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Travel Story

Online with Apollo and driving with Athenians

From the chaos of Greece’s capital city to the Sanctuary of Delphi

I cursed myself for getting into such a mess but there was no backing out now. Like it or not I was committed to launching the shiny little Citroen 2CV from the sidewalk of Omonia square into the maelstrom of Athens rush-hour traffic. While Betty puzzled over the faded Xeroxed map I struggled to figure out how the car worked. The roof was simple enough – same principle as a window blind – but the other controls were baffling. No help from the company rep. Perhaps not wanting to witness what happened next he got our signatures on a release form and promptly disappeared.

We were bumbling around Greece on an open-ended schedule and having spent the last few days trudging around Athens on foot we were eager to get out of the city. Renting a car seemed like a good idea. We sprung a deal with a local car rental agency, completed the paper work, and were told the car would be ready in the morning. It could be picked up where the salesman marked an X on our map. It was there alright, parked on the sidewalk of a busy traffic circle, and tended by a young salesman who spoke not a word of English.

By trial and error I got the engine going and determined that the gidget protruding from the centre of the dashboard, which I took to be the hand brake, was actually the gear shift. The moment of truth had arrived. Picking an opening amongst a hoard of onrushing taxis I lurched off the curb. With the engine racing while I fiddled with the gearshift and Betty looked for the right exit we sped round and round the traffic circle like rats trapped on a cage-wheel. Finally, in desperation, I swung into the first available opening and ended up on a quiet side street where we pulled over, heaved a sigh of relief, and got ourselves together.

By mid-morning, headed south on the coast road to Cape Sounion, the horror of Athens traffic was behind us like a bad dream. The little Citroen handled like a charm and with the top rolled back and the warm sea air in our faces we cruised along Attica's Apollo coast which, despite over development of its many beaches, offers stunning vistas of the sea.

It was still early when we pulled into the nearly empty parking lot at Cape Sounion, 30 km south of Athens. Located on the southern tip of the Attica Peninsula and surrounded by rocky cliffs that tumble into the Aegean Sea, the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion has one of the most dramatic settings on the coast. Perched on a craggy spur 65 metres above the ocean, it has been a landmark for mariners for hundreds of years. It was built in 444 BC, at the same time as the Parthenon, and dedicated for worship of the God of the Sea.

In Greek mythology Poseidon, better known by his Roman alias of Neptune, was the brother of Zeus and, as number two in the hierarchy of the Gods, nothing was spared in the construction of his temple. Today 15 of its original 34 white marble columns are still standing and, caught in the early morning light against the sparkling blue ocean, the remains of the Temple of Poseidon are still a magical tribute to the artistry of classical Greece.

Not surprisingly Cape Sounion has become a magnet for tourists – easy to get to and a regular destination for day-tripping busses from Athens. Lord Byron of England was among the first visitors to be captivated by the majesty of the place and he writes of the serene solitude of "Sunium's marbled steep". Better known for his lyric verse than for his acts of vandalism, Lord Byron was also among the first to scratch his name into one of the marble columns. Since he set the precedent back in 1810 literally thousands of lesser scribes have added their names – desecrating almost every accessible surface with their scrawling.

Later that morning, when the first bus-load of tourists began filing out to the ruins, I wondered how many new scraps of graffiti were about to be added to Poseidon's sacred Temple. We walked back to our car and drove north, along the east coast of Attica, careful to give Athens a wide berth. With no schedule and no particular agenda we wound our way into the mountains, stopped for coffee and moussaka at a roadside taverna, and spent the night in a small rural pension with a good view across the Gulf of Evia.

We arrived at Delphi early the next morning and spent the entire day exploring the well preserved ruins of the Sanctuary. From the main entrance the Sacred Way leads to the partially restored Temple of Apollo. Although only a few of its columns remain standing the grandeur of the original building is easy to visualize. Carved into the hillside above the Temple the great theatre, one of the finest in Greece, can seat 5,000 people. And beyond the theatre a broad walkway leads to the Stadium, a level playing field almost 200 metres long lined with tiers of stone seats. It once held 7,000 spectators who gathered here every four years for the Pythian Games.

Located on the craggy slopes of Mount Parnassus, high above the Gulf of Corinth, the Sanctuary of Delphi was regarded by the ancients as the centre of the world. As early as 1500 BC it was a religious site, dedicated to the Earth Goddess Gaia, but the Sanctuary reached the peak of its political influence in the 5th and 4th centuries BC when Apollo took over as God in residence. During the golden age of Classical Greece Delphi was recognized as an autonomous state. It became the site of the Pythian Games, which were second only to the Olympics as a sporting event that brought the rival city-states of Greece together for peaceful competition. More importantly, it was home to the supreme oracle of Delphi who had a direct verbal pipeline to Apollo himself.

Pilgrims throughout the ancient Mediterranean world flocked to Delphi to seek advice from the God of the Sun. Common folks, who could afford the consulting fee, came with questions regarding everything from marriages to business deals, while political leaders posed questions of state and military strategy. But talking to Apollo was not a one-on-one chat.

The words of the God were spoken through a local woman, required to be over the age of 50, who was chosen to act as the consulting priestess or Pythia. After bathing in the sacred Castalian Spring the Pythia entered a small chamber where she sat on a low tripod and inhaled sweet-smelling vapours issuing from a fissure in the ground. The link with Apollo was assumed to be complete when the Pythia entered a trance-like state that often deepened into delirium and occasionally death. Once Apollo was online the presiding priest, having collected an appropriate fee, posed the question and interpreted Apollo's reply from the incoherent mumblings of the Pythia. The answers, translated into verse by the priest, were usually masterpieces of ambiguity.

The ritual of the oracle of Delphi was recorded by the Greek writer Plutarch who served as a high priest in the temple during the first century AD. When excavations in 1892 failed to find any fume-emitting fissures Plutarch's account was dismissed as myth but new scientific evidence suggests that he was in fact correct. A previously unknown fault in the bitumen-rich limestone of Mount Parnassus has recently been identified by U.S. geologists. It passes directly through the temple of Apollo and both active and dried-up springs are scattered along the fault line. Some of these contain traces of both methane and ethylene. The latter is a sweet-smelling, psychoactive gas once used as an anesthetic. It can produce visionary hallucinations and a sensation of disembodied euphoria.

We can only speculate on how many momentous decisions may have been influenced by the befuddled incantations of a woman who was high on the fumes of natural gas. The leaders of both Athens and Sparta regularly consulted the oracle and it's reasonable to suppose they did so before embarking on the disastrous Peloponnesean wars. No one knows what they were told but I like to imagine that both leaders got the same message about the outcome of the war – perhaps the ancient Greek version of it being a "slam-dunk". It was! The Greek city-states wore themselves out fighting one another and were conquered en-masse by the Macedonians. The ambiguous prediction was correct, and the oracle continued to proffer advice for another several hundred years.