Although the museum was closed for lunch, necessitating a return at the end of our circuit round Mystra, the Cathedral provided many excellent photo opportunities. I will be devoting a whole post to the frescos I saw elsewhere, but this place warrants coverage all of its own…
We parked at the lower of the two car parks for Mystra, ready to go up and then down. The first marked place we reached was the Metropolis (actually the Cathedral), but on the way there we saw plenty of noteworthy (and photo-worthy) things…
Just below my parents house in Tseria is a small church, not even the biggest one in the village, and all around its outside are interesting pieces of artwork…
A brief post to introduce you to the beauties of the harbour at Kardamyli, the nearest coastal town to Tseria…
Like the Tannery, this has a video explaining the process of making gunpowder. Most of the gunpowder used by the Greeks in the War of Independence of 1821 was manufactured in Dimitsana, so this is of particular relevance to this museum. Once more it is a story told in pictures…
The Tannery is absolutely remarkable. There is a 15 minute video which describes the process of getting from skins to usable leather. The process was painstakingly slow, occupying something in the region of a month per batch of skins. If you are ever fortunate enough to visit this site make sure you watch the video right through – it is good.
Once again, pictures will tell this story better than words…
From Dimitsana we descended into the Lousios Gorge, where there is a Byzantine church and the remains of ancient Gortys, not be confused with Gortyn on the island of Crete.
There is not the hugest amount to see at Gortys but I did get some good pictures….
The open air museum of water power at Dimitsana is a remarkable site, worthy of several posts. This post covers the first part of the site, leading up to the tannery, and including some stuff about fulling, and some introductory stuff about water and energy.
Pictures tell this story better than words…
A final coda to my post about Olympia (https://aspiblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/ancient-olympia/), a lively and amusing version of the story of how the ancient Olympics got started is told by Tom Holt in the novel Olympia. Any book with his name on the cover will be a good read.
After an excellent stay at the Hotel Europa, we set off as intended just before 10 o’clock. For the next hour things did not go quite as planned…
First we could not find our way on to the road from Olympia to Tripoli as intended, and then having got on to a suitable route we picked up a hitchhiker which delayed things further.
However, we still arrived at our first stop of the day, Dimitsana, in good time to go round the open air museum of water power.
So
me pictures from this portion of the day…
Between those on display at my parents holiday home, the stuff at cape Tainaros and a good mosaic at Olympia I reckon I have enough to justify providing a collection of mosaic pictures…
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