Rhamnous

Those who have visited my house know we have a wall of photographs from places we have visited.  In one frame we can highlight three moments from our trips.  Generally, a place only gets one frame with the exception of Antarctica and Greece.  I've thought about changing out the photographs--they are attached to glass which can easily be swapped--but how to decide which memorable photograph will be relegated to a drawer or the ephemera of some electronic file?

Well, Rhamnous is making me rethink replacing one of the photos of Greece.

About 20 min north of Marathon, this is a virtually unknown and untouched gem!  There is a lot of history about the site, which I will let you all research on your own (FYI, I started here).  Suffice to say, this is a prominent military port settlement, with two distinct temples and a fortress enclosing a city.  At least that's what we saw.  I say this because at the margins on any site, there is alway more to be discovered, and we were truly running out of steam.  Because like all good archaeological sites, it is nestled in a mountain foothill and requires a hike of significant elevation to show worthiness to invoke the favor of the god (or goddesses in this case).

Here, we start at around 75m in elevation, following the ancient road to the temples another 200m along and 15m in elevation.  

Reconstructed wall segment.  We had fun noticing that the new blocks and pediment bore the date of the project (1991 for this section).  

Note the condition of the road/path.  One must have some goat DNA to visit these sites.

Temple of Themis (Goddess of Justice), although there appear to be two thrones, one for each goddess in judgment.

Temple of Nemesis (Goddess of Just Retribution) (north side view).

East side view, showing carved areas where the column has left a shadow.  Also note the etched graffiti of a foot.  

Altar beyond the east entrance, with our minder in the background.

We weren't allowed to go on/into the temples, and because they are raised with many steps before on gets to the main floor, it is hard to get a sense of the scale, particularly as the one to Nemesis is the largest to her.  Also, since they are so close together, although distinctly not parallel, it was not possible to walk between them without drawing a whistle from our minder, not that with 6" clearance those pictures would have been of any use to tell a better story.  

That said, I did stumble upon some interesting graffiti.  Despite quite a bit of online searching, I haven't been able to determine what this means or more importantly, why.  But the dates correspond roughly with the time around WWII, and I suspect strongly that these are tributes to individuals who died, perhaps asking for justice for their deaths.  And perhaps that is just my own fictionalization.  Anyway, here is the picture I took.  

Pay special attention to the two "markers" mid right with is enclosed in a rectangle with a plant at the top (rotate 90° counterclockwise to read) and mid top (upside down).

Lower right step.  Initials, an inscription and a date (1938) as well as a floral depiction.

Here there are two feet and a hand with rings on 4th and 5th fingers, as well as text, and dates abounding.  A veritable treasure trove of mystery on its own! 

Well, this alone would have been worth the price of admission, but we were led further by our minder to the "panoramic viewpoint".  I will note that this comes up on Google maps as an actual location, and it made no sense to me until I got there.

Our minder described it as 300m to paradise.  Yes, 300m of hiking down loose rocks at a 15-20° slope down 85m of elevation.  Oh, but it was worth it.  While I will never hike to the tholos tombs of Thoriko ever again, I will most definitely return to Rhamnous.  There was simply too much to appreciate in one trip.  It needs to be digested in pieces before new details can be assimilated.  So, for this trip, I stuck with my standard tropes of architectural and civil engineering (stairs, doorways, drainage) and the odd cannonball???

Stairs, stairs, stairs!!!

Door lintel and threshold, especially showing where the door would have been set.

Drainage, carved in marble!The convergence of multiple drainage conduits.

Rooms adjacent to the main road.Room with a covered well.  Possibly a cannonball???

Pot shards littered the ground that one couldn't avoid walking on them.  I'm not sure they were meaningful from an archeological standpoint, but we will never know. 

Of course, we had also been promised that there was a different route out of the fort, but that was not to be.  Instead, we had to scramble back up the rock-littered goat path.  Here is the road taken and the road not.

A view of "the goat path".  You can see our minder waiting for our return on the viewpoint, and another visitor starting her descent.

We started up this road, despite the nominal barriers of some tape suggesting that this was not for visitors, and thought better fearing we might get stuck at a more impassable barrier after hiking up 400m only to have to turn around.

So, what did we miss?  Well, there was no site map, so we may never know!  The smaller things were easier to understand.  The larger spaces were harder to parse.  Like the theatre on the north side of the settlement, or the gymnasium on the south side.  In fact, now that I can look at the panoramic view picture I took without sun glare and with magnification, I think we completely missed a large segment of the north side (we got about as far as the second set of light green trees behind the cypresses and got a little overwhelmed by everything.  I can fully appreciate how the mouse feels in the maze.  So, we will study the map and use what we learn at other sites to help us understand what think is at Rhamnous, and then return to explore a little further and confirm.