Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,179 entries, all of them here in full.
November 9, 2022 · 668 words
Alas, Callisto
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 Arte
Read entry →November 2, 2022 · 551 words
Last Night in Athens
It’s our final night in Greece. We left the Callisto three night ago, and now we’re back at our B&B in Athens, just hangin’ out and seeing the sights. The Callisto experience was delightful but intense. Every day new sights to see, new ruins to meander through, new artifacts to admire, all with people whose […]
Read entry →November 1, 2022 · 69 words
More Bouboulina
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 Re
Read entry →October 31, 2022 · 362 words
Bouboulina!
Behold Bouboulina, sea-captain, freedom fighter, and the first woman ever appointed an admiral (and in two navies, Russian and Greek!). I encountered this statue on the island of Spetses, where her house has been turned into a museum by her descendants, who still own it. She was born in a Turkish prison in 1771, where
Read entry →October 27, 2022 · 498 words
Crab Wise
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. Spectacula
Read entry →October 24, 2022 · 65 words
Lively
Behold the mighty Callisto, on which we’ll be spending the next week or so, exploring the archaeological treasures of the Cyclades. Weather promises fair for the next few days, after which the sea may get a little, um, lively. We may not be hitting the beach of Despotiko in the rubber boats after all, but […]
Read entry →October 24, 2022 · 195 words
Dead Greeks
Today was a visit to the National Archaeological Museum, which I’ve visited on every trip to Greece. And here’s the golden death mask of a Mycenaean king, which Heinrich Schliemann decided belonged to Agamemnon. (Turns out Agamemnon lived four hundred years after this guy kicked the bucket) Contemporary critics of Schl
Read entry →October 23, 2022 · 215 words
Cycladic Enigma
From the Museum of Cycladic Art, one of the thousands of marble effigies found across the islands, all made pretty much in this style. Most were found in graves, though so many were looted nobody knows where most of them were dug up. Most were doll-sized, but some (including this one) were nearly life-sized. The [&hell
Read entry →October 21, 2022 · 330 words
Portraits
Now here’s a Roman for you, the product of the merger of Roman portrait traditions with Greek painting and Egyptian funerary customs. Nothing seems to be known about the subject, save that (from the narrow red stripe on his tunic) he would seem to be a member of the Equestrian Order. This might have been […]
Read entry →October 12, 2022 · 116 words
Shaping Up
Edward Willett and Shadowpaw Press, with help from Kickstarter, has released a perfectly enormous anthology that is well worth your time. The anthology features authors who have been interviewed on the Worldshapers podcast. Names include Griffin Barber, James Morrow, Jane Yolen, Cory Doctorow, F. Paul Wilson, and yours
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