I suppose at the end of every journey, upon reflection, there is always a low point to the trip just by dint of comparison to all the other days. Well, personally, I already know which day was the low point, and it wasn't because of what we saw, but because the journey there was so incredibly painful.
After Pylos, and learning that there are something like 12 places on the Peleponnese alone named Pylos, I had taken to cross referencing the locations with my Atlas of Classical Mythology against the GPS and a second check against the satellite view of Google maps to make sure that we had city names and street locations (since so many of these streets are unnamed, dirt roads) in the right place. As a result, when we went in search of Nestor's Palace the second time, it was a breeze, and we drove right there while the German group in the car in front of us had to pull over to review their GPS instructions which were incorrectly telling them to turn right a block too early.
I don't know quite how yesterday's debacle happened, but one would think that an ancient and preserved city like Messini, which was virtually untouched throughout the millennia and a world heritage site, with extended hours, would have a couple of signs to help weary travelers find it, but such was not the case, and perhaps, I will finally be motivated to write (rant) about the signage, or lack thereof, in Greece which has been a bit of a thorn in my side since we left Athens.
Anyway, as I was saying, after Pylos, we really couldn't trust the GPS to give us the actual location of what we wanted, particularly if there were a modern city versus an ancient city. Ancient cities just aren't on the map, as one might expect, so we are regularly in search of triangulation between and amongst the adjacent modern cities. Well, this one happened to be "Mavromati", and all the descriptions and satellite photos showed the ancient city as "west of Mavromati". Sounds unique enough, right? Turns out that there are 3 of them in the southwest part of the Peleponnes alone, which we only discovered in sequence.
The first Mavromati was located about 45 minutes outside Kalamata, high in the mountains in the right area, and took us one failed attempt before Randall balked at the chromatodromos, and we had to backtrack through another mountain route that had paved roads. West of Mavromati #1, however, yielded another chromatodromos, which we seriously doubted led to a major archeological site. Notwithstanding, we got out of the car, and hiked about a kilometer in and up to what were some other ruins, and so the trip was not an entire waste, we did manage to see a real wild boar, grunting and all.
Now, we have a portable MiFi with us in order to connect to the internet wherever we are, but in the mountains of nowhere Greece, we weren't getting a good signal, and Google maps was insufferably slow that it was functionally not working. That was when we decided to go back to the car, and where we got better signal, and Google was showing a different Mavromati layout. Back on the GPS, we now find another Mavromati, which is due north of modern Messini. I am skeptical, since old and new cities are rarely located in such close proximity, but I don't have any better idea, so I navigate us practically back to Kalamata, and into Mavromati #2, which is a veritable maze of narrow streets, and out the western road all the way to the next town. No ancient city. Then I think, perhaps, it was off the southwestern road, and I navigate us all around the big empty space on the GPS, some 20 kilometers, through several more towns, and back to Mavromati #2. Still no giant archeological site. We agree to drive into Messini and try to follow the Fodor's instructions Randall found online ("from the current city of Messini, follow the signpost to Mavromati"--yep, that was all we had to go on). So, we drove around downtown modern Messini, and found one sign which we tried to follow until the trail went cold, and then we took one of two routes north into Mavromati #2, and back into the maze. Now, Randall was balking at turning onto narrow paved roads, not just the dirt roads, and having no other way to get out of the town since the left turn I wanted was blocked by two residential cars, perhaps not unreasonably thinking that it was Sunday and no one should be driving around at this hour, we could only go east, which we did.
That was when we stopped, again, consulted Google, the Atlas, the GPS and the car rental map, and realized that near the location of the ancient city (Atlas and car rental map), there was yet a third Mavromati. So, back north, another 20km, we turned towards Mavromati #3, and finally found Ancient Messini. We were beginning to think it was a curse against places that started with "m" since Mystras was also such a bust.
In all, the journey took us just a little over 6 hours, and I don't even want to know how many kilometers. Fortunately, because it is such an important site, it was open until 8pm (which we knew in advance, or we would have abandoned this search after Mavromati #1), but to say that our feelings for the naming and signage of things in Greece and particularly this area tainted our enjoyment of an otherwise amazing archeological destination would be an understatement.
It will take me a while before the distaste goes away enough that I will want to post anything substantive about this site, but I will say that we meticulously tried to see everything in the city because, even though we now know exactly where it is, we will not be coming back here.
No comments:
Post a Comment