Kalamata → Corinth
Kalamata to Corinth is quite a culture shock. Kalamata is a functioning tourist destination, a place where people and want to visit and where it's clearly nice to live. Corinth looks like a sad and broken ex-destination, a place where nobody wants to be.
But i didn't realize this till Monday evening. I walked up to the bus station in Kalamata to catch the 10:30 to Athens, and it was already sold out when i got there around 9:45. A couple of tourists in front of me had hoped to get to Tripoli and were very grumpy about the situation. They didn't buy a ticket for the 14:00, and i didn't see them on it when i took that one, so i guess they figured something else out.
Since i had almost 4 hours to kill, i decided to climb the mountain out back of Kalamata. The one to the north, which doesn't go anywhere in particular. There are no hiking trails. No gorges or waterfalls. There is just a windy road that goes up and up and eventually stops in a village overlooking the Messenian Gulf. I wasn't sure if i would make it all the way, but i summoned the spirit of Artemis - who according to Google Maps had a sanctuary up there - and made it.
There was no sanctuary of Artemis, at least not any more. But it felt like a good place to put one.
The walk took me through some outer suburbs and then up into that odd Greek mix of rural mansions and crumbling shacks, often located in plots right next to each other. There was a little locked church with an awning where i could sit and get some shade. Then a monastery, which i am not certain was still in operation. Then i met a near-toothless, long-haired peasant on the side of the road with a rake and a chicken tied to a stick pegged in the ground. I have absolutely no idea why you would take a chicken for a walk, or why he was in that particular part of nondescript road with a rake, but there he was.
Thinking back on it, it feels like one of those weird interactions from Greek myth. Like, perhaps i met Ares with Alectryon, who he turned into a chicken.
Anyway, i had a short chat with the chap who spoke a few words of English, and he wondered where i was going. I told him i missed the bus so i decided to climb the hill... Why? I don't know, because it's there.
A bit further up the hill i passed the most glorious olive groves i've ever seen, the trees rising up from golden grass. Further still was a random bench, right on the cliff in a scenic spot overlooking all of Kalamata. Obviously the local kids know about it because there was also a pile of trash up there.
It's interesting the kinds of trash you see around the place when you're walking. There is large rubbish like mattresses and office chairs and other furniture that's hard to get rid of, often dumped over embankments where also you can conveniently pull a car over. There's take out coffee cups and beer cans and water bottles, which probably people just toss out the window. Hats and flip-flops that might have blown away from moped riders by accident. And occasionally, in locations that subsequently appear less romantic, underwear and condom wrappers.
That said, if you're on a road to nowhere like i was, the trash is less of a continuous stream like it is along highways and other main roads, it's more clustered around formerly-scenic spots.
I reached the little village on top of the hill and looked for the site where Google Maps showed the Artemis sanctuary (OpenStreetMap showed nothing), and it was just an overgrown plot, which appeared to be a private plot at that. No signage. There was an old notice board in the center of town that perhaps once upon a time had a bus schedule or the church opening times or some other local announcements, but nowadays it's bare. Whatever village was up there is virtually abandoned. A handful of houses, some of them maintained, but few with cars out the front. Holiday homes, perhaps? Who knows. There was nobody around to ask, although i did see two or three cars and mopeds pass in the 3 hours or so i spent climbing up and back down. I gave them all a two-finger salute/peace sign/hand of benediction because i've heard showing full palm in Greece is offensive.
Great walk, in any case. I had a coffee at a roadside café near the highway before going back to the KTEΛ to take the bus to Corinth. Pretty much soon as we started heading up into the hills the rain began. You know you're taking a bus in a country where it doesn't rain much when the roof starts leaking. Fortunately it didn't leak on my head, but on the head of the guy sitting in front of me, whose aggressive leaning back had crushed my knees, so he moved to a different seat and my legs got a bit of respite. Thanks, Zeus!
I knew that the bus would stop at a bus station called Isthmos, right on the canal that now cuts the Peloponnese from the Greek mainland. It's an inconvenient spot to stop if actually you want to visit Corinth, but i saw it as an opportunity to see the canal and then walk into town. Little did i know what a shit-show walking round Corinth would be.
The canal was probably the most touristy spot i had been to yet. I guess every single car-driving tourist traveling between Athens and the Peloponnese takes the same route, and stops at the same spot to take photos, so there are a bunch of tacky souvenir shops and other stalls selling useless crap right there. I also had to walk halfway across the bridge and take the classic tourist shot. It's still the Corinth Canal, damnit. I won't share the photo because you can go on Wikipedia and see the same photo literally everybody has taken, but i am glad i got to see it.
The Corinth Canal is one of those triumphs of human hubris that we sadly have gotten rather a lot of in the century or so. It was planned and considered for thousands of years, but nobody actually succeeded in doing it until the late 19th century. But it's sliced deep and narrow, so narrow that modern ships cannot fit down it, and through janky rock that keeps collapsing into it, so it's basically fucking useless. It looks pretty cool, though.
The whole area around the main bus stop and tourist bridge looks like it's seen better days. There is an absolutely fantastic hotel there which is so retro cool i wish i could've stayed there, but i think it's dead.
I tried to follow what appeared to be a farm road or hiking trail all the way down the canal to the sea, but after going 15 minutes or so, i was blocked by massive mounds of sand and rubble and signs indicating it was a construction site. So i unrolled my hike and tried to find a different route into town that wouldn't go along the highway. But the roads that aren't the highway are kind of a disaster. It's something between a rural and light industrial area, where almost all the buildings are abandoned, yet the road still follows this byzantine route that zigs and zags as if an awful lot of people were extremely possessive of whatever barren strip of apocalyptic wasteland belonged to them once upon a time.
In short, it sucks to walk down. But it would get worse. At one corner i met a cyclist - the first person i had seen on the road. He asked if the bridge across the canal was nearby, and i tried to explain him the roundabout path he'd have to take to get there. I asked if the way he came was a nice way and he gave me that passive-aggressive German/Dutch phrase of "well, i wouldn't say it's nice" that actually means it's a fucking shithole. He said he had been to Ancient Corinth that morning (different town to Corinth) and the hotel had tried to get him to take a taxi and he said he was dismayed. "It's not the price, the price is whatever, but why would i take a taxi?" He seemed at a loss to explain it in English, and i was too tired to test my assumption that he was German or Dutch, but i nodded because i knew exactly what he meant. Who the fuck goes on holiday just to take a taxi everywhere? That's not a proper holiday, that's... i don't know, it's just fucking... sitting in a car. I also can't explain how ridiculous it seems to me, and apparently neither can other Europeans with my background. It just sounds utterly absurd, to take a taxi on vacation, the fuck.
I mean, obviously people do. I saw a bunch of them just this morning. Still. It feels wrong.
He did warn me, however, that the way he had come had some wild dogs that he did not recommend me walking past. So i thanked him for the advice and abandoned my back streets zig-zag to go back to the highway. Little did i know that the highway was really, honestly just a straight-up fucking highway. No sidewalk at all. Barely even a shoulder. So, basically, they built the main bus station for Corinth about 5km away from Corinth, and the only way to get to Corinth is along a highway with no sidewalk or wait however many hours for a shuttle bus. If you want to take the back roads, good luck, they're a maze of crumbling buildings and trash mountains and wild dogs and one really rich guy with a painted steel fence and an irrigated olive grove. Great.
Coming into the edge of Corinth proper, i managed to cross the highway and get a feel for the rest of town. The graffiti battle here was between supporters of ΠAO (Panathinaikos FC) and AEK (AEK Athens). AEK is well-known (at least my German leftie/anarchist circles) as being a club formed by Greek refugees from then-Constantinople, and it has a hooligan army known for being pro-Palestine, pro-Hezbollah, pro-Kurdistan, pro-immigrant, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-American etc etc. It must be confusing to be a football fan, because you kinda want to support a club whose background is aligned with your politics in theory, but then there's also the hooligan element who take it to an extreme where you're like, well, um...
Anyway i guess AEK supporters see ΠAO supporters as conservative and bourgeois, and so the kids spray over each other's slogans in a city where neither of the clubs actually play. I think football hooliganism and obsessive fandom in general is stupid, but somehow seeing AEK on the walls made me feel slightly better about the Corinth youth than the Kalamata youth who - to their credit - taught me the Greek words for "vaccine" and "death" thanks to their dumb anti-vaxxer shit, in the gaps of the walls where there wasn't already Christian fundamentalist slogans.
But along with angry leftie graffiti comes angry working class people, and that's the overarching vibe of modern Corinth. It seems like once upon a time it might have been a beachside tourist destination, and perhaps it still is for a brief period in the summer, but there are so many abandoned buildings and empty storefronts it's clear that this place is not doing great at all.
This morning i walked into town from the opposite side to the canal and once again i was trapped walking along the highway for a chunk of the way. There is a large California-style strip mall with a bunch of nice clothing shops way out west, and if you walk through the mall it goes out to a big porch area with the beautiful blue waves of the Gulf of Corinth crashing in, but... it's a trap. You can't walk from the mall to the sea shore, never mind that it's mostly trashy rip-rap. Map says there's a ruin here, a ruin there, but it's all fenced off, and you need to do long and painful detours just to travel what would have been 5 steps if there was no fence, and then there's a dead-end anyway.
I cursed the disgusting American-style car-centric planning. It's almost as if somebody deliberately went out of their way to make the most pedestrian-unfriendly design they could possibly come up with. I thought to myself "man, all you have to do is build a greenway, just a cycle path, even just a sidewalk, and this whole place could start to rejuvenate, because then people will want to walk to the mall, you won't have these decaying ghettos along the way, surrounded on all sides by speeding automobiles"...
Well, my optimistic thinking went out the window when i got closer to town and saw that that is exactly what they have done. There is a kilometer or two of beachside greenway stretching out of town to the west, exactly the kind of thing i was expecting them to have laid all the way out to the mall and then inland to Ancient Corinth. But... it's a fucking wasteland there anyway. Overgrown, graffiti-covered buildings. Places that maybe once were a beach bar but now they are not. Seaweed piles up on the beach, creating a weird, meter-high spongy ridge of soggy organic matter blocking the sea. An umbrella topples on its side.
And yet three truck drivers have pulled up in an empty lot and are paddling their feet. A few oldies comb the beach. There's a couple having a coffee out front of a café i thought was closed.
After all, it's still a scenic location.
But i'm getting ahead of myself, because i am telling you about today. Yesterday i still had to find dinner. I booked into a cheap hotel and walked into town. And the only options are pizza, burger, gyros, coffee. There are a handful of buffet-type places that have sheet pans of potatoes or moussaka or whatever. That's it. Working class town, working class food. It's amazing how ubiquitous pizza and burgers are. All over the world, same shit. It's depressing, not just because it's the same, but because it's so fucking bland and boring. Like, there's so many better cheap foods you could do. Tacos, for starters.
Anyway, it is what it is. I went to a high class taverna and struggled to find anything vegetarian, much less vegan, and ended up having my most expensive (and one of the least satisfying) meals in Greece yet. While i sat there, the skies exploded. The storm that crossed Greece in the last two days - Elias - was no fucking joke. The road between Patras and Athens got blocked by a landslide. There was flooding that destroyed a bunch of houses on the island of Evia, north-east of Athens. The lightning went on and on here around the isthmus, from around sunset through till early in the morning. I had received two emergency alerts on my phone to shelter in place - one of them amusingly arrived on the bus where literally everyone's phone pinged at the same time.
I did, however, have a good sleep. This morning the weather report looked like we'd get a half day of drizzle leading to bigger storms in the afternoon, so i took the 8:30 bus to Ancient Corinth in the hopes of seeing a column.
You guys. I saw a column.
Ancient Corinth is a town just up the hill from modern Corinth, which is by the sea. Large parts of the town are either in the main museum area or are excavated and cordoned off digs, so there is a weird patchwork of houses and ruins. I get the impression most of the houses are just rooms rented out to tourists, and pretty much everything in town except for the one coffee shop where i stopped to get an espresso and a simit (called a κουλούρι/koulouri in Greece) is a tourist trap.
I was originally just going to visit the museum area because i was worried that last night's rain might have destroyed the trails up to Acrocorinth and perhaps the whole site would be closed, but since i was there at the crack of dawn and the road up to the outer gate is paved, i figured might as well hike up and see what's what.
I am so glad i did. Acrocorinth is a newer castle on a rocky mountain that towers over Ancient Corinth. You can see the fortifications for miles around, and i had done just that on the road coming down from Kalamata and Tripoli the day before. Apparently it was the acropolis of ancient Corinth, but so many newer fortifications have been built over the top that it mostly just looks like your bog standard middle ages castle.
Except it's much, much bigger than pretty much any castle i have ever visited. It is fucking epic. Aside from being right on top of a mountain which has views to the sea both sides of the isthmus, across the Gulf of Corinth and deep into the Peloponnese, it has walls upon walls of fortifications, and one tower is even still standing. You get inside the first wall and it's like a little city up there, with a church/mosque and everything. I mean, most of the stuff inside the walls is rubble now, but you can sense the grandeur. I am so glad i decided to head up there.
Even better, because of the ominous weather and the early hour, there were only a handful of other people exploring the site. I kept a fast pace because i didn't want to be trapped up there if the rain started up again. The hills are steep and the paths are slippery cobbles that have been polished from the feet of millions of tourists and soldiers and worshippers and whatever else over the millennia. Even taking care not to fall while also making haste, it was very impressive.
But the icing on the cake for me was getting to the peak, where once there stood a temple of Aphrodite. Now it's just a square of massive bricks increasingly overgrown by the surrounding grass and bushes. But it's there. I sat on a brick that maybe was hewn from the hillside 2500 years ago, hauled up on logs by a team of slaves, slotted into a building designed by an engineer not unlike myself, a place where perhaps sacred prostitution occurred, or at the very least a place where many women worked and dedicated their lives. And i sat in that same spot, completely alone, on top of the world.
I looked down at the isthmus and imagined the people in the temple thousands of years beforehand looking at the same isthmus going "you know what, we should dig a frickin canal through there, it'd save us so much time". I looked at the olive groves and the red rooves and imagined that this probably isn't terribly unlike what people in antiquity would have seen. No cars up in Aphrodite's temple, just me and the sun and the birds.
I started back down at an opportune time, because a trio of older chaps were making their way up. And by the time i got down into the main courtyard area the place was getting pretty crowded. The parking lot was full and a couple of taxis were waiting. When i had started my walk there were only two campervans and a hatchback, plus the couple of lady adventurers who i passed on my hike up who had taken the same bus as me but skipped the morning coffee.
Since the sun had come out, and it seemed like if the rain hit it wouldn't be for a couple hours yet, i decided to take an ambitious route back down the mountain. Instead of following the now all-too-busy road, i headed down an unmarked trail that i hoped would lead me to a farm road shown on OpenStreetMap. It was the kind of trail that would not be great in the rain, and it was already muddy and a bit slippery from the night before, but fortunately it did hit that farm road, which to be honest was just a lightly-cobbled dirt road that i wouldn't even risk bringing a 4WD up after last night's storm.
It went this way and that through some olive groves which appeared to still be somewhat in use judging by the plastic containers about the place which perhaps are what the pickers use to harvest. There were some crumbling buildings that perhaps might have once been small farm houses... or perhaps they still were! I didn't want to get too close in case there were squatters or other eccentric hermits living up there.
I got a bit lost, but the nice thing about hiking in a place where the only trees are spaciously-planted olives is that you can pretty easily change direction and find your way back. I popped out on a covered road that led back to Ancient Corinth. Not a car in sight. One part of the road had been slightly sloshed by a small stream of mud from the cliff, but nothing too bad. I walked all the way back to Ancient Corinth without seeing a soul.
And then i saw several tour buses full of souls. Dear lord. I forgot about this part of Greece. Or, quite frankly, anywhere scenic around Europe in general. Fucking hell. It was a tourist swarm! The old timey street full of souvenir shops and tacky restaurants with "Greek" salad (it's not called that in Greece) and souvlaki and all the other overseas Greek restaurant favorites was in full swing. I decided then that i would not spend 8€ to go through the museum and take a photo by the temple of Apollo, which i had already seen from a distance and therefore sated my hunger for columns. I am sure it would have been great - i sucked it up and braved the tourists at Delphi, and at Agrigento, and it was worth it - but after my near-religious experience sitting alone with my thoughts in the Aphrodite temple i decided to continue my lonesome trek back to modern Corinth.
Which brings us back around to my earlier thoughts about this sad city and how to rejuvenate it. I do wonder how much poor urban planning has to do with its current situation. You have Ancient Corinth on the hill, which i can understand can't really develop much more because every time someone goes to dig a foundation they find another fucking ruin instead. Then - miles away - you have modern Corinth, which is beside the sea and perhaps could be a nice beach town in its own right. Except just a little bit up the coast is Loutraki which not only has a beach but also hot springs and a casino, so of course it's going to draw more tourists. And then off in the other direction you have the bus station, next to a canal which is essentially another a tourist gimmick. So all the best tourist stuff is just a bit too far away for any tourist to bother coming here, and because of car culture the whole area is actively hostile to hikers and pretty unpleasant for cyclists, so you don't get much of that crowd either. Who's left?
Maybe modern Corinth will die off and 2000 years from now they'll be uncovering ruins of beach houses here, imagining what a bustling place it was, and all the great food and culture that once was there, and someone will sit on a piece of rubble which is all that's left from the hotel where i am staying right now, and think to themselves, wow, i really feel a connection to these people from antiquity.
Man, humanity is fucking awesome. I love it.
I am still trying to decide if tomorrow i should go to Athens, or if i should try to find another nearby town to spend Thursday night, just to spend another day away from the hustle and bustle, which i'll anyway be getting as soon as i am back in Taipei. One thing i do know is that i am probably going to eat gyros tonight because what else we got? Wherever i go next better have meze is all i'm saying...
But i didn't realize this till Monday evening. I walked up to the bus station in Kalamata to catch the 10:30 to Athens, and it was already sold out when i got there around 9:45. A couple of tourists in front of me had hoped to get to Tripoli and were very grumpy about the situation. They didn't buy a ticket for the 14:00, and i didn't see them on it when i took that one, so i guess they figured something else out.
Since i had almost 4 hours to kill, i decided to climb the mountain out back of Kalamata. The one to the north, which doesn't go anywhere in particular. There are no hiking trails. No gorges or waterfalls. There is just a windy road that goes up and up and eventually stops in a village overlooking the Messenian Gulf. I wasn't sure if i would make it all the way, but i summoned the spirit of Artemis - who according to Google Maps had a sanctuary up there - and made it.
There was no sanctuary of Artemis, at least not any more. But it felt like a good place to put one.
The walk took me through some outer suburbs and then up into that odd Greek mix of rural mansions and crumbling shacks, often located in plots right next to each other. There was a little locked church with an awning where i could sit and get some shade. Then a monastery, which i am not certain was still in operation. Then i met a near-toothless, long-haired peasant on the side of the road with a rake and a chicken tied to a stick pegged in the ground. I have absolutely no idea why you would take a chicken for a walk, or why he was in that particular part of nondescript road with a rake, but there he was.
Thinking back on it, it feels like one of those weird interactions from Greek myth. Like, perhaps i met Ares with Alectryon, who he turned into a chicken.
Anyway, i had a short chat with the chap who spoke a few words of English, and he wondered where i was going. I told him i missed the bus so i decided to climb the hill... Why? I don't know, because it's there.
A bit further up the hill i passed the most glorious olive groves i've ever seen, the trees rising up from golden grass. Further still was a random bench, right on the cliff in a scenic spot overlooking all of Kalamata. Obviously the local kids know about it because there was also a pile of trash up there.
It's interesting the kinds of trash you see around the place when you're walking. There is large rubbish like mattresses and office chairs and other furniture that's hard to get rid of, often dumped over embankments where also you can conveniently pull a car over. There's take out coffee cups and beer cans and water bottles, which probably people just toss out the window. Hats and flip-flops that might have blown away from moped riders by accident. And occasionally, in locations that subsequently appear less romantic, underwear and condom wrappers.
That said, if you're on a road to nowhere like i was, the trash is less of a continuous stream like it is along highways and other main roads, it's more clustered around formerly-scenic spots.
I reached the little village on top of the hill and looked for the site where Google Maps showed the Artemis sanctuary (OpenStreetMap showed nothing), and it was just an overgrown plot, which appeared to be a private plot at that. No signage. There was an old notice board in the center of town that perhaps once upon a time had a bus schedule or the church opening times or some other local announcements, but nowadays it's bare. Whatever village was up there is virtually abandoned. A handful of houses, some of them maintained, but few with cars out the front. Holiday homes, perhaps? Who knows. There was nobody around to ask, although i did see two or three cars and mopeds pass in the 3 hours or so i spent climbing up and back down. I gave them all a two-finger salute/peace sign/hand of benediction because i've heard showing full palm in Greece is offensive.
Great walk, in any case. I had a coffee at a roadside café near the highway before going back to the KTEΛ to take the bus to Corinth. Pretty much soon as we started heading up into the hills the rain began. You know you're taking a bus in a country where it doesn't rain much when the roof starts leaking. Fortunately it didn't leak on my head, but on the head of the guy sitting in front of me, whose aggressive leaning back had crushed my knees, so he moved to a different seat and my legs got a bit of respite. Thanks, Zeus!
I knew that the bus would stop at a bus station called Isthmos, right on the canal that now cuts the Peloponnese from the Greek mainland. It's an inconvenient spot to stop if actually you want to visit Corinth, but i saw it as an opportunity to see the canal and then walk into town. Little did i know what a shit-show walking round Corinth would be.
The canal was probably the most touristy spot i had been to yet. I guess every single car-driving tourist traveling between Athens and the Peloponnese takes the same route, and stops at the same spot to take photos, so there are a bunch of tacky souvenir shops and other stalls selling useless crap right there. I also had to walk halfway across the bridge and take the classic tourist shot. It's still the Corinth Canal, damnit. I won't share the photo because you can go on Wikipedia and see the same photo literally everybody has taken, but i am glad i got to see it.
The Corinth Canal is one of those triumphs of human hubris that we sadly have gotten rather a lot of in the century or so. It was planned and considered for thousands of years, but nobody actually succeeded in doing it until the late 19th century. But it's sliced deep and narrow, so narrow that modern ships cannot fit down it, and through janky rock that keeps collapsing into it, so it's basically fucking useless. It looks pretty cool, though.
The whole area around the main bus stop and tourist bridge looks like it's seen better days. There is an absolutely fantastic hotel there which is so retro cool i wish i could've stayed there, but i think it's dead.
I tried to follow what appeared to be a farm road or hiking trail all the way down the canal to the sea, but after going 15 minutes or so, i was blocked by massive mounds of sand and rubble and signs indicating it was a construction site. So i unrolled my hike and tried to find a different route into town that wouldn't go along the highway. But the roads that aren't the highway are kind of a disaster. It's something between a rural and light industrial area, where almost all the buildings are abandoned, yet the road still follows this byzantine route that zigs and zags as if an awful lot of people were extremely possessive of whatever barren strip of apocalyptic wasteland belonged to them once upon a time.
In short, it sucks to walk down. But it would get worse. At one corner i met a cyclist - the first person i had seen on the road. He asked if the bridge across the canal was nearby, and i tried to explain him the roundabout path he'd have to take to get there. I asked if the way he came was a nice way and he gave me that passive-aggressive German/Dutch phrase of "well, i wouldn't say it's nice" that actually means it's a fucking shithole. He said he had been to Ancient Corinth that morning (different town to Corinth) and the hotel had tried to get him to take a taxi and he said he was dismayed. "It's not the price, the price is whatever, but why would i take a taxi?" He seemed at a loss to explain it in English, and i was too tired to test my assumption that he was German or Dutch, but i nodded because i knew exactly what he meant. Who the fuck goes on holiday just to take a taxi everywhere? That's not a proper holiday, that's... i don't know, it's just fucking... sitting in a car. I also can't explain how ridiculous it seems to me, and apparently neither can other Europeans with my background. It just sounds utterly absurd, to take a taxi on vacation, the fuck.
I mean, obviously people do. I saw a bunch of them just this morning. Still. It feels wrong.
He did warn me, however, that the way he had come had some wild dogs that he did not recommend me walking past. So i thanked him for the advice and abandoned my back streets zig-zag to go back to the highway. Little did i know that the highway was really, honestly just a straight-up fucking highway. No sidewalk at all. Barely even a shoulder. So, basically, they built the main bus station for Corinth about 5km away from Corinth, and the only way to get to Corinth is along a highway with no sidewalk or wait however many hours for a shuttle bus. If you want to take the back roads, good luck, they're a maze of crumbling buildings and trash mountains and wild dogs and one really rich guy with a painted steel fence and an irrigated olive grove. Great.
Coming into the edge of Corinth proper, i managed to cross the highway and get a feel for the rest of town. The graffiti battle here was between supporters of ΠAO (Panathinaikos FC) and AEK (AEK Athens). AEK is well-known (at least my German leftie/anarchist circles) as being a club formed by Greek refugees from then-Constantinople, and it has a hooligan army known for being pro-Palestine, pro-Hezbollah, pro-Kurdistan, pro-immigrant, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-American etc etc. It must be confusing to be a football fan, because you kinda want to support a club whose background is aligned with your politics in theory, but then there's also the hooligan element who take it to an extreme where you're like, well, um...
Anyway i guess AEK supporters see ΠAO supporters as conservative and bourgeois, and so the kids spray over each other's slogans in a city where neither of the clubs actually play. I think football hooliganism and obsessive fandom in general is stupid, but somehow seeing AEK on the walls made me feel slightly better about the Corinth youth than the Kalamata youth who - to their credit - taught me the Greek words for "vaccine" and "death" thanks to their dumb anti-vaxxer shit, in the gaps of the walls where there wasn't already Christian fundamentalist slogans.
But along with angry leftie graffiti comes angry working class people, and that's the overarching vibe of modern Corinth. It seems like once upon a time it might have been a beachside tourist destination, and perhaps it still is for a brief period in the summer, but there are so many abandoned buildings and empty storefronts it's clear that this place is not doing great at all.
This morning i walked into town from the opposite side to the canal and once again i was trapped walking along the highway for a chunk of the way. There is a large California-style strip mall with a bunch of nice clothing shops way out west, and if you walk through the mall it goes out to a big porch area with the beautiful blue waves of the Gulf of Corinth crashing in, but... it's a trap. You can't walk from the mall to the sea shore, never mind that it's mostly trashy rip-rap. Map says there's a ruin here, a ruin there, but it's all fenced off, and you need to do long and painful detours just to travel what would have been 5 steps if there was no fence, and then there's a dead-end anyway.
I cursed the disgusting American-style car-centric planning. It's almost as if somebody deliberately went out of their way to make the most pedestrian-unfriendly design they could possibly come up with. I thought to myself "man, all you have to do is build a greenway, just a cycle path, even just a sidewalk, and this whole place could start to rejuvenate, because then people will want to walk to the mall, you won't have these decaying ghettos along the way, surrounded on all sides by speeding automobiles"...
Well, my optimistic thinking went out the window when i got closer to town and saw that that is exactly what they have done. There is a kilometer or two of beachside greenway stretching out of town to the west, exactly the kind of thing i was expecting them to have laid all the way out to the mall and then inland to Ancient Corinth. But... it's a fucking wasteland there anyway. Overgrown, graffiti-covered buildings. Places that maybe once were a beach bar but now they are not. Seaweed piles up on the beach, creating a weird, meter-high spongy ridge of soggy organic matter blocking the sea. An umbrella topples on its side.
And yet three truck drivers have pulled up in an empty lot and are paddling their feet. A few oldies comb the beach. There's a couple having a coffee out front of a café i thought was closed.
After all, it's still a scenic location.
But i'm getting ahead of myself, because i am telling you about today. Yesterday i still had to find dinner. I booked into a cheap hotel and walked into town. And the only options are pizza, burger, gyros, coffee. There are a handful of buffet-type places that have sheet pans of potatoes or moussaka or whatever. That's it. Working class town, working class food. It's amazing how ubiquitous pizza and burgers are. All over the world, same shit. It's depressing, not just because it's the same, but because it's so fucking bland and boring. Like, there's so many better cheap foods you could do. Tacos, for starters.
Anyway, it is what it is. I went to a high class taverna and struggled to find anything vegetarian, much less vegan, and ended up having my most expensive (and one of the least satisfying) meals in Greece yet. While i sat there, the skies exploded. The storm that crossed Greece in the last two days - Elias - was no fucking joke. The road between Patras and Athens got blocked by a landslide. There was flooding that destroyed a bunch of houses on the island of Evia, north-east of Athens. The lightning went on and on here around the isthmus, from around sunset through till early in the morning. I had received two emergency alerts on my phone to shelter in place - one of them amusingly arrived on the bus where literally everyone's phone pinged at the same time.
I did, however, have a good sleep. This morning the weather report looked like we'd get a half day of drizzle leading to bigger storms in the afternoon, so i took the 8:30 bus to Ancient Corinth in the hopes of seeing a column.
You guys. I saw a column.
Ancient Corinth is a town just up the hill from modern Corinth, which is by the sea. Large parts of the town are either in the main museum area or are excavated and cordoned off digs, so there is a weird patchwork of houses and ruins. I get the impression most of the houses are just rooms rented out to tourists, and pretty much everything in town except for the one coffee shop where i stopped to get an espresso and a simit (called a κουλούρι/koulouri in Greece) is a tourist trap.
I was originally just going to visit the museum area because i was worried that last night's rain might have destroyed the trails up to Acrocorinth and perhaps the whole site would be closed, but since i was there at the crack of dawn and the road up to the outer gate is paved, i figured might as well hike up and see what's what.
I am so glad i did. Acrocorinth is a newer castle on a rocky mountain that towers over Ancient Corinth. You can see the fortifications for miles around, and i had done just that on the road coming down from Kalamata and Tripoli the day before. Apparently it was the acropolis of ancient Corinth, but so many newer fortifications have been built over the top that it mostly just looks like your bog standard middle ages castle.
Except it's much, much bigger than pretty much any castle i have ever visited. It is fucking epic. Aside from being right on top of a mountain which has views to the sea both sides of the isthmus, across the Gulf of Corinth and deep into the Peloponnese, it has walls upon walls of fortifications, and one tower is even still standing. You get inside the first wall and it's like a little city up there, with a church/mosque and everything. I mean, most of the stuff inside the walls is rubble now, but you can sense the grandeur. I am so glad i decided to head up there.
Even better, because of the ominous weather and the early hour, there were only a handful of other people exploring the site. I kept a fast pace because i didn't want to be trapped up there if the rain started up again. The hills are steep and the paths are slippery cobbles that have been polished from the feet of millions of tourists and soldiers and worshippers and whatever else over the millennia. Even taking care not to fall while also making haste, it was very impressive.
But the icing on the cake for me was getting to the peak, where once there stood a temple of Aphrodite. Now it's just a square of massive bricks increasingly overgrown by the surrounding grass and bushes. But it's there. I sat on a brick that maybe was hewn from the hillside 2500 years ago, hauled up on logs by a team of slaves, slotted into a building designed by an engineer not unlike myself, a place where perhaps sacred prostitution occurred, or at the very least a place where many women worked and dedicated their lives. And i sat in that same spot, completely alone, on top of the world.
I looked down at the isthmus and imagined the people in the temple thousands of years beforehand looking at the same isthmus going "you know what, we should dig a frickin canal through there, it'd save us so much time". I looked at the olive groves and the red rooves and imagined that this probably isn't terribly unlike what people in antiquity would have seen. No cars up in Aphrodite's temple, just me and the sun and the birds.
I started back down at an opportune time, because a trio of older chaps were making their way up. And by the time i got down into the main courtyard area the place was getting pretty crowded. The parking lot was full and a couple of taxis were waiting. When i had started my walk there were only two campervans and a hatchback, plus the couple of lady adventurers who i passed on my hike up who had taken the same bus as me but skipped the morning coffee.
Since the sun had come out, and it seemed like if the rain hit it wouldn't be for a couple hours yet, i decided to take an ambitious route back down the mountain. Instead of following the now all-too-busy road, i headed down an unmarked trail that i hoped would lead me to a farm road shown on OpenStreetMap. It was the kind of trail that would not be great in the rain, and it was already muddy and a bit slippery from the night before, but fortunately it did hit that farm road, which to be honest was just a lightly-cobbled dirt road that i wouldn't even risk bringing a 4WD up after last night's storm.
It went this way and that through some olive groves which appeared to still be somewhat in use judging by the plastic containers about the place which perhaps are what the pickers use to harvest. There were some crumbling buildings that perhaps might have once been small farm houses... or perhaps they still were! I didn't want to get too close in case there were squatters or other eccentric hermits living up there.
I got a bit lost, but the nice thing about hiking in a place where the only trees are spaciously-planted olives is that you can pretty easily change direction and find your way back. I popped out on a covered road that led back to Ancient Corinth. Not a car in sight. One part of the road had been slightly sloshed by a small stream of mud from the cliff, but nothing too bad. I walked all the way back to Ancient Corinth without seeing a soul.
And then i saw several tour buses full of souls. Dear lord. I forgot about this part of Greece. Or, quite frankly, anywhere scenic around Europe in general. Fucking hell. It was a tourist swarm! The old timey street full of souvenir shops and tacky restaurants with "Greek" salad (it's not called that in Greece) and souvlaki and all the other overseas Greek restaurant favorites was in full swing. I decided then that i would not spend 8€ to go through the museum and take a photo by the temple of Apollo, which i had already seen from a distance and therefore sated my hunger for columns. I am sure it would have been great - i sucked it up and braved the tourists at Delphi, and at Agrigento, and it was worth it - but after my near-religious experience sitting alone with my thoughts in the Aphrodite temple i decided to continue my lonesome trek back to modern Corinth.
Which brings us back around to my earlier thoughts about this sad city and how to rejuvenate it. I do wonder how much poor urban planning has to do with its current situation. You have Ancient Corinth on the hill, which i can understand can't really develop much more because every time someone goes to dig a foundation they find another fucking ruin instead. Then - miles away - you have modern Corinth, which is beside the sea and perhaps could be a nice beach town in its own right. Except just a little bit up the coast is Loutraki which not only has a beach but also hot springs and a casino, so of course it's going to draw more tourists. And then off in the other direction you have the bus station, next to a canal which is essentially another a tourist gimmick. So all the best tourist stuff is just a bit too far away for any tourist to bother coming here, and because of car culture the whole area is actively hostile to hikers and pretty unpleasant for cyclists, so you don't get much of that crowd either. Who's left?
Maybe modern Corinth will die off and 2000 years from now they'll be uncovering ruins of beach houses here, imagining what a bustling place it was, and all the great food and culture that once was there, and someone will sit on a piece of rubble which is all that's left from the hotel where i am staying right now, and think to themselves, wow, i really feel a connection to these people from antiquity.
Man, humanity is fucking awesome. I love it.
I am still trying to decide if tomorrow i should go to Athens, or if i should try to find another nearby town to spend Thursday night, just to spend another day away from the hustle and bustle, which i'll anyway be getting as soon as i am back in Taipei. One thing i do know is that i am probably going to eat gyros tonight because what else we got? Wherever i go next better have meze is all i'm saying...