Kolokotronis's prison

 Young Alex had his first full day in Greece in a decade. How can he even be old enough to have a lost decade?

After yesterday's intense, busy, and social day it was nice to have a quieter day. Our AirBnb is in the center of the city, a block behind the central square of the old city, so it is very convenient and we don't have to spend long days out. Nauplio (or Naflion) has three castles and most of what we see is Venetian, so it it looks very western -- our idea of a castle.

 We drove up to the biggest, Palamidi, which we took the students and our kids to see every year. Phil and I realized that we have very different strategies with this large site. He goes to the top to see the views and walks all the way down. I go up the main route, but I dawdle in the different keeps which have lots of hidey-holes that one can explore. We ended up going up Phil's route and down mine to give Alex the full experience. 

The view down from the castle

The tip of the peninsula

Bell at the top

This is new...a snack shop right in the middle of the site.

My favorite part of the site is that there are all these hidey-holes to explore. One of them is known as Kolokotrones's prison, and is basically an oubliette (a "forgetting place"), a hole in the floor of a chamber that you have to duck down to enter. It is lit up and has a sign. 

The entrance to the outer chamber -- it turns to the left and then drops down.

The other ones are not lit up and are just hidden in the back of various rooms that you need to peek into to realize that there is some place to get to. You need a flashlight and some guts to explore them. They are unattended and just there. I love them because when I am in an old quiet empty space, I feel like I can feel the generations of people who inhabited the spaces.

Phil and Alex discovering one of the hidey-holes

This one goes all the way through to another of the rooms.

These were all rooms in the same courtyard. All of them seemed to have been larger open rooms that were filled in with a door and window later. You can see the outline of the original arches.

After Palamidi, we drove back down to the town and walked around, and then had a rest out Airbnb.

At about 5pm, we got up and wandered around. We went into an interesting church. It was a church of the birth of Mary, the mother of god, and had an anti-abortion poster outside, which I have not seen before in Greece. Abortion has been legal here since the mid-1980s. It may have been a Catholic church that was converted into an Orthodox church. I was showing Alex the tamata, the representations of prayers that are left on the icons. There were prayers for spouses, and cars, and houses, and babies, and health of various body parts.

The tamata are the silver things in the upper corners

Close up of a bunch of tamata

This one had heaps of them

On both sides.

And some draped across

Outside was the largest, tallest olive tree I have ever seen. There was a plaque nearby that explained that someone was martyred there and the olive tree was planted at the spot. Usually olive trees are kept short so that the olives can be harvested.

plaque explaining the tree and the martyrdom

We ended the day at a delightful taverna with the obligatory cat, who befriended Phil. The cat was a black cat, so made Phil miss Nero.

We strolled back to our Airbnb and did some shopping along the way. We ended the evening with some retsina and showers. A much quieter day, but a welcome respite!