Interlude

To break up the stream of Greek ghost towns on this blog, here’s some other, more random, sights we got to see on our visit. Greece has always been a seafaring nation, and has myriad shipwrecks to show for it. Not far from Athens, the pitched-over hull of the Mediterranean Sky lies a stone’s throw from the nearby hills. The locals fishing there wanted nothing to do with me. Nonetheless, a couple made for a nice foreground in this shot.

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On the Peloponnesian peninsula, just down the shore from a fancy resort, lies another wreck which is close enough to shore that a part of it can be touched from dry land. I risked my camera to wade into the choppy surf and take shots from various angles, but it was this shot that wound up being my favorite. It shows how this ship has become a part of the beach it’s on.

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We visited the ruins of a small castle on the Mani peninsula. Not far from Vathia, it very much had the same architectural feel as the tower houses of that old village. The inside, as seen in the first shot below, was very approachable. But the extreme rot of the floors (just out of frame in the shot) precluded actually going inside. This shot was taken from a windowsill.

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Greece, on the whole, seems to be a very religious country. One sign of this are the ubiquitous eikonostasia, roadside shrines often built at the site of an accident or other memorial site. They often take the form of a miniature orthodox church on a pedestal. This one was right at the bridge crossing the river into the abandoned village of Skoteina.

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A rather different stop was the abandoned military radar facility on the Lefkada peninsula (everything is a peninsula in Greece). It was a fairly quick shoot, as the few buildings here were mostly charmless. The massive radar dishes themselves are the draw, and on our early morning visit I tried to turn the glare of the rising sun into a positive.

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Finally, the view from the hill the station was on was unreal, with the various islands in the morning mist looking like on O’Keefe painting.

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Thanks for reading. Next: back into the ghost towns.