I settled down at the computer today with the great intention of finishing writing up our Athens trip and maybe even moving on to talk about Poland. But when I logged on today I realized that Flickr or Lightroom (which I use to export photos to Flickr) had surreptitiously broken about 75 percent of the links to photos on the blog. I’ve begun to replace them but it is a huge effort to try to reverse engineer what photo was where and then re-link it, so I’m just going to do a little bit at a time until they’re all fixed. And I will no longer be using Lightroom’s export feature.
When I last left you, we were still wrapping up Athens. Here is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This ruined temple was started in the 6th century BC, finished in the 2nd century AD during the times of Emperor Hadrian, and destroyed by Barbarians in the 3rd century. As viewed from Acropolis:
The temple used to have 104 utterly huge (55 feet high, six feet wide) columns, but over the centuries the marble was taken and used for other purposes. There are only 15 columns left standing today. Even with its greatly reduced footprint, you could really get a sense of scale– when it was intact, it must have been awe-inspiring.
There’s a 16th column too, but it blew over in a windstorm in 1852:
One of my most vivid memories of visiting this place, however, will be this— can you guess what these are?
These tiny, dense little flowers blanketed the entire grounds of the temple– it felt a little like walking on a lumpy foam mat. But the best part was the slightly musty-dirty-floral smell– I wanted to lay down in a bed of these buds and luxuriate in the smell. If you guessed chamomile, you’d be right! (I would have had no idea what it was without the smell, which on a sunny day in Athens was absolutely intoxicating.) Apparently “chamomile” is actually from the Greek words for “ground apple,” and even the Ancient Greeks were aware of its medicinal purposes.