Delfi, 5 June 1987 Still excavating at Olympia; streets not built for buses

(Delfi, Greece, June 5, 1987)   We began the day with a tour of the Sacred Precinct at Olympia, dominated by the Temple of Zeus and the site of the original Olympic Games.

      The official start of the games was 776 B.C., although there may have been local games there earlier.  Lists of winners were kept of the games from then until the games were banned by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in 393 A.D., an existence of more than a thousand years.

      The site of Olympia was buried by floods and excavated by Germans in 1875, which led directly to the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896.  A museum at the site contains some of the finer works found at the site.  Excavation is still continuing to this day.  Two parties have projects underway there.

      We continued north along the Ionian Sea on a lush coastal plain.  Agriculture is big business here and there is a lot of truck farming, heavy on potatoes and corn.  There are also many grapes and miles of olive trees.  In the open country the roads are good, but the cities can be nightmares.  Our driver maneuvers his big Mercedes bus through streets and around corners built for donkey carts.

      We saw the first cows on our trip today, dairy cows near Pirgos.  Most of the livestock we see are sheep and goats with probably more goats.  The animals are well-tended.  Many of them are staked out, which means they have to be tended at least twice daily.

      A lot of the farm homes have chickens wandering around.  As a matter of fact, at the outdoor restaurant in Olympia where we ate lunch a friendly hen came in and cleaned up the crumbs.  We have seen a number of geese also.

      Many of the houses and businesses have solar water heaters on the roof, usually two solar panels connected to a water drum.  The preferred method of construction is reinforced concrete and half or more of the buildings are planned for having another story added later.  Steel reinforcing bars extend in an irregular pattern above the roof to tie the next story to the existing building.  This gives the building the effect of having a bad haircut.

      We saw several Gypsy tent camps alongside the highway.  Our guide says they do much agricultural labor.  Our bus proceeded to the Gulf of Corinth, last seen further east when we crossed the Corinth canal.  Here we took a ferry to the north side of the narrow strait.

      The ferry business is good.  As we crossed, I counted five ferries underway.  There appeared to be more than a dozen ferries available.  On the south side of the ferry is a mountain with a little snow still at the top, 1926 meters.  There was a wind chop on the gulf and this raised a breaker perhaps a foot high along the shore.

      On the north shore we stayed along the edge of the gulf on our way to Delfi, the home of the Oracle.  We passed by bauxite mines at Itea where red ore is piled in small mountains waiting to be shipped.  The Russians are proposing to finance an aluminum reduction plant there, which is raising political heat, because it is just a few miles from Delfi, one of the most famous cult sites in Greece.

      The site ranks along with the Acropolis in Athens, Olympia and the Island of Delos among the most important sites of the classical period of Greece.  Aluminum smelters are major sources of pollution.

      Tomorrow we go to the site of ancient Delfi (or Delphi) and view it for ourselves.  Tomorrow night we will be back in Athens to get ready for our flight to Istanbul, Turkey.