By Bob Van Leer

  (ATHENS, GREECE, June 6, 1987) Today we completed our four-day tour of sightseeing and visiting ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins.

  We began the day with a visit to Delphi (or Delfi), one of the most famous cult sites in Greece. It was renowned throughout the ancient Greek world and beyond as the sanctuary of Apollo and the seat of his oracle. The Sacred Precinct of Delphi is dominated by the Temple of Apollo, built on a deep subterranean fissure from which mysterious exhalations originally emanated.

  In historical times a priestess seated herself on a tripod over the crevasse and would go off into a trance. Questions relating to the fate of a war, journey, marriage or business enterprise would be put to her and she would make strange, incoherent utterances which were interpreted to the anxious and puzzled consultant by a "prophet".

  Above the temple rises the 4th century B.C. theater restored during the Roman epoch. It remains in a good state of preservation. The theater seats 5000 and is still occasionally used. The whole complex is on a series of benches high on the slopes of Mt Parnassus. The highest structure is the stadium seating 7000, the site of the Pythian Games.

  A visit to the museum completed our visit and we journeyed on to our next stop, the monastery of Osios Loukas near the Gulf of Corinth. This is relatively new compared to the ruins we have been touring and is still in use. Built between 941 and 944, the monastery was damaged in World War II but restored in the 1950s. It contains some splendid mosaics, looking as bright as when they were done in the first half of the 11th century.

  We now headed back to Athens to our previous hotel, The Grande Bretagne, to get ready for our flight to Istanbul, Turkey, in the morning. On the way back, before getting to the monastery, our bus met another bus in one of the small towns on the mountain and we had a traffic jam. This, mind you, is on a main highway, similar in importance to highway 101.

  In the small towns the narrow, old streets are used and two buses could not pass. Traffic promptly piled up behind both buses and we had a jam. After much arm waving and discussion our bus backed up on the sidewalk and the other bus passed, also by riding on the sidewalk. At that, the buses had to pull in their side mirrors to pass.

  At Athens we are back to where the hotel rooms have TV sets. None did outside of Athens. We are also back to easy access to newspapers. Our group, all connected with the newspaper business, was frustrated by the lack of English language papers and the few we found became dog eared from passing around.

  Our tour of Greece has been an interesting one and we know more than when we came.

  Tomorrow we will begin to hear the Turk side of the story in the stormy relations between the two countries,