Corfu Between Tales and Reality

Among all religious beliefs, the Greek pantheon of colorful gods is perhaps the best described in the history of all human religiosity. There is literally no piece of Greek land, portion of the sea, or tiniest island that has no origin in radiant old mythology. The island of Corfu is no exception as well. Apparently in the mythological history, it was one of those unnamed islands in the region of Scheria where the mighty Poseidon spent a portion of his eternity with the freshwater nymph Korkyra. Their descendants, the Phaeacians, as described by Homer in Odysseus' adventures, inherited the island and named it after Poseidon's lover. The final shape of the island owes its appearance to Poseidon as well, when he separated Paxos from Corfu with his trident in order to create a love nest for him and his wife, Amphitrite (sea nymph this time). I don't blame him; both Korkyra and Paxos are beautiful and colorful islands, and he obviously knew his craft well. I understand his affection for nymphs as well; he was the sea god after all, and in the aftermath of the mythological creation, he alone is most likely responsible for the origin of the human race on a total of 227 Greek islands, including Atlantis, but that's a different story.

However, the reality and history of Corfu are much different and much less idyllic. Being in the cross-worlds in the Middle Ages between the Ottoman Empire and western civilization, the history of Corfu was turbulent, to say the least. The island managed to survive and keep its Greek identity after numerous raids by barbarians and conquests by Europeans during the medieval period. The origin of the first people on the island is not much known. According to Homer, they had some relationship with the Mycenaeans (Dorians), but it is not scientifically proven true. Furthermore, there were no ancient ruins dedicated to Poseidon at all. There are two ruins excavated so far, one of a temple dedicated to Hera and the other, the most significant temple built around 580 BC, dedicated to the goddess Artemis, which was monumental in dimensions for the time. In the above picture is its full, around 20-meter-long pediment portraying a living Gorgon (mythical creatures with hair made of living, venomous snakes, most likely Medusa or one of her sisters).

After ancient times, the island was ruled by the Romans first and then went under the Byzantine Empire. After the Byzantine period ended (around 1267 AD), Corfu was vulnerable to the constant pirate attacks and raids by its neighbors and crusaders and stabilized only when Venetians occupied the island in 1386. These olive trees from the picture above are seeded by Venetians and considered to be more than 500 years old. The Venetians ruled for more than 400 years and ended their rule in 1797. Most of the Venetian dominance left a big mark on today's island architecture, including the large fortress. After that, the island was occupied by the French, followed by a strange alliance of Russians and Turks, then the British, and finally, on 21 May 1864, after the London Treaty, Corfu and all the Ionian Islands united with Greece.

The most important milestone in the history of Corfu happened during the Turkish siege of 1716, when Venetians managed to defend the island and stopped the Turks in their advances toward Europe. Fighting alongside Corfiots were Venetians, Germans, Italians, Maltese ships, Papal galleys, galleys from Genoa and Tuscany, Spanish galleys, and even Portuguese forces. The Turkish failure in Corfu was a historical event of enormous importance—who knows what would happen if the result of the battle went otherwise? However, the other parts of Greece and their southern islands weren't that lucky and went under Ottoman occupation, causing a large number of refugees and migration toward Corfu. In the following centuries, more immigrants arrived from Illyria, Sicily, Crete, Mycenae, and the Aegean islands. Of course, in this small blog story, I didn't mean to go much into historical events, but I always like to learn a bit more about places we travel to. If you want to know more, the reference links below are a good point to start googling.

This summer, we visited Corfu and its picturesque village of Messonghi. At the same point in history, the small village, along with neighboring Moraitika, was established by Cretans and Peloponnesians. With its interesting feature of the Messonghi River, small and nice beach, crystal-clear waters, and amazing people, this village was our host for 11 days of our vacation, and we fully recommend the stay. Beside the archaeological museum, we also visited the Serbian House dedicated to the Great War events and one nice museum called "Casa Parlante", dedicated to the ordinary life of one British aristocratic family from British rule in the middle of the 19th century. The most impact on me personally was the traditional Corfu dishes called Sofrito and Pastitsada, and their recipes dated back 200 years in the past. Last but not least, our big thanks goes to Spyros, his family, and their fine Georgina apartments, where we stayed the entire time.

Refs:
https://atcorfu.com/corfu-history/
https://greeking.me/blog/visit-corfu/item/207-corfu-the-island-of-the-phaeacians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfu

https://visit.corfu.gr/museums/archaeological-museum/

https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/traditional-sofrito-recipe-from-corfu/

https://www.dimitrasdishes.com/pastitsada-from-corfu-beef-stew-with-pasta/

https://www.booking.com/hotel/gr/georgina-apartments.en-gb.html

Photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/FswFohcaRpuYJPiYA

The Minoan Legacy

Often, I found myself giving a glimpse of thoughts of where I would move on this world in order to acquire at least a little bit better life compared to what we currently have. Or when. Has there ever been a time in history when there was a civilization with a more dignified style of living? With society built with a more honest foundation toward themselves and their neighbors. With equality among people, genders, colors, skin, and different cultures. With not at all or just a hint of superstition and religiosity. With no temples higher than schools and people's homes. With cities without strong police keeping order and without military of any kind. Was there a country without fortifications, both real and metaphorical? With no or just a bearable hostility toward others...

There is definitely no such idealistic settlement in this world. Not now. But there was one before. More than three thousand years ago on the island of Crete. The first civilization in Europe and perhaps the first and last one that fits this description. The place where I would time travel without hesitation if I could.

We know them in our history books as the Minoans, but that wasn't their real name. What they called themselves we don't know. We don't understand their letters and can't read their tablets. They built marvelous settlements with almost all the modern infrastructure we are familiar with today. Glorious city-palaces with paved roads between them. With main squares where they preferred practicing sports and arts instead of going into temples to pray. They were people who invented and lived one idealistic, peaceful life and based their wealth on trades among themselves and all the others across the sea.

Unfortunately, after several attempts throughout eons, human nature and natural catastrophes destroyed Minoan civilization, and these people at the end dispersed fully, and their way of life faded away for good. Among neighboring civilizations and their saved documents, as well as with the Bible, their names were probably either Keftiu, Kaptarians, Caphtor, or Kabturi. Or if you like, we can even call them Atlanteans if we connect Plato's story with the Minoan volcanic eruption that reshaped the island of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC. Perhaps we should wait for their Linear A script to be revealed by maybe another Rosetta Stone, but until then, Sir Evan's label for Minoans based on the old Greek mythology is the best we've got. Nevertheless, this blog post is not really history research, and more stories about related old times I tried to list below in the references, but one thing is for sure. The end of Minoan culture, which started with earthquakes and at least one cataclysmic volcanic eruption, faded and dispersed during the final couple of centuries of the second millennium with hostile raids and occupations over time from both directions: mainland Greece in the face of old Mycenaeans and ancient invaders from the direction of the Middle East.

However, their life based solely on manufacturing goods and food, honest trade, sports, arts, and all the non-hostile human activities was once indeed possible and flourishing. Unfortunately, their legacy is, as it seems, lost for good, and after more than three and a half thousand years, we are living in a world filled with fear of self-destruction with little hope for humanity to survive the next three millennia. Anyhow, the road, or to better say, the airplane, took us this summer to the island of Crete, and we landed at the Chania airport, which is also the military base that hosts both air and nearby naval forces. The sight of supersonic fighters constantly flying above the beaches, heavy military aircraft parked next to the civilian runway, and large destroyer ships anchored in Souda Bay was definitely not something old Minoans would evolve into if history played the cards differently. After visiting the Knossos archeological site and the wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated to these ancient people, I am certain of it.

Caused by the city's amazing scope and Minoan fascination for bulls, centuries after the fall of civilization, Greek mythology created one of the most famous stories with characters as strong as Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Theseus, and, of course, the Minotaur captured in the center of the labyrinth. On the other side, the most plausible truth of why Knossos was built the way it was built is simply because Crete was positioned on top of the movement of the African tectonic plate under the Eurasian plate. This is causing lots of earthquakes, small and big, and results from the complex geological process; the entire eastern side of the island is sinking while the western part is rising. The ancient builders purposely made the palace in this way in order to sustain constant ground shake, with buildings and chambers literally supporting each other from all directions.

It probably goes without saying that I am fascinated with Greece and the Greeks. Their amazing history and all the contributions their ancestors gave to the rest of the world are enormous. With this summer trip, I rounded out walking the lands of all three main stages of ancient Greek times. Classical Greece that belongs to the mainland north of Sparta, the Mycenaean epoch that precedes them in the time of Agamemnon, and now the ancient civilization of Minoans that precedes them all. Surely, there are many more sites to see, but somehow I felt today that I fulfilled the genuine urge to visit all the main places and to walk the same paths where stories from history (and mythology) took place.

Our prime vacation time this summer was in Agia Marina, a cute little place several kilometers west of Chania, where we spent a wonderful ten days exploring local beaches and took an excursion to the old Venetian harbor in the old city and its nautical museum with an exact replica of the Bronze Age Minoan ship. The second trip to Heraklion and Knossos completed our travel through the history of the island, and the following day-by-day travel video clip Viktor and I made hopefully will show you more than still images could, especially if you have never visited Crete before.

Surely, summer vacations are never about visiting museums and the history of the area. It is also about the present, and in the most hedonistic fashion, we also visited the Balos Lagoon, one of the greatest beaches in Europe, and, most of all, tried to enjoy the time by meeting local people and visiting local sites and the neighborhood. It is hard to say what we liked the most, and I guess the best thing is to say that Crete is an exceptional place to visit. Something we will definitely try to do again. Many thanks to all the good people we met this July, especially to the crew of Fly Fly Travel and their great guides, Nebojša and Dobrivoje, for all their super-professional work and help.

Image and video refs:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tp8ugeNBg07zE9q52
https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/greece/

Refs:
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/knossos/articleKnossos01.html
http://paleoglot.blogspot.rs/2010/01/minoan-name-for-minoa.html
http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Science.php
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos
https://www.timemaps.com/civilizations/minoan-civilization/
http://ancient-greece.org/history/minoan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/.../HIST101-2.3.2-MinoanCrete-FINAL.pdf
http://www.ancient.eu/Minoan_Civilization/

Super 8

The history of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who, among others, were the first to take several images per second in one effort—all for scientific purposes back then—to study the locomotion of birds, animals, and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first to take a series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less at the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun-shaped camera capable with one trigger pull of capturing 12 images in a row within one single second and storing them all on the single 90 mm film. He used his gun to study various motions of animals, fish, and insects within his so-called 'animated zoo', including dropping cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet.

ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera

It was not long after initial chronophotography efforts and enthusiasm in the 19th century that the 'evolution' of motion pictures diverted heavily into entertainment and cinematography. The history of films and fun started almost with the start of the 20th century, but in the spirit of today's title, 'domesticating' films within ordinary people and human homes waited another 65 years for the invention of Super 8, or, to be precise, the improvement of Kodak's standard 8mm film from 1932 into a more efficient surface with a bigger width for the frame itself and significantly smaller perforation on the film's right edge. After they introduced it at the 1964-65 World's Fair, Super 8 instantly became the very first home video format with light cameras capable of filming 18 frames per second and more than 3 minutes of the movie per small film cartridge.

To say that my father was a film enthusiast in the second part of the sixties and the entire seventies would be an understatement. It was natural for him to go the step further and, in addition to the several analog SLR cameras and darkroom equipment for developing photos, to invest in home movies. Spending time in the darkroom and hanging photos on the wire were some of the most thrilling experiences of my childhood, but when Super 8 came, another world opened. I was too young to operate the camera, but on the occasion or two I remember, I did hold it and press the red button, especially during our vacations in Greece. Well, aside from those rare moments, most of the time my job, with being a kid and all, was to be in front of the camera and not behind it.

Tondo Super 8 Projector and LG Nexus 5 in action

But to cut the story short, this month I did something I was delaying for a long time. During the last two weeks, every night I was descending into my own customized darkroom equipped with a tiny Super 8 projector and digitalizing our family films. Twenty of those survived over time, and with a speed of two per day, I projected them on the wall and filmed them all with my smartphone. It was far from being an ideal setting, but this was the best I could do. I tried different approaches, filming from different distances, using different settings, and using my DSLR Nikon in the beginning. I even tried to project the film directly into the DSLR, but all my efforts failed due to not having proper lenses and objectives, and in the end, the smartphone was the chosen solution, and it did a better job in the dark than the Nikon.

With more expensive equipment, I am sure the results would be much better, and probably the weakest link was the cute and old Italian Tondo projector, which was my father's portable cinematic projector. I did try with a bigger 'player' first, but despite all my efforts, I couldn't manage to repair the old and superb Crown Optical Co. Ltd. Auto-P, a silent Standard and Super 8 film projector, our primary projector capable of displaying big and crisp screens on the large walls and with much better quality. To be honest, it's more than half a century old and built with nowadays rare parts, especially the missing lamp that is hard to find these days, but I didn't give up, and perhaps in the future, if I stumble on some solution (read it: an eBay sort of solution), I will repeat the effort, at least for those videos filmed indoors.

Nevertheless, all twenty rolls now come with twenty MP4s, and for this occasion I decided to create two movie collages with six movies each. They are all filmed in the late sixties, during the seventies, and in the early eighties with an ELMO Super 106 camera from the first image. The first one, embedded above, contains six films from our early vacations in Greece, and in chronological order, they are filmed in the Acropolis of Athens, Zeitenlik, the World War I memorial park in Thessaloniki, vacation resorts in Kamena Vourla, Asprovalta, Katerini Paralia, and two vacations in the vicinity of the port city of Volos.

The second collage is from our home and village in Niš and Guševac in Serbia. Mostly it focuses on my sister's and my babyhood and early childhood, birthday parties, family gatherings, and excursions. Also our old house that is now gone and the old shape of our country village front yard. This video also contains one of the rare black-and-white films from our collection that probably originated from different cameras and settings.

This entire effort triggered lots of memories and emotions from almost forty years ago, and seeing people live, especially those that are not alive today, is something extraordinary that regular photography cannot induce. Perhaps we today, with all of our pocket gadgets, are taking video clips and home photography for granted, but before, in the Super 8 era, this was a completely different experience. What we today do with just two taps on the screen, before you had to do in a more complex manner, including purchasing film cartridges, carefully planning (directing) filming sequences for a 3-minute film, sending it to development, organizing cinematic sessions...

One thing is for sure: Super 8 was the origin of what we have now in our homes. It was eventually replaced with VHS tapes in the 80s, but at the dawn of the 21st century, the analog period came to an end, and old-fashioned home gadgets were replaced with home digital camcorders first and, in the very last decade, with smartphones. To tell you the truth, it is nice to have a camera in your back pocket, it is, but somehow, with me, as I witnessed the origin of the entire process in my early childhood, the nostalgia for the analog days gave me another layer of the entire experience. Something special and extraordinary for sure.

'Super 8,' a sci-fi movie by J.J. Abrams

Perhaps for the best conclusion for this post, it would not be fair not to mention one of J.J. Abrams' greatest movies from 2011. Simply named 'Super 8', it tells a main sci-fi story about an alien encounter, but everything is perfectly wrapped within a background story of school kids trying to film a short movie for a Super 8 festival. It was really a great movie, and if you liked E.T. before, this is definitely a decent sequel and one of my favorites.

Refs:
http://www.kodak.com/id/en/consumer/products/super8/default.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_formats
http://www.retrothing.com/2009/09/tondo-super-8-projector
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/super-8-jj-abrams-says-194908

Thassos Island Today and Before

The age of this blog is both old, in the sense of the fast maturing of the internet and IT technology in general, but also very young if we are counting human age in the old-fashioned way. When we first visited Thassos Island a dozen years before, the internet and social sharing technology were about to enter their unstable teenage years, so to speak. It was the time when I bought my first digital camera, the HP PhotoSmart C850, with its state-of-the-art optics and digital technology from the time. Pictures from Thassos back then in the summer of 2003 were probably my first attempt to take more artistic landscapes from our Greece vacations, and today is perhaps the time to compare both what changed in photography gadgets and also Thassos itself after a full 12 years.

Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post—half of them shown above, all taken with the HP Photosmart C850 with a 4-megapixel CCD sensor, and half below, taken from this summer vacation with the Nikon D5200 and CMOS sensor with approximately 20 megapixels more than in the old HP. It is insufficient to say that 12 years of maturing of technology in optics, hardware, and software is easily noticeable.

As for Thassos Island, very little changed over the years. Local people are still the same, very hospitable and friendly; beaches are the same as they probably were hundreds of thousands of years before; the Aegean Sea is still crystal clear, just like in the time of Zeus; the company and the sun are the same hot, like in all Julys in previous millenniums and eons.

What is a little different are the people who are visiting Thasos—this year there were more tourists from Eastern European countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine, and Russia, and fewer from Western Europe, which is probably the result of the anti-Greece media campaign due to the political conflict between the Greek government and the EU and the financial crisis in Greece these years. I have to say that at least during our stay on Thassos I couldn't notice any crisis or any problems whatsoever. Man-made crises are always like that; they always have profusely enhanced exposure in media, and the truth is never on either side in conflict and never in media. I know it is a cliche, but you have probably heard the phrase "trust no one", and if you ask me, it is always the ultimate truth when it comes to raw propaganda and news in media, especially if it is related to some political affairs like the current one in Greece vs. the EU (and by EU you can freely read Germany).

http://www.thassos-island.com/

Fishermen and Pirates of Evia

The road this summer took us approximately 700 km south to the second-largest Greek island, Evia (Εύβοια). Starting from this year, we decided to leave Macedonian Greece and start spending our vacations visiting other regions of the country and this southern part of the Balkans. Our vacation resort was located only about 100 km from the spot where the famous 'Battle of Thermopylae' took place and where, in the late summer of 480 BC, King Leonidas of Sparta confronted a large army of the Persian Empire led by Xerxes the Great, who was trying to occupy ancient Greece in the second Persian attempt. The Greeks were vastly outnumbered and faced with imminent collapse after the betrayal during the second day of battle. Leonidas dismissed the majority of his army and, in the most famous last stand, remained to guard the narrow pass of Thermopylae only with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans. We all know what happened next. At least many of you saw the movie, and although it was diverted from the real happenings and portrayed Leonidas defeat in a more or less artistic way, this was one of the most striking battles of them all. In the following months and years, Greeks managed to stand on their feet and finally, in a couple of naval battles, forced Xerxes to withdraw and to finally end the war.

Anyway, history aside, we spent ten days in the town of Pefki, at the northern shore of Evia. It is inhabited only by local fishermen, and its small harbor is occupied with small- and medium-sized fishing boats. Every night this small fleet was sailing out from the bay and in the morning was returning with tons of various catches for local markets, restaurants, and further industrial export. Fishing is a very successful business in Evia, and there is no surprise if you see a fisherman's latest model of Mercedes-Benz parked next to his boat. Of course, during the summer, the small fishermen's town grows into a large tourist resort, and over a couple of previous years, the Serbian 'tourist armada' started to grow rapidly. Many Greeks have already learned a couple of Serbian words, and lots of menus in local restaurants and tavernas are already translated to Serbian as well. Even the Serbian flag is waving on the beach next to the Greek one in several places. I guess Persians did it all wrong; instead of invading the Greek peninsula, they only needed to sail here for summer vacations and start spending gold and coins, and Greeks would probably raise their flag for free. :-)

This vacation was a perfect chance to test our Olympus µ TOUGH-6010 under the water. Viktor and I were very excited about this and made tons of photos and video clips. The camera heroically withstood salty water, and some of the photos, after little post-processing, turned out very well. Video clips, although not in too high resolution, captured nice underwater activities, especially in those times when Viktor dropped the camera to the sandy floor and we had to search for the little thing while it was recording all our efforts from the bottom of the sea. Crystal clear water of the Aegean helped a lot, and we are looking forward to our next underwater adventures.

Πάργα

In our part of the world summer vacation is the most important one for most people. There are several reasons for this, and probably the major one is that during July and August in this part of the western Balkans, where we live, temperatures can go as high as 45°C (113°F), and the obvious solution is to pack your bags, jump into the car, and go to one of four nearby seas for a couple of weeks to cool off and enjoy (and also to change the everyday scenery and recharge your inner batteries, which are always seriously depleted when summers come).

Due to the shortest distance and good roads, Greece is probably the best destination for a car trip to the seaside that takes less than 10 hours of driving. Unfortunately this is one of few routes for all those "gastarbeiter" people who mainly work in Germany and other western countries and during summers form very long rivers of vehicles toward their home destinations in Turkey and other countries. When they hit borders along the way, this is a nightmare you want to avoid. Once we had bad luck and got stuck in one of 7 lanes between the Serbian and Macedonian (FYROM) borders and waited 4 hours to pass through. This is why we always travel halfway during the night and cross the borders around dawn or so to avoid crossing peaks and giant waiting times. The return way is always smoother, and we mainly use borders for rest and shopping. Like I already wrote in the post Aegean Sea before, short car destinations in Greece are all connected to the Aegean Sea, but this time we chose to check out the Ionian basin and try the relatively new motorway the Greeks built not so long ago. Only once I spent vacation in this part of Greece, and I remember it was a hard job for my father, as the curvy road from the Aegean to the Ionian Sea included one mountain after another, and driving through them required full concentration all the way with frequent resting points. Today, this is a different story with the new modern freeway, and the same destination is now reachable within 3 hours or so. Believe it or not, this new route includes about 60 tunnels almost 50 km long combined, and during summer heat, driving through all the tunnels comes extra handy and relaxing.

Since this was the first time for me driving this road, I decided to use a little help from modern GPS navigation. It was only needed for the last hour of the trip, where we needed to leave the motorway and find our way to the final destination in Parga, a small and old town located some 40 km south of Igoumenitsa port across the Corfu island. I didn't have any specialized GPS car devices before, and I decided to risk it a little and use the smartphone instead. I bought cheap navigation software called "Navi Ninasus" despite not so many recommendations online. To my surprise, it handled all the situations extremely well and pointed us exactly to the front gate of our villa without any problems. Rerouting was perfect and fast, and it proves very well on the ship and on foot as well. You can see it in action in the photos below, and if you want to save some serious money in the big GPS market, this one is a very good solution.

When we visited our travel agency (Big Star Niš) and told them that we decided to go to Parga this year, Stefan, one of the agency owners, while describing the house we wanted to hire, said something about a nearby olive forest that looks exactly like the scenery from "The Lord of the Rings", a fantasy trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien's famous book. Of course, I was a little skeptical about this but at the same time very curious to explore. The moment of our arrival, when I first saw the large olive tree just above our villa, I was eager to go to the forest as soon as possible. So we did the very next day, and if you look at the next couple of photos from the woods when we made a shortcut our way to the Lichnos beach, I am sure that, like me, you will agree that old olive trees are something special to see, and to tell you the truth, if Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf jumped out of some tree, I wouldn't be surprised at all. My only regret is that we didn't hit the time when olives are being collected with large nets villagers are using for this purpose. I am sure this would be something worthwhile to see. Needless to say, our landlady on our last day gave us a bottle of olive oil as a present, made exactly from the olives collected right from the woods we saw and photographed, and with this blog post I thank her for all her hospitality and kindness. The same level of gratitude goes to Stefan and "Big Star", which is one of the best travel agencies in Niš.

Perhaps to better feel and, in this case, hear the forest, I took a couple of seconds-long video clip showing all the beauty of old olives:

According to a couple of wikis I read, I learned that Pargians are descendants from the old Greek tribe called Thesprotians. Perhaps the best-known resident in ancient times was Odysseus himself, who married Thesprotia's queen of the time by the name Kallidike and spent many years in this area leading the tribe and fighting many wars as their king. Unfortunately, if we leave mythology aside, real history for Pargians was not so cheerful, especially much later in the Dark Ages when these people shared violent times with the active neighborhood. They survived different rulers and occupations starting with Normans, Venetians, French, British, and Ottomans, not to mention constant attacks from various pirates from the sea. Today, the monumental fortress built for their defense is the sour witness of the old times, standing above the small town for centuries. In the town below, old narrow stone streets, similar to those of Corfu, are now wonderful tourist attractions, along with four beaches, all very different in nature and appearance. Surrounded by large hills and dense forests, Parga today is one of the few real tourist paradises during summer, filled with voices of dozens of different languages, especially at night when it is not easy to find an empty chair in local tavernas. In addition to Parga's social life, to me, Greek vacations are always more about reading books and enjoying peaceful moments. This time I brought "The Lost Symbol" and swallowed it in just a couple of days. If you want to learn something more about worldwide Freemasonry, this is the book for you, especially if you are, like me, a big fan of Robert Langdon's adventures. We had a large garden in front of the house with a big stone table where, below the shadows of lemon leaves, reading Dan Brown's book got additional pleasure. On the other hand, for Viktor no summer vacation can pass without his tablet and a couple of video games (picture to the right).

Just 20 km offshore, there are two small islands called Paxos and Antipaxos. According to the legend, Poseidon himself used his mighty trident and sliced the southern part of Corfu, making this small archipelago paradise just for him and his wife, Amphitrite, to enjoy some peace and quiet. Compared to nowadays worldwide religions, I really love Greek mythology and their amazing stories. I mean, come on, if you are creating a mass of fairy tales, using wild imagination is a must, and ancient Greeks did it very well. Of all religions in existence today and those extinguished in the past, Greek former beliefs are probably the best in the history of mankind. Anyway, there are many boats sailing to the Paxoi Islands every morning, providing a one-of-a-kind experience of swimming in the same waters where Poseidon enjoyed his time with his wife alone on the beach. A small boat even entered one of the sea caves, providing a unique feeling for us, but the best was the moment when one of the boats turned loudspeakers toward the cave and played James Brown's famous song "I Feel Good". The echo from the cave provided a sound effect I had never heard before. Don't miss this trip if you are spending vacation in Parga or Gaios, the main town of Paxos Island, where we enjoyed "Τσιπούρα" delicious Mediterranean fish with teeth.

The second boat trip was a ship cruise to Corfu and the island of Vido (Greek: Βίδο), a special place for Serbian history where more than 5000 Serbian soldiers were buried at sea. At the beginning of World War I, the whole Serbian army was forced to retreat by the major offensive by Austrian and Bulgarian armies. In just two years of war, the Serbian army declined from 420,000 to the number of 150,000, ending on the island of Corfu with the help of Allied forces' ships. Those who didn't survive harsh wintertime during the long walk over Albania's mountains were buried on the island of Vido, and those who couldn't find empty burial space on the island were just buried in the sea near the island. This very spot where they are buried is called Blue Sea Tomb, and there is now an almost hundred-year-old poem, "Ode to a Blue Sea Tomb", describing the pain and suffering of the Serbian people and soldiers during WWI. I simply wrote "History is sometimes painful" in the book in the memorial. And I meant not only Serbian history. For more about our trip to Corfu, please read the post Streets of Corfu, where I experienced a a unique kind of déjà vu that I tried to describe there. Following are photos from Corfu and Vido, and the second image is of the Serbian House at 19 Moustoxidou Street, which is one great museum dedicated to the WWI events.

But life is always going on, and history is there to remind us of our failures and our brightest moments. We should use it to learn from it, but honestly speaking, I have that feeling that humans have a long way to go in order to start avoiding mistakes and stop repeating violent behavior from the past.

Well, this post is also a photo collection from the vacation, and now is the time to choose the best photo taken. Of course this is subjective business, but if you ask me, the honor goes to my wife, who took the opening photo of this post. I am sure for some of you this would be just a bunch of rocks on the shore, but for me this is the perfect example of accidental photography and Pareidolia. My wife actually just wanted to take a photo of the rocky formation from the taxi boat when we were returning from the beach to Parga, but after we saw it on the big screen, from this angle, it looked amazingly like a giant prehistoric fish or sea dinosaur with a large fin or flapper on its back.

Needless to say, we all fully recommend Parga and the Ionian Sea for summer vacation. I am sure we will be returning here in the future, maybe next time to northern Corfu or one of the southern Ionian islands.

Aegean Sea

Before I start writing about this amazing sea, first of all, I have to say that this story is equally about Greece, the oldest European country and the first known civilization in Europe. Surrounded by three seas, Greece is probably the most interesting place in the Mediterranean basin ever since it was formed and filled with water many millenniums ago. The Aegean Sea keeps the most important part in the history of mankind, being a natural barrier between civilizations independently developed over the west, east, and south. Once in those past times, today known as B.C., this was the center of the world. It was also the place where many amazing things were born that we know today as science, democracy, philosophy, mathematics, culture, and sport, along with all those "other inventions" like modern armies and wars, dictatorships, religion, divine beings...

Aegean Sea

Today, after two millenniums, looking at this part of the world from my point of view and my own relations to the Aegean Sea, it is all about geography, really. I actually live in southern Serbia, where four different seas are more or less equally distant from my current location, and in the past four decades, in one way or another, I visited all of them. Before, with my parents, and now with my own family, every summer vacation is reserved for spending up to two weeks at the zero-level elevation of the nearby seaside. After I spent several vacations on the Black, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, I decided that those simply are not comparable to the Aegean. Don't get me wrong here, all those three seas have their good sides and charm, but the Aegean is something special for me. Who knows why? Maybe my inner being is somehow attuned to it, or I am simply connected with it on some lower level of understanding, but whatever it is, I calculated that when I sum up all the time I was there, I got about 400 days of vacation time spent in Greece. If I spent all those days in a row, you would probably read this post in Greek instead, but the truth is, due to my perforated time spent there, I only have a basic understanding of probably the most beautiful written language in all of Europe. I can't be sure, but I think my first vacation in Macedonian Greece was at about the age of 2, more than 40 years ago, and until today I have probably visited about the same amount of different towns, fishermen villages, and tourist settlements all around the northern Aegean. I literally watched Macedonian Greece grow from a modest, unexplored country to the prestige destination for anyone expecting a great time for a short vacation during summer break. I might have spent lots of days in Greece, but my son already reached one "Greek" record—his first encounter with Greece was a couple of miles under the Olympus mountain when he was only a couple of cells old, if you know what I mean. He was also learning to walk and swim there, and I am sure you would agree that those are pretty big milestones in anybody's life.

The history of Greece is one of the most colorful tales of them all. Not many nations in the world survived and built their history for that long period of time, starting millenniums before Christ. The ancient Greeks came to Europe almost three millenniums B.C., but maybe the common origin point when it all started is back in the 8th century B.C., when they started to build a civilization known today as a cradle of Western civilization or the world we live in today. This post is too small to carry all the history of the region, so I will let you browse them all in the below links, and instead I will focus on just one period of time known as Classical Greece that flourished for a couple of hundred years, starting somewhere in the 5th century B.C.

Alexander the Great

It was the time when artistic and scientific thought rapidly evolved and shaped humanity as we know it today. If you ask me, this was the period of time relatively free of violence and conservative influences like religion or politics. It started after the fall of the last Athenian tyrant, or, if you will, after a series of dictatorships ruled the ancient Greek cities back in the 6th and 7th centuries before Christ. Aristotle defined the tyrant as "one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others". Looks familiar? Hmm, it seems to me that ancient Greeks gave dictatorships in heritage as well. It also looks like Classical Greece is just a period of time where Greeks tried to recover from hundreds of wasted years, and it was the time that they really wanted to change their society for the better. In a way they did just that, and in a whole period of the next 200 years, they created a foundation of modern society and planted scientific thought deep into future generations. Sadly, this period ended with the rise of military societies shaped in the form of the Macedonian empire and Alexander the Great (and his father, Phillip II, before him), who suddenly decided that their land was too small in size and the best way to defend it was to conquer the neighbors, and by neighbors, sometimes this meant thousands of miles away from Greece, as far as India. Sounds familiar again? It definitely resembles some of today's governments that defend their countries far away from their borders. Military societies are a direct product of development in science and engineering, and it was not much of a surprise that the rise of the Macedonian and later Roman empires were byproducts of inventions of new state-of-the-art armory and transportation in both land and sea. The better an army is armored and organized, the more dangerous it becomes for the region. Same as today, only with different actors and more lethal weapons.

Carl Sagan, in his famous COSMOS series, in episode VII, "The Backbone of Night", described the birth of science in these Classical Greece times in the northern Aegean by telling a story of Democritus and his understanding of atoms and matter. Democritus posted his atomic theory somewhere in the 5th century B.C., and like many other famous scientists of the time, he is a direct descendant of the Ionian School founded by Thales, establishing critical thinking as a foundation in modern scientific thought.


History is always fun, and not because it teaches us about ourselves and how to fix errors from the past, but sadly, it also shows us the future. Nothing changes overnight, especially human behavior, and although we are living in a modern, technologically superior time, the inner core of our social being remains the same. We still have wars, dictatorships, bullies, cold wars, and borders of many kinds. Well, it is time to stop with all that, at least in this post, so let's continue the main story and see how the Aegean Sea survived the centuries.

Geographically and also touristically speaking, the northern and southern parts of the sea look very different, and it is caused by one large cataclysmic event. It was the late Bronze Age, a couple of millennia before Christ, when one of the most powerful volcanoes literally exploded under the island of Thera, nowadays Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. It is now well known as a Minoan eruption, and by recent study, seismologists tend to classify this explosion as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa Island. This eruption probably caused the volcanic winter in the 17th century B.C. recorded in China by the "Bamboo Chronicles" with "yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals". It also caused the devastation of Minoan civilization, the complete reshaping of Aegean geography, and the birth of many myths, including the one of sinking the entire island of Atlantis "in a single day and night of misfortune", recorded by Plato.

Reconstruction of the Santorini Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

Whatever happened, the Aegean is filled with many islands south of Athens compared to its northern counterpart. Our vacations are always targeting the northern part simply because it is located less than 1000 km from southern Serbia, and it is cheaper and easier to get there by car in less than 10 hours of driving. If it is a family vacation, this is also the best route. However, spending vacation on some Greek island is a completely different experience. There are only two major (in size) islands on the north, Thassos and Corcyra. I visited both of them several times, and their crystal-clear beaches, small fisherman villages, and unique people are simply totally different from the coastline where the tourism over the years almost destroyed small towns and turned them into hotels, clubs, discos, and loud streets. Don't get me wrong here, they also have their unique charm, but the vacation for me is more book-reading silence, wave sounds, and seagulls and less loud music and football match atmosphere. However, there are lots of islands in the southern Aegean left for me to explore. Plenty of time. I also need one thing to confirm there: once we indeed visited the southern Aegean, but from the eastern, Turkish side of the sea, and we felt a couple of small tremors that originated from the middle of the sea, according to our Turkish guide. I am wondering if this is really the truth, and if it is, how bothersome this is on the Greek islands lying exactly there in the "Santorini" area. After all, there are no dead volcanoes, just dormant ones, and we are still living on a very live planet, especially here where African and Eurasian tectonic plates are kissing each other at regular intervals.

Today, Greece is facing a big economic crisis, affecting millions of people, especially in large cities. Greece is probably on top of several European countries affected by the world's recession(s) initiated after the 9/11 event a decade ago. Greek misfortune mainly happened because of the organization of the Olympic Games back in 2004. The extremely large cost of this giant event forced Greece to take many credits and loans in order to fix infrastructure and build new arenas. The Olympics went well, but now, almost a decade after, Greece is facing bankruptcy and an empty state treasury. To be completely honest, I am not very good when it comes to understanding world economics. I am also not good at reading between the lines, so I am not sure what really is at stake here, but speculatively speaking, the major loans happened after the world's recession could be easily predicted, and I can only state a big amount of skepticism that bankers and international fund keepers who actually financed Greece at the time couldn't predict the world economy in the next decade. I mean, if there was even a shadow of doubt that something would happen, why provide credits in the first place? I am really not one of those who believe in conspiracy theories, but something is not really right here. Whether or not the world crisis is manufactured or this is just one natural financial wave of recessions, I am sure Greece will survive, just like in the previous three or so millenniums. Elegant bankers who loaned the money in the first place will survive too, and I am sure there will be no need to exclude caviar and champagne from their menus. After all, this is just another man-made crisis, not a natural disaster. It will pass.

Aegean Sea - Marble beach, Thassos

You know what else will survive? Aegean Sea. It doesn't care for all human stupidities. It ironically smiled two and a change millenniums ago when Alexander the Great fought Persians in wooden galleys, and I am sure it is smiling today when EU officials debate on excluding Greece from the monetary eurozone.

It will stay crystal clear, perfectly reflecting the mother star from sunrise till sunset.

Image ref:
* https://www.7reasons.net/?dt_portfolio=der-supervulkan-von-akrotiri&lang=en

Refs:
http://www.egeonet.gr/index_en.html
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/greekorg/greekorg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/democritus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Annals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/santorini/eruption.html
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/118706-Ye-gods-Ancient
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alexander_the_great.shtml