Greece Skies: 1966 [Sky Watch Friday]

In my last posting three weeks ago, I indicated that I would resume with shots from a tour we took to Greece in 2005.  Actually, our first trip there dates back to 1966, when we drove in a VW Beetle  from Munich, Germany through Italy and Yugoslavia all over Greece. Back then, I was shooting Kodachrome 2x2 slides, and storing them in plastic Vis File pages. This proved to be a bad idea, since after several decades in loose leaf binders, they managed to accumulate specks of dust and dirt [which are obvious in the top two images]. I discovered that when I decided to put them through a digital scanner. It was quite a chore trying to remove the spots pre-scanning and post editing.  Having said that, I will delay again posting the 2005 shots and show you some 'ancient' images from this earlier trip.
Our first stop was in northern Greece in Meteora where monasteries were built atop giant sandstone pillars, starting in the 9th century A.D. To quote Wikipedia: “Access to the monasteries was originally (and deliberately) difficult, requiring either long ladders lashed together or large nets used to haul up both goods and people. This required quite a leap of faith – the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only "when the Lord let them break". Until the 17th century, the primary means of conveying goods and people up and down was by means of baskets and ropes. Below are two shots that give some sense of the scale of these constructs.



Leaving Meteora, we headed south to Delphi, home of the Oracle of Apollo. The remains of a temple, an amphitheater, and several other structures are built into the mountainside. We happened to arrive during the filming of what appeared to be some religious rite in the temple [below].

 As the sun was going down, the light was magical. The shots below were taken higher up from the theater.


The last shot was taken in the harbor area of a place I do not recall. I found it fascinating how the fishermen worked together as a team mending their nets.