In lieu of my usual poetic fare, I want to promote this exclusive once-in-a-lifetime photo taken only yesterday on one of the side streets of Meligalas only a few feet from the town’s main thoroughfare. With one foot on a ladder (which the local authorities presumably used as a warning marker) and with the promise of hitherto unimagined heights of elation awaiting him, we can see the tourist in question proudly showing off his discovery; unfortunately, before he could return with the proper spelunking gear, he found the entrance hermetically sealed by these same authorities who perhaps suddenly became wary of the adverse odoriferous publicity that would run rampant were the area to be overrun by tourists flocking to see a tributary of the effluent Styx flowing mellifluously under their feet.
By the way, I think it highly poetic and fitting that this intrepid discoverer should hail from one of Europe’s Low Countries.
On my route to work the local authorities, who are desperate for a revival in the tourist industry, are secretly trying to do the same thing under the pretence that they are carrying out 'road works'.
ReplyDeleteI can dig it.
ReplyDeleteHa.
ReplyDeleteIn my rambling days a little over a half century ago, I learned from youth hostel acquaintances that the Dutch are the world's most accomplished travelers.
A Dutchman I met on a Brindisi to Corfu boat crossing sold me the key to his apartment in the dry hills above Athens for sixty dollars.
And so it was that I learned about the baking summer climate of Athens, a city then still riddled with the marks of war.
Had the Dutchman sold me the key to Hades perhaps the experience might have been a wee bit... cooler?
Meligalas looks like a much much more pleasant site for entry to the underworld.
I agree with you wholeheartedly vis-a-vis Dutch travelers but I believe the gentleman on the ladder is a not-so-classic example. As for Athens in the early 60s, thank you for reminding me of how it was and for letting me bask in the memory of its "past" glories.
ReplyDeleteMeligalas a much more pleasant site for entry to the underworld? It depends on which side of the Styx you were on.
I think I do understand that dark history as well as an outsider can (and that is not very well, of course), Vassilis. But the history of a place keeps being rewritten by those who are in it. And now, for me, anyway, you have been writing a better, brighter chapter in the history of this ancient precinct. The second temple is not like the first. Yet you have lit up a sacred grove for us, there, despite the odds. Poem by poem, day by day.
ReplyDelete