November 7-12, 2024
Now I’ll do a quick recap of the rest of our cruise adventures.
November 7 & 8. After Olympia, we stopped in Athens for 2 days, while some people got off and others joined the ship. The first day, we had no excursions, so I did laundry in the ship’s Launderette on our deck, and just relaxed around the ship for the day, including teatime at 4:00, while Ken went to the bar on the main deck.
The next day we went to the Acropolis and then walked around the Plaka District right below the Acropolis with the older still-occupied buildings.
After the winding walk on well-trod smooth marble pavers and steps up to the Acropolis, we both enjoyed being in the presence of the amazing buildings we both studied in Architecture History courses, taking lots of close-up pictures of columns, capitals, and friezes! Seeing the Parthenon and the caryatids (the six maiden columns) in person was very cool, even if they were replicas (the real ones are in the museum, which we did not visit).
November 9. The ship left Athens that evening, and we woke up on the island of Crete with a visit to the ancient Palace of Knossos of the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. It was begun around 1900 BC, enlarged and reconstructed for five centuries and finally destroyed around 1350 BC. It is a massive archaeological site with mostly excavated foundations built on a hillside and supposedly had five stories in places. Unfortunately an early archaeologist, Arthur Evans in the early 1900s, took it upon himself to recreate mistakenly what he thought some of the spaces were with painted columns and concrete beams and fake frescoes…
November 10. The next day we woke up in Rhodos (Rhodes), Greece, just off the west coast of Turkey. We walked around the Old Town within the walls and then stopped in one of the local restaurants for another cooking demonstration and lunch.
November 11. After cruising during the night, we woke up in the harbor of Kusadasi, Turkey. Ken had decided that he had seen enough ancient piles of rocks with a couple columns, so he decided to skip the excursion to the ancient site of Ephesus, so I ventured forth on my own. The whole city site is on a hill, sloping down to the old harbor entrance, which now is dry land six miles from the sea, as the inland river deposited silt over the centuries and filled it in. Back in the day, it was a very important trading city with ships arriving from throughout Asia and Europe with market stalls lining the main street.
Luckily the bus dropped us off at the highest point, and we walked our way down the street to the lowest point, again on very smooth and sometimes steep and slippery marble pavers.
On the way back to the ship, we stopped at a store that makes Turkish carpets. We saw how they get the silk from the caterpillar cocoons to make threads and watched a woman making a rug. Then we were all treated to a Turkish drink similar to Greek ouzo but better(!), while they started the hard sell to buy rugs. I think everyone filed out without buying any, but it was fun watching them throw down one beautiful rug after another!
November 12. After cruising overnight again, we arrived at the port of Çanakkale, Turkey, the access point for the ancient city of Troy. This time, I also decided to forego the excursion to the ruins and the history lesson on the battles of Troy! Instead, we took the shuttle bus into the city center of Çanakkale town to wander and see the museum where all the statues went.
Unfortunately, the museum we were directed to ended up being the military museum at the fort, telling the story of the Ottoman victory of Gallipoli against the British, Australian, and New Zealand (ANZAC) armies in 1915-1916 and the sea battle right outside the fort, holding the passage to the Sea of Marmara, the access to Istanbul. We didn’t know much about that horrific battle, since the U.S. was not in WWI yet, so we didn’t learn about it in school, but as Ken said, it was interesting to see it explained from the victor’s side.
Tangible Roots 
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