An Aegean adventure
Pamela Wade finds that you don’t have to be a classical scholar to cruise around Greece and Turkey, but a little knowledge goes a long way.
Cruise and learn around Greece and Turkey
Toilets have come a long way since 300BC. At Philippi, in northern Greece, there’s a well-preserved communal latrine with carved marble seats where the holes are disconcertingly close: cosily buttock-adjacent, in fact.
At foot level is a channel where water flowed continuously, enabling the potentially 40-plus patrons to sit and chat in unpolluted comfort.
There’s also marble in the bathroom of my classy suite back on board Silversea’s Silver Spirit, but I’m not sharing it with anyone else.
There are plenty of other spaces for being sociable on this elegant and recently refurbished ship – half-a-dozen lounges, eight restaurants, pool deck, theatre – and just 600 other guests to mingle with, so there’s plenty of elbow room.
Most of them are much better prepared than I am for this cruise around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean: eight days, from Istanbul to Piraeus, the port for Athens, visiting a selection of Greek and Turkish ports and islands.
My classical education consists of vague and very distant memories of translating Latin accounts of centurions guarding the baggage, but my companions seem to have done their homework on ancient architecture, biblical connections, and movers and shakers such as Alexander the Great.
When you’re dealing with well over two millennia of lively history, it’s a lot to get your head around on the spot. But our guides work hard to make it accessible, even for the more grasshopper-minded of us who are happily diverted by friendly dogs accompanying us through the ruins, by the bright colours and shiny 24-carat gold of the paintings inside chapels (and by the rivetingly gruesome subjects of some of them), and by random QI-type trivia, such as that Alexander wasn’t literally that Great, as he was only about 1.5 metres tall.
It’s not all ancient history, by any means, especially when we get to the party island of
Mykonos. When we sailed away from Istanbul, that city’s fabulous skyline of mosques, domes and towers was silhouetted against a perfect sunset, but since then the October weather has been grey and damp – though not dull enough to mute the glamorous deep, clear blue of the Aegean Sea.
Finally, at Mykonos the sun comes out again, and the effect is dazzling. White-painted buildings sit like crusted snow on the island’s rocky slopes, their artful blue highlights making them irresistibly photogenic, especially when set off by purple bougainvillea. Winding narrow lanes lead up and down, past little shops and bars, chapels and houses, eventually delivering visitors to the famous five windmills above the harbour, foregrounded by poseur cats.
There’s no escaping the history though, and our next port of call, the island of Rhodes, is dripping with it. At Lindos, there’s an acropolis of fluted columns high on a hilltop overlooking a sheltered cove where St Paul first preached, and even the cute donkeys down in the town have a story. They are descendants of animals donated to the locals by the Americans, who had broken up all their roads during World War II.
At the town of Rhodes, where the ship is moored, there are battlements, domes, cobbled streets, stone stairways and, in the grassy moat beyond the city wall, neat pyramids of cannonballs.
In one street, there is also, mysteriously, a souvenir shop selling authentic-looking boomerangs carved from olive wood.
Marmaris, the next island, returns us to Turkey, a nation just as ancient and full of stories. We all hope that the one about the 2000-year-old plane tree in Bayir is true, as we dutifully walk around it three times, anti-clockwise, in order to ensure a long and lucky life.
Afterwards, sitting in its shade on a warm, sunny day, drinking tea from a tulip-shaped glass, with nothing more demanding ahead of me than a bus-ride through pretty scenery back to being pampered on Silver Spirit, I feel the magic is working already.
Life on board is not all positive, however, despite the friendly ministrations of my butler, the proffered elbows of waiters leading me back to my table (even from the breakfast buffet), and the relief of almost everything (from wi-fi to tips) being included.
There is also the barely-concealed viciousness of the daily Trivial Pursuit competition, which becomes more cut-throat as the cruise progresses.
The initial veneer of politeness soon evaporates,
mistakes are remembered and referred to, there are raised eyebrows and scepticism as answers are suggested.
And that’s within the team: between teams, no holds are barred. ‘‘Let’s take their seats tomorrow – and mess with their heads,’’ schemes Sheila, eyes narrowed at the highest-scorers.
On the other hand, my pride at scoring double points by knowing what a philtrum is finally trounces the shame of never having heard of Philip II of Macedon (Alexander’s dad) before this cruise.
Other famous names I was aware of, so it was quite special to visit St John’s cave at Patmos and the House of the Virgin Mary, and to walk on the same shiny marble pavers that Cleopatra and Mark Antony had trodden on their honeymoon.
This was at Ephesus, one of Turkey’s many glories, its time-worn stonework softened by the masses of well-fed stray cats sprawled over it.
Here, the world’s biggest and most challenging jigsaw puzzle is under way, with thousands of pieces of swirled marble, shattered by an earthquake centuries ago, being painstakingly fitted back together.
The towering facade of the old library, also a reconstruction, is truly a spectacle, and so is the immense theatre, its curves rising up the hillside providing seats for an audience of 25,000. It was impressively big thinking for 300BC, but even here there is no escaping the era’s sociable attitude to bathrooms.
Just as in Philippi, there are rows of snug marble seating, with added information about rich Ephesians sending slaves ahead of them to prewarm the stone. That is kind of fascinating, but the bit about sponges on sticks? Well, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.