Greece - Delphi

That's enough of Athens - time to see a bit of the rest of the country. We hired a car and did a little trip round a few well-known sites, went up the mountains for a look-see and stumbled across a surprise bridge.

First call was Delphi, home of the Oracle. As it's half-way up a mountain, it was bloody freezing but well worth the trip.

The Oracle had predictive powers. You could come here and ask a question in the full knowledge that you would get an answer that, though correct, you would not really understand until it was too late. This got around the sticky question of causality. If you didn't know what to do to avert the horrible fate that stood in your way, you couldn't do anything about it and it would happen anyway. But you still got to worry about it.

It was several thousand years before public transport systems were invented and stress was turned into a proper science.


Delphi is a large spread-out site, and up a hill to boot. That means that you have to do a lot of walking to see it all. As we are pretty lazy, this is a long-shot of a bit we couldn't be bothered to walk to.
That's better, a close bit. Some more of them columns.
Writing on a stone. There seems to be two different types here - but, then, it's all Greek to me.
Kim gets up-close and personal with a piece of rock.
The site had a shed-load of temples. A lot of Gods got a look-in but Apollo was the big guy round here (and, incidentially at Delos which we will see later).

A lot of broken stones. Up a hill.
The top of a column which is probably of a type that has a special name.
Here's Apollo's temple, as expected, the biggest one here.
A lot went on here. This is the theatre.
And here's the stadium. This was right at the top of a very steep hill. You probably got a gold just for making it up here.
A different view of Apollo's temple. He was the son of Zeus and seems to have had a big portfolio (healing, music, the Sun, herds, flocks, etc.).
A sarcophagus - and that's the end of Delphi.
Time to get a move on. We stopped for lunch in the lovely seaside town of Itea and then headed off to Nafpaktos for the night.

The car, taken from the hotel balcony. Me (thinks): "That looks like a piece of crap". Kim: "Ahhh, it's sooo coooote". Me (thinks): "Thought so".
When you've got a room with a balcony overlooking the Med, you might as well make use of it.
And we could also see this. Before we got here, we thought we would either have to go all the way back round the bay or get a ferry across to get to Olympus. Not so, the brand new Rio-Antirio Bridge will do the getting-across-the-water thing and what a beautiful structure it is. More of this tomorrow.