Peloponnese Trip IV: Pylos and Mystra

The first site was only a short distance away, as we were going from the modern town of Pylos to the ancient site of Pylos, another Mycenaean palace. It was one of the most powerful, but unfortunately also one of the most flammable. The building was mostly wood and stored tons of wine and oil, and seems to have ended in a pretty spectacular conflagration. This upside to this took a few thousand years to become obvious: as the headquarters of the local king, who owned about as much stuff as the rest of the region combined, Pylos had pretty well-developed system of record keeping using clay tablets. Pretty much the only advantage to using clay tablets is that heat, for example from the fires set by the army looting your palace, bakes them and makes them extremely durable, and 3000 years later archeologists can read them and be impressed by how awesome you are. This happened pretty frequently in the Near East, but about 90% of the Mycenaean Greek we have comes from either Pylos or Knossos, so it was a pretty significant find. Pretty recent, too; I actually met a guy earlier this week (this is really being written 1/15/2008) who excavated it.

The other significant thing about Pylos is that it's home to one of the best characters in epic: Nestor. The Greek army in the Iliad isn't so much a coherent army as it is a bunch of war bands under the command of various kings who have sworn loyalty to Agamemnon for the duration of the war. Homer gives us these impression that these kings actually do all the real fighting. For example, the Greeks are winning the war, but then Achilles stops fighting to go sulk in his tent, and that alone turns the tide of battle so that the Trojans nearly burn down the Greek ships. The only reason the don't is because another Greek, Ajax, almost single-handedly fights off the entire Trojan assault force. The exception to this rule is Nestor, who's about three times as old as anyone else in Greece and spends the entire war doing typical old man stuff. He tells stories, gives good advice that everyone ignores and bad advice that everyone follows, and occasionally berates those young punks for being young and stupid. In his day, Greeks were real men, like Theseus, and they were fighting centaurs! Monsters! None of these girly Trojans. In his day they would have had that war wrapped up in under a week! Yes sirree. If Nestor were still a young man, he'd show that Hector a thing or two. And so on. Anyway, picture time:

A view of the sea.
A hearth. There's actually very faded painting on it of a flame motif, but I can't make it out in this picture.
Nestor's bathroom.
The tub is mentioned in the Odyssey.

After Pylos we stopped for lunch in Kalamata, where all of those olives come from.
From there we had to drive through the mountains to Laconia. Thanks to a large dose of transdermal motion sickness medicine it was a pleasant trip.
Another picture of the drive.
Last one. This is about a lush as Greece gets during the summer.

The end goal of the drive was Sparti, but before going into town we stopped at Mystras for an hour or two. Here's out friend Leonidas (more about him next time) with a geography lesson. Mystras is roughly the same spot as Sparta, but instead of being in the valley it's on one of the western mountains overlooking Sparta.

Mystras itself is actually of Western European origin, and was founded in 1249 by Frankish crusaders as a fortified settlement. The Spartans, who had stopped by relevant to anything centuries before, eventually all moved uphill. By the end of the century the Byzantines had taken control of the area again. For all of you normal people who have no idea who the Byzantines are, that's the modern name for the Christian Greek empire centered on the city of Byzantium. Of course, they called themselves Romans (in Greek, since hardly any of them knew any Latin) and they called Byzantium Constantinople, but Byzantine sounds less clunky than "Eastern Roman Empire". Eventually, as the Roman government suffered from civil strife of various sorts, the Romans decided that it would make their civil wars more pleasant for everyone if they split the job of being emperor up. The man who made the lasting division between the Western Empire, centered in Rome, and the Eastern Empire, centered in Byzantium, is coincidentally the same one who officially converted the Roman state to Christianity - Constantine. The Eastern empire long outlived the actual "Roman" empire, was mostly dismantled in the 1200s by the crusaders that were supposedly their allies against the Muslims, and, just when they had started to get their act together again, were taken down for good in 1453 by the Turks, about 1100 years after Constantine and 1000 years after Rome had been sacked by Germans.

Under the Byzantines, Mystras did pretty well and for a time was the tradition seat of power of the heir to the Byzantine throne. Shortly after the fall of Constantinople, the Turks took Mystras and held it for a few hundred years, lost it to the Venetians for a few hundred more years, and then finally retook it in 1715 and started booting the natives out. In the 1830s, after the Greeks won their independence, the western classics geeks who had helped fight off the Turks backed a western classics geek as the first king of modern Greece, Otto. Otto, a German, and his buddies immediately had the people of Mystras refound the long-abandoned Sparta, and also build the village at Athens up into their capitol. Now Mystras is a bunch of ruins and half of Greece lives in Athens.

This began a three-day string of climbing on castles and stuff, which I discovered is a really enjoyable hobby and I highly recommend it if you're ever in Europe.
Another view of Sparta, and also Ana's knee.
Looking at the mountains on the east side of Laconia from the mountains on the west side of Laconia
Looking down on my classmates.
Among their other wonderful social practices, the Spartas were in the habit of leaving scrawny babies out to die. Actually, newborns with birth defects or whose parents couldn't care for them were routinely abandoned in antiquity, so one can't be that hard on the Spartans in particular, but they were known even then for killing off any babies they didn't think could survive their education system. More on that in the next post, but anyway, this is probably the mountain where they exposed those kids.
On a lighter, crimes-against-humanity-free note, this is how we got up to the fortifications.
And this is what we had to drive through to get to that last picture.
The view from the top, looking northish.
Byzantine ruins, as seen from Frankish ruins.
Castle walls. They look just like the Lego set I had.
More castle.
A big face.
This does not look like Greece.
A neither does this.
A couple of tourists.
Look! Trees that don't have olives on them.
A Byzantine church.
I can see the influence on later Turkish mosques.
This picture is only interesting if you like circles or ceilings.
A Byzantine palace for the Despot of Mystras, their equivalent of the Prince of Wales.
They were restoring it, so I couldn't go inside.
Western European church art.
This looks like Italy to me.

And that's it for Mystras.