British Museum along with the rest of the loot he made off with.

The five (not six) caryatids in the Acropolis Museum.

I don't know how many pieces of sculpture we skipped in the Acropolis Museum. There was just too much to take in. I will say that some of the pieces still have some of the original paint on them and (as faded as it is today) that was extremely gratifying to see. It's awesome to see paint that's survived 2,500 years on a piece of stone when the stone has not been treated with care for a lot of that time.

I don't know what else to say about this museum other than I'm glad we went to the Museum after we visited the site. I found it easy to make connections to what we'd just seen. I doubt I would have made the same connections in the opposite order. I especially appreciated the sculpture (some of it replicas) from the Parthenon being in the same orientation in the Museum as it is on the actual site, particularly because you can see the actual Parthenon when you are looking at some pieces of the sculpture.

Sculpture from the Parthenon in the Acropolis Museum with the actual Parthenon visible through the windows.

One of the things I love most about travel is that it gets you to places that you have longed to go to that you have learned about without actually ever having been there. Setting foot in foreign (or domestic) lands to make your own judgements about places is thrilling to me. It can be perspective-changing or it can validate what you already thought you knew. Usually, there's a little of both but it's rarely exactly what you thought before you actually arrive there. It's not virtual reality. It's real life. Being there matters.

We didn't spend much time at all in Athens but I'm convinced we were right to devote a good portion of our time there to what is unquestionably the number one tourist attraction in the city. When you are standing in the city of Athens looking up at the Acropolis, it seems like a long way up. It's not too bad, but you do have to walk up there yourself. There's no funicular or elevator. Take it slowly if you have to and it's cooler in the morning. That Athens sun can get hot.

Also, it's not pronounced Acropolis in Greece. The word is feminine and the "s" isn't pronouced. It's Acropoli. Do with that what you will.

Southeast corner of the Parthenon. Not sure how Elgin missed plundering this part.

Power Is Power

I'll start this post with what may seem like a stupid statement: I'm not sure we end up in Croatia in 2023 without having watched HBO's series Game of Thrones.

It sounds stupid, right? Croatia is this picturesque, coastal country right on the Adriatic Sea with the most gorgeous crystal-clear blue-green waters and spectacular historic cities and we are there because we watched some television show. The food is incredible. The people are amazing. The weather is idyllic. The cost of living (or tourist life, I guess) is super affordable and we are there because of some fantasy show that broadcast altogether too few episodes over too long a period of time. 

It's true!

There are a lot of motivators behind our choice of travel destinations. Family. History. Culture. Food. Wildlife. Architecture. Spirituality. Connections with different types of people. Epic walks. The outdoors. I could go on and on and on. For Croatia, it was Game of Thrones. At least that's where it started.

Stupid. You can go ahead and think it. Or say it even.

Dubrovnik's Fort Lovrijenac.

Now to be fair here, 30 years ago Croatia was at war over its secession from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and nobody wants to go to a country either at war or recovering from a war and sometimes these thoughts stick. But 30 years ago is a long, long time and recovery and stability can occur within a span of time way shorter than that pretty quickly. Croatia was poised for success as a tourist magnet along the shores of the Adriatic Sea. Its coastline is no different than those of Greece and Italy and France and Spain. It just needed to separate from the rest of Yugoslavia to realize its full potential. Unfortunately, that took a war and an eventual recovery. 

Ultimately, it took Game of Thrones to turn our attention to Croatia. Good thing we watched Game of Thrones. Croatia was a revelation. 

I do think it's peculiar, by the way, that we visited not one, but two (Rwanda - which I did not blog about), countries this year that were involved in some sort of civil war or conflict with allegations of genocide in the 1990s. It's scary how quickly things can change. In the case of Croatia and Rwanda, things are much, much better than they were 30 years ago. But there are other places where the opposite is true.

View from Klis Fortress looking back down towards Split.

When we first started looking seriously at Croatia as a destination, we focused on the historic city of Dubrovnik, which was adapted in Game of Thrones into King's Landing, the capital city of Westeros. Our intent was to stop the Game of Thrones stuff there, quickly seek out some sights in and around Dubrovnik where some scenes were filmed and then enjoy the rest of Dubrovnik for what it is today: a city filled with history and culture and character. 

It became apparent pretty quickly that Dubrovnik wasn't going to keep us busy for more than a half a week. That would mean we'd need to find someplace else in Croatia to keep us occupied, either as a day trip or as a separate overnight stay. Eventually, we found Split, a city a couple of hundred kilometers up Croatia's coast which was founded with the construction of the retirement palace for the Roman Emperor Diocletian. And lo and behold, scenes in Game of Thrones were filmed in Split, too.

Split. Dubrovnik. It had to be Game of Thrones tour time. HAD to be! And yes, we took two GoT tours on this trip, one in Dubrovnik and one in Split. Never accuse us of doing anything halfway. See Vienna if you doubt me.

Dubrovnik at night, looking north from the steps outside St. Ignatius' Church.

So we've been here before. Northern Ireland. 2019. Call it our first Game of Thrones pilgrimage (I think Croatia will likely be our last...). We spent a day with one of the extras in the show tracking down random locations where the series was filmed that we never would have thought of going on our own. We committed to the mission. We wore cloaks. We answered trivia questions. We brandished swords. It was an awesome fun day out. 

That was not our Croatia experience. It wasn't better. It wasn't worse. It was just different. No cloaks. No swords. No random locations. In Northern Ireland, we went where we were taken. In Croatia, we used our GoT tours to get to some places we wanted to go which would have been difficult to get to on our own. Yes, we wanted to see spots where dragons breathed fire or where slave masters were killed or where plots were hatched, but we also wanted to get out of town in Split and Dubrovnik. Our Game of Thrones tours both did that for us.

When we started planning our Croatia jaunt, we found hotels right in the heart of (or just outside) the historic city centers of both places. In Split, that would put us right in the middle of what used to be Diocletian's Palace. In Dubrovnik, we'd be a five minute walk to the Pile Gate at the west side of the city. Couldn't get any better locations. We'd get a ride from the airport (in Split) or the ferry terminal (in Dubrovnik) and be close to most everything we wanted to see. No fuss, no how-do-we-get-to-the-city, no car, just a walk away.

And yes...MOST everything. We had a couple of other spots on our list in the Klis Fortress (outside Split) and the Trsteno Arboretum (outside Dubrovnik) that we wouldn't be able to get to unless we got a taxi and had the driver wait or we spent a lot of time on buses to more buses and then waiting for return buses. Lucky for us, Klis Fortress became the city of Meereen in GoT and the Trsteno Arboretum was the gardens of the palace at Kings Landing in the series. Let's just knock these both out by booking a GoT in each spot and there will be no public transportation logistics to coordinate and we'd get to see where some of our favorite scenes in the series were shot.

So that's what we did.

Our GoT guide in Split, Luka, showing us where the dragons were kept in Mereen.

For me on these two tours, the best places inside the cities that we visited were Fort Lovrijenac, the 11th century fort that sits just west of the city of Dubrovnik, and the substructures of Diocletian's Palace (which later became Split), built to both support the private quarters above for the former emperor and to keep food preserved as long as possible in a relatively cool environment. 

Fort Lovrijenac was built specifically to defend Dubrovnik from attacks either by land or sea from the west of the city. Walking around the Fort today, it is completely believable that in the event of an attack, you'd be safer in that place than anywhere else in the vicinity. It's is an absolute giant of a compound that seems impenetrable from all sides and is accessible from a single point that is easily defended. This place, combined with the thick wall that snakes all around the city itself, were the keystones to the defense of Dubrovnik. It does not take long to explore Fort Lovrijenac. You can definitely get the sense of what happened there pretty quickly. But the walk itself down to the place and back to the city is definitely worth the effort as well. We for sure got the best views of the entirety of Dubrovnik from the Fort.

In Split, the substructures of Diocletian's Palace were the only piece of the place we did not explore on our own (meaning without a GoT tour) but we could have. The underground spaces are so atmospheric. They have an authenticity about them that can only really come from places that are actually authentic. The feeling we got when we walked through the Iron Gate at the south wall of Split when we got to the city just kept happening again and again and again in the substructures. They are a fantastic achievement of engineering to be still standing as constructed a full 1,700 years plus after they were first constructed. 

Our Dubrovnik GoT guide, Daniela, showing us around the Red Keep.

So, of course, since we are on a Game of Thrones tour in both places, we are following a guide (Luka in Split; Daniela in Dubrovnik) holding a notebook with stills from the series to show us what the places looked like on television vs. how we see them today. I know...it's corny and a little stupid but there is something genuinely exciting about being somewhere that such an iconic television experience was created.

So...here goes some of the nerdy stuff.

The substructures of Diocletian's Palace were used to represent the dungeons or cellars (not sure which) of the city of Meereen, a city with three giant pyramids (added by CGI) with an economy built on and driven by slavery that was conquered by Daenerys Targaryen who subsequently freed the slaves held by the rich masters. Two of Daenerys' three dragons, after a couple of shall we say...unfortunate incidents with the third dragon, were confined to the cellars of the city. Or in real life, the substructures of Diocletian's Palace. And sure enough, we were clearly right there where Tyrion Lannister freed the two dragons from their restraints in Season 6, Episode 2. Obviously without the actual dragons, since you know...they don't exist.

According to Luka, they filmed more than 200 scenes in the substructures but used very few. I believe it. There's not a whole lot of footage of this place necessary.

Fort Lovrijenac was primarily used to represent the Red Keep in Kings Landing, the ultimate defensive inner sanctuary for the royal family, but there were so many more scenes filmed there. One of my favorite scenes in the whole series is the "power is power" conversation between Petyr Baelish (a whorehouse owner who somehow has enough clout to be on the King's Small Council) and Queen Cersei Lannister (Season 2, Episode 1 if you must know). And sure enough, with a doubt, that conversation was had in the courtyard of Fort Lovrijenac, with any sort of Catholic iconography or baptismal fonts erased from reality. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that this is goosebumps type stuff (I'm not that into this) but I'll just say pretty cool to have been there.

In the streets of Mereen where the slave masters were killed. Uh...I mean...Split. Of course.

There are a whole lot of other spots in both Split and Dubrovnik where you can discover the actual places where Game of Thrones was filmed, from the alleys in Split where some of the slave masters were killed; to the dock outside of Dubrovnik where character after character after character set sail for wherever; to Cersei Lannister's walk of shame through the city of Kings Landing. This last one is probably the most famous and celebrated scene in the series for people to check out in Dubrovnik.

Two things about this last one. First, the producers of the series wanted to have this scene filmed at the side door of the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary but the local leaders of the Catholic church wouldn't allow a scene with a naked woman to be filmed on their doorstep so they moved the location to the steps outside the Church of St. Ignatius. Second, there are a bar and restaurant at the bottom of the first set of steps where you can get all sorts of shame-themed dishes and drinks. We didn't try them so no endorsement coming on that one.

This series, by the way, seriously disrupted life (and tourism) in these two cities. Fort Lovrijenac was closed for an entire month during on sequence of filming and the entire city of Split inside Diocletian's Palace was closed while the series was being filmed there. Can you imagine showing up on vacation to either of these places and finding significant portions of both cities off limits? 

If you are wondering about loss of income for merchants and restaurants and hotels, apparently HBO covered their expected revenue and more. 

Shame burger or cocktail, anyone (top)? Checking out where Bron trained Jaime to fight left-handed (bottom).

But these GoT tours weren't about seeing stuff we could have walked to from our hotels, right? Let's talk Trsteno Arboretum and Klis Fortress.

For me, Trsteno Arboretum was a bit disappointing. Maybe it was because it was at the end of a long-ish tour or maybe it was because we were focused on the place as a setting for Game of Thrones, but I didn't get a whole lot out of this visit. The drive up the coast is gorgeous but ultimately, it's a garden without a whole lot to discover from my perspective. The plaza along the coast where Bron trained Jaime Lannister to fight left-handed (after his right hand was dispatched with a big knife) was the highlight for me.

But Klis Fortress was awesome.

Occupation of the piece of land where the current Klis Fortress stands dates back to before the time of Christ but construction of something resembling what we might see as a stone fort today dates from the ninth century. The current manifestation of the Fortress was built in the 18th century when that part of Croatia was under Venetian rule. The location of the Fortress is about as spectacular as you can get: it sits on an absolute sliver of a piece of rock high above the neighboring land. The walls behind walls of the Fortress are perched along a knife edge thin length of solid rock with sides of cliffs below the walls that are almost sheer vertical. 

It sits immediately above the town of Klis and has served as a refuge for the population of the town and Croatian rulers in that part of the country for centuries. It seems impenetrable but it has, at a few points in its history, been taken by an enemy, most notably by the Ottoman Empire in the year 1537 (it took the Croatians 111 years to re-take it from the Ottomans in what I assume was not a continuous effort).

I can't imagine how hopeless attacking this Fortress would have been. It's difficult work walking uphill in shorts, a t-shirt and my Skechers. I can't imagine assaulting the place in metal armor with a helmet and heavy weapons while the defenders repel you from above. The layers of defense are obvious and I am sure daunting to an attacking force. Get past the first walls and the defenders of the Fortress would just move back behind the second wall. Then past the third once that layer had been conquered.

There's not a whole lot of context to what you are walking past when you get to the Fortress itself so I was happy to have Luka with us to tell us about the history of the place and guide us all the way to the top of the hill while stopping here and there to tell us some Game of Thrones anecdotes. The top is definitely the highlight. There's a small church (shown below) up there that was a converted mosque built by the Ottomans upon the ruins of the original church that they destroyed when they conquered Klis in 1537.

Of all the places we traveled to see filming locations on our two GoT tours, I understood why they traveled all the way to Klis the least. It seems like such an effort to get a cast and crew and extras up to this place to film pieces of scenes using bits and pieces of this Fortress. Sure, it's an incredible location but the stills that Luka showed us made me wonder if they really couldn't have done these scenes in a studio somewhere. I mean, Meereen looks really nothing like Klis. Meereen is a gigantic place and Klis is decidedly not gigantic. It's actually pretty tiny. I can't imagine housing an army in that place for any length of time. 

Although I guess if faced with a choice of being somewhere altogether too small for comfort and being indiscriminately slaughtered by an invading army, I'm headed to Klis at the first opportunity.

We got about an hour at Klis Fortress. I'm sure it was not enough to get into everything there was to see at the place but I think we saw enough. We walked through the whole entrance sequence, visited the small museum of an armory on the property and visited the cell where prisoners were held (I can't imagine how cold that stone cell on top of that cliff was at night...) in addition to seeing the super spartan church at the top of the Fortress. We also got one surprise in the parking lot, an exposed vertical face of textured rock that seemed to go on and on for a while and served as graphic inspiration for the wall at the north of the north in Game of Thrones.

Standing where HBO actors stood (top) and the inspiration for a certain wall (bottom), Klis Fortress.

I don't know how exactly we would have made it out to Klis without signing up for a Game of Thrones tour. My hunch is we would have deemed it either too much trouble or too expensive to worry about and would have found something else to do in Split. And that would have been too bad, I think. I consider Klis an essential part of our Croatia memories and we wouldn't have done this in all likelihood without of GoT tour. It's a pretty amazing site even if it doesn't take a whole lot of time to walk the entire place. They apparently have evening dramatic performances up there in the summer. There's a small stage with about maybe 50 or 60 seats set up. I bet the view at night is spectacular.

Before I close blogging about Game of Thrones (probably forever...) there are a couple of other spots in and around Split or Dubrovnik to get your fantasy fix. 

There's a small Game of Thrones museum in Split which is all of four rooms big and is probably not worth the €14.50 we paid for admission. It's mostly filled with props (some of which, like an authentic shutter used to cover modern windows, are very underwhelming) and dioramas and costumes and maybe one or two Funko Pops. Enter at your own risk. We're not sorry we went but I also feel we could have skipped easily.

There's also a Game of Thrones exhibit on the island of Lokrum off the coast of Dubrovnik. The place was used as the setting for the city of Qarth and it's about a 10 or 15 minute boat ride from the old Dubrovnik harbor on the east side of the city. Lokrum is worth the trip regardless of any sort of GoT attraction. There are hiking trails and insane amount of peacocks over there. There's also a replica of the Iron Throne. And who can resist getting a picture taken when faced with a replica of that thing.

That's enough Game of Thrones stuff for this trip. Valar Morghulis. 

Thanks to Elite Travel for getting us to all these places.