Behold a 3500-year-old fresco of three Cretan ladies, found in the palace at Knossos. Except they may not be ladies, they might be goddesses. Or priestesses dressed as the goddesses they served. Or some upper-class women enjoying one another’s company. Archaeology can be complicated that way. The principle divinity of the Cretans seems to have […]

Greek religion was weird. It was a mashup consisting of various local traditions shoe-horned together, with myths having many variations depending on who you asked, and even the nature of the gods seemed somewhat protean, with very different versions of a god being worshiped in different places. The cult statue of Artemis worshiped in Ephesus […]

Turns out that Bouboulina has also been immortalized as a Playmobil playset. That’s how you know you’ve made it. Bouboulina’s granddaughter was a chip off the old block. During World War II she established an organization to smuggle Allied servicemen out of occupied Greece, along with bits of intelligence. Like most Resistance heroes, she was […]

Callisto has made a crabwise sideslip in order to avoid the 30+knot windstorm that’s about to crash into the Cyclades, and now we’re moored in Nauplion harbor in the Peloponnese. Any land excursions will occur safely on the mainland. So the only actual Cycladic island we visited was Santorini, as seen above. Spectacular but very […]