My blogging pal Derrick has a robin that visits his garden, I don’t have a Robin but I do have a Wren. I like the Wren, it is not so obligingly photogenic as the Robin but is possibly my favourite British bird…
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Childhood, Europe, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Travel
Tagged British Birds, Farthing, Life, Ornithology, Travel, Wren
It was an interesting experience to go through the hidden door behind the bookcase and to climb the steep steps into the rooms where they lived and hid.
Imagine staying hidden and quiet all day without a mobile device and the internet!
The little guide book calls it a ‘Museum with a Story’ and this sets it out against other museums that do not have the same emotional connection.
Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favourite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing your link in the comments’ on Norm’s site, anytime between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time).
From the harbour we walked further up the Kali Strata towards the upper town of Ano Symi passing on the way dozens of abandoned once grand mansions that were built over a hundred years ago when Symi’s sponge fishing and ship building industries were both thriving but which fell into decline in the first half of the twentieth century when both suffered serious economic failure.
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Other houses were damaged during the Second-World-War during the German occupation and empty shells stand adjacent to some, like the Pantheon, that have been restored. Rules on restoration are very strict and this together with difficulties of access for modern vehicles (the only viable means of transporting building materials is by expensive donkey train) means that the cost of a restoration is often prohibitive and for this reason the whole process of regeneration is likely to take some considerable time.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, backpacking, Europe, Greece, Greek islands, History, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Ano Symi, Blue Doors of Greece, Dodecanese Islands, Life, Photography, rhodes, Symi, Travel
Narrow cobbled streets, whitewashed houses with paintwork cracked and splintered by the sun. With less than a thousand residents across the entire island there isn’t a great deal of local activity to observe. In the tight, sinuous streets paving stones have been edged in white and decorated with flowers, hearts, sailboats and slogans: “My Kimolos, my paradise”. Lovely.
At the top the tall cathedral seemed somehow too grand and too big and completely out of scale with the tiny streets and boxy houses. The streets are ramshackle and without order or planning as they wound their way to the centre and the sixteenth century Kastro, much of which isdilapidated and in ruins with heaps of rubble from collapsed and mostly abandoned houses.
Inside, some people were clinging on to occupation of houses with only very basic facilities that would certainly be declared unfit in the United Kingdom.
The Kastro is an important historical monument and there are plans to restore the buildings and some early work has begun but it is likely to take a very long time because current funding from the Greek Government and the European Union is totally inadequate which leaves the project financially beyond restorative reach.
As surely as a sunflower drops its head and dies if anyone wants to see these old doors they had better go soon because they will soon be replaced with plastic and will have gone the way of the old Greek ferries, the unreliable bus services and the dusty corner shops that sell things people no longer need.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Cathedrals, Europe, Greece, Greek islands, History, Literature, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Cyclades, Cyclades. Greek Door, Greek Ferries, Kimolos, Life, Milos, Photography, Travel
Next to pointless cruising and boring city tour buses the third holiday form of holiday transport that I dislike most of all are those annoying tourist trains which are now an irritating feature of almost everywhere you go.
I have vowed never to go on one so was horrified to discover that the bus to the site was not a regular vehicle at all but one of these gaudily painted eye-sores which look so out of place (except perhaps at Disneyland). Unfortunately it was the only sensible way to get to the Askelepieion because walking was out of the question and I wasn’t even going to consider paying for a taxi so I had to climb down off my snooty pedestal, abandon my lofty principles and jump aboard the train.
It took about twenty minutes to reach the site and we paid the modest entry fee and went inside to see the ruins of the once grand hospital where modern methods of medicine were developed and where treatment was a three stage process of incubation and diagnosis, treatment and recovery and then convalescence.
Rather like the Ancient Agoras in the town there wasn’t a great deal standing and what there was certainly not original because once again it had been dismantled and recycled and try as hard as I could to imagine what it may have looked like it was hopeless because all I could see were toppled columns, ruined temples and fractured and splintered stones.
I used to lament such destruction but here I realised that if I wanted to see it I could always go again to the Knights Castle because they used the very stones that are now missing at this place to construct the fortress. My view now is that this really doesn’t matter, it is like a child playing with building bricks, it builds, dismantles and builds again using the same bricks but in a different architectural style.
As is often the case the important thing about being there was being there and not what we were going to see.
Temporarily this form of recycling is mostly at an end now thanks to UNESCO and a greater shared global appreciation of World Heritage and for the time being never again will a historically or culturally valuable site suffer the indignity of being wilfully dismantled to build something new and eventually therefore the World will be cluttered up with wholly new construction.
I had visited the Askelepieion several years before in 1984 and little seemed to have changed in thirty years except for fashion (no improvement) and waistline (several more inches).
Then and now…
To make the site make more sense for visitors the Italians, when they excavated the site, thoughtfully restored some of the steps and the columns in the same way that they had rebuilt the Acropolis at Lindos and the Street of the Knights in Rhodes.
I used to think this was rather a shame as well but I am now persuaded by Henry Miller who wrote of the the reconstruction and interpretation of the Minoan Palace at Knossos on Crete: “There has been much controversy about the aesthetics of Sir Arthur Evans’s work of restoration. I find myself unable to come to any conclusion about it; I accepted it as a fact. However Knossos may have looked in the past, however it may look in the future, this one which Evans has created is the only one I shall ever know. I am grateful to him for what he did…”
Substitute Italians for Arthur Evans and he could easily have been talking about the Askelepieion on Kos.
An hour was quite long enough to examine the site in a superficial tourist sort of way (after all we are not archaeologists) and after we had walked around all three levels and through the ruined temples and buildings we returned to the car park and waited to be taken back to Kos on the pretend train.
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Posted in Athens, Cyclades, Europe, Greece, Greek islands, History, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Askelepieion, Dodecanese, Greek islands, Greek Odyssey, Kos, Life, Mussolini, Photography, Travel
As the first capital of Portugal, Guimarães is known as the place where the country was born – ‘The Cradle City’. In 1095 Count Henry of Burgundy, who had married princess Teresa of León, established in Guimarães the second County of Portugal and on July 25th 1109 Afonso Henriques, son of Count Henry of Burgundy, was born here and it was where Duke Afonso Henriques proclaimed Portuguese independence from the Kingdom of León, after the Battle of São Mamede in 1128, declaring himself to be Afonso I, King of Portugal.
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, History, Literature, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Guimaraes, Life, Photography, Portugal, Travel, UNESCO
There are two hundred and ninety four steps up a spiral staircase that take visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, is reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although you know that you were ascending sometimes according to the extreme angle of the tilt of the building it feels as though you were going down at the same time, which, believe me, is a very unusual experience.
Mark Twain described it like this: “The winding staircase within is dark, but one always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or dip of the tower. Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on one end; others only on the other end; others only in the middle.”
Posted in backpacking, Cathedrals, Europe, History, Italy, Literature, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Campo dei Miracoli, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Life, Lucca, Pisa, Travel, Tuscany, World Heritage Site
