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EDMUND KEELEY, Professor of English and creative writing at Princeton University, has published four novels set in Greece and several collections of modern Greek poetry in translation.<\/p>\n
Delphi was thought by the ancient Greeks to be the navel of the world, the earth’s center, and at the same time the primary seat of other-worldly powers. Its oracle was born out of violent conflict: the slaughter of dark forces in the shape of a dragon called the Python by the god of music, healing and prophesy, called Apollo. The modern setting in all its mixed splendor still reflects this history of contraries, offering an updated version of what the Greek poet George Seferis once called ”that eternal dialogue at Delphi between the wrath of earth and sacred peace.”<\/p>\n
It was escape from the imminent wrath of earth in the form of an Athenian smog cloud and heat wave – at its peak, 105 degrees in the shade – that drove me in a hurry to the foothills of Parnassus. I was out for landscape with startling high places, cool grandeur, silence, what one remembers to be more abundant in Delphi than anywhere else in mainland Greece south of Meteora and Athos. And I was out for the discovery of exquisite artifacts that you could pretend nobody else had ever noticed before and the valley of countless olive trees, 19th-century harbors still unspoiled, fresh fish dinners by the sea. It is all still there, though now you have to work a bit to recover what was once so freely and generously given, as though to you alone.<\/p>\n
You may find that the change in Delphi largely brought on by tourist traffic has its positive consequences. For one, it forces you to use your wits to track down out-of-the-way places you might normally skip and to explore the well-trodden places at the borders of daylight. For another, it presses you to give more time to the surrounding landscape, which in turn may inspire you to visit at close quarters what has captured your imagination at a distance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
There are, for example, the great cliffs behind the ruins, known as ”the shimmering rocks,” and the sharp cleavage between them that forms the gorge of the Castalian spring, whose sweet water still flows amply beside the highway, and the vast sea of olive trees below that floods the Pleistos valley and the broad Chrissa-Amphissa plain to Itea and the Corinthian Gulf.<\/p>\n
If you climb to the high point of Apollo’s sanctuary, pause at the stadium to pay a moment’s tribute to this early home of peaceful international competition – actually twice the length of a World Cup soccer field – and keep on going up as far as you can, you will find yourself flush against the rock-face called Rhodini in the guidebooks and Kroki in the town below. It is unlikely that you will stay long, because as you look up at its rim, the cliff seems to thrust you back, threaten you with huge slices of itself, boulders that give off the illusion of overhanging the sheer face against the laws of gravity. Anyway it will make you aware of the damage it could do, as it has over the centuries, when earthquake or windstorm brought down portions of the cliff apparently in the god’s displeasure over some mortal idiocy.<\/p>\n
And then there is the Castalian gorge, still tantalizing to those attracted by steep and narrow places that have a mysterious history, its early Roman fountain – with those waters that Pausanias, author of the first reliable guidebook, called delicious in the second century – turned by the wheel of time into a Christian shrine with its ancient niches carved in the rock serving to shield candles and icons in place of pagan offerings.<\/p>\n
The sea of olive trees is less sacred and less dangerous territory. It provides a long green passage to the shore, where lobster and shrimp and honestly fresh fish are still plentiful. So is clear seawater for a swim if you voyage out beyond the tankers and freighters tied up for scrapping in Itea harbor or search for free coastline near Galaxidi, a village that has remained steadfastly out of date in style and untarnished by modern thinking ever since it decided that the steamship would never become a substitute for the clipper ships they built there to run Napoleon’s blockade. The 40 dying freighters tied up outside Galaxidi harbor may be put into some kind of historical perspective by the portrait gallery of over 50 two- and three-masted sailing transports in the village museum, open at very odd hours and therefore reserved largely for those who demonstrate the same stubborn persuasion as the villagers.<\/p>\n
There are two spots within the site that seem to me to offer the best possibilities for private discovery. The first, on the upper level of Apollo’s sanctuary, should be approached the moment the site opens in the morning (currently at 9); the second, that gathering of temples in the lower sanctuary known as the ”Marmaria,” should be approached just before sunset, after the upper site has closed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
If you begin the morning visit by moving quickly to the top of the theater and gradually working your way down to the Sacred Way against the current of the tourist traffic, you can start your tour with a long moment of calm in the shade of twinned cypresses on the wall above the theater’s empty arc. This will allow you room and time to take in not only the expanse of both upper and lower sanctuaries but the mountains behind and beyond, clear of all but the simplest forms of nature except for the occasional silhouetted goat or wheeling eagle, shaping a bowl of blue-gray rock and olive-green valley that seems so free of unnecessary complication that for the moment you can believe yourself indeed at the timeless center of the world.<\/p>\n
The lower sanctuary, open long after all other public places have closed to the afternoon heat, provides another access to silent comtemplation, because only a few visitors find their way down there late in the day. Sometime before the sun sets, choose one or another of the unsorted temple blocks on the edge of the site and consider the Tholos first of all, the grace of its three restored columns and the suprise of their circular placing. Then review the ancient trunks of the olive trees within arms’ reach just below, some said to be a thousand years old. Turn finally to survey the upper sanctuary above the highway, now viewed from a perspective that highlights those major monuments you explored in the morning – the Athenian Treasury, the polygonal wall, Apollo’s temple, the curving theater – seen from here with a fullness, a sense of true scale, that is perhaps as close as one gets to what the ancients themselves must have seen.<\/p>\n
There is one other bit of territory still open to discovery, the museum – but here you have to work particularly hard for your rewards. The secret is to abandon your guidebook, avoid the temptation to follow one or another of the guided tours that will cross your path, choose your rooms and artifacts not in any particular order but as they liberate themselves from the fluctuating pressure of other explorers such as yourself. That way you will see that the pleasure of this relatively small museum comes not simply from the best-known pieces but also from sudden encounters with less well-advertised objects that demand unobstructed attention, objects you may be seeing for the first time and may not so easily encounter again.<\/p>\n
The major problem at Delphi, as at most great sites in the world, is that created by all the others there who, like you, are bent on finding their own modes of escape. You run into them early on your route, soon after leaving Thebes, busload after busload traveling under the label ”Cruise Air” or ”Traveland” or ”Chatours,” pausing at Levadia’s Friendly Stop for a Coke or a curio, chattering in most of the expected tourist languages – German, French, Italian, Japanese, English – unguided for the moment and therefore probably blissfully unaware of dark local history that is now part of their own. There is no one at Levadia’s Friendly Stop to tell them how very close they are to the ancient crossroads where Odeipus murdered the stranger that was his father and thereby gave us a myth that helped to shape contemporary psychotherapy.<\/p>\n
Many travelers in Greece, one soon perceives, are anyway not so much interested in local history, dark or otherwise, as they are in having a good time, a Zorba-like release, dancing with the natives at the Discotheque Katmandu. And even before they get into that kind of folk mythology, many want to find a reasonably comfortable hotel for the night, and first thing the following morning, a souvenir to take back home for remembrance in the cold of winter. During the last 20 years these immediate needs have changed the modern town of Delphi, half a mile beyond the ancient site, from a village of quaint tile roofs and narrow dirt streets -once marked by the passage of more incontinent mules and donkeys than foreign visitors – into a long parking lot of tour buses, row on row of small hotels (the grander hotels are discreetly hidden from sight on the far outskirts of the town), one-room shops with every variety of ”Greek Popular Art” or ”Greek High Fashion” and restaurant on restaurant with grand terraces giving on the valley but often an unholy mix of standard local fare (”smashed meat,” ”grilled chaps,” ”fresh frozen fish”) and second-rate international cuisine.<\/p>\n
”This town is another disaster,” says the Mayor of Delphi. ”We were moved here from the site itself a hundred years ago when they had to knock down our old town in order to excavate the ancient ruins, and someday soon we’ll have to move farther around the bend of this mountain and rebuild our town the way it once was, since we ourselves have now destroyed much of the pleasure in it by putting up these modern cement monsters year after year.”<\/p>\n
The Mayor is a fourth-generation Delphiot, owner of a small cement hotel on the main street heading west, either an incurable optimist with an eccentric sense of history or a shrewd politician with a black sense of humor. If you complain about the excesses of loquacious guides and their hurried charges crowding the ruins, he will remind you that Plutarch complained about tedious guides some 2,000 years ago, yet honored Apollo’s oracle by taking it seriously and the god’s sanctuary by celebrating, at his own pace, whatever struck his fancy among the few remnant works of art that the Romans and others had failed to plunder before his day.<\/p>\n
Contrary to the Mayor’s claim, the town of Delphi is not entirely a disaster. Before leaving the place it is worth taking a walk to the upper neighborhoods, where you can still find some of the narrow stairway streets and tiled cottages of the early 20th-century village. At one of the high points, alone on a bluff, there is the ruin of what was once the home of the wonderfully eccentric, visionary poet Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife, Eva Palmer. For a while during the late 20’s and early 30’s, these two had a dream of restoring Delphi’s ancient role as a focal point of Greek artistic and spiritual expression. They tried twice through international festivals to give their grand idea life, but all that apparently remains of it now is this two-story house, open to the winds and graffiti, and separate monuments to each of them outside the front gate, one turned slightly away from the other. Traveling To DelphiGetting There To really appreciate the way in which the concrete landscape of Athens is transformed into the rolling green countryside en route to Delphi – giving way in turn to the rugged mountains behind the town – take the public bus from Athens’s Liossion Street bus station. A taxi ride to the bus station from central Athens costs $2.50 at most. Buses depart for Delphi at 7:30 A.M., 10:30, 12:45 P.M., 3 and 5:30. The trip takes three hours and a single fare is $5.30. Buy your tickets well in advance of departure. The bus back to Athens leaves from the Cafe Apollon on King Paul and Queen Frederica Street in Delphi, which is also where you buy your tickets. The cafe is open from 5.30 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. and from 4 to 8 P.M. Buses leave for Athens at 6 A.M., 9, 10:30, 1 P.M. and 5:30, although they often run up to half an hour late. It is not possible to reserve seats for the return journey and visitors with tickets are sometimes left stranded on the sidewalk as the packed bus closes its doors.Motorcoach Tours For those who prefer a little more comfort, several Athens travel agencies offer one-and two-day tours to Delphi by bus. ABC Tours has a one-day trip, with stops in Lefkadia and Arachova, for $38. The price includes a midday meal and a guide for the Delphi museum and the ancient site. Their two-day tour costs $59 and includes two meals at a Delphi hotel. ABC Tours, 58 Stadiou Street; telephone 3211381. Tours to Delphi are also offered by Chat Tours, 4 Stadiou Street, Athens, (telephone 3223137); G.O. Tours, 31-33 Voulis Street, Athens (3225951); Key Tours, 2 Ermou Street, Athens (3232520), and Tea Tours, 52 Vass. Sofias Avenue, Athens (7213470). Any Athens hotel will make the reservations.Where to Stay Delphi, a small town with only two main streets, boasts three topcategory hotels, all with rooms with views over the valley. The Hotel Amalia, modern and airy, stands high above the town. Single rooms with two meals rent for $33 a night and double rooms for $53. Telephone: (0265) 82101.The Hotel Xenia, just below the Amalia, has a garden and vine-covered walls. A single room with two meals costs $28 a night, while a single with all meals is $35. A double with two meals costs $44.60, with all meals $59. Telephone: (0265) 82151. The Hotel Vouzas has single rooms with two meals at $34 and doubles at $55. There are also several lower-category hotels with prices from $13 for a double with no meals. Restaurants Delphi lacks high-quality restaurants, but it is impossible to walk more than a few yards without coming across a taverna offering such Greek specialties as moussaka, souv @laki or grilled meat on a skewer, stuffed tomatoes and stuffed vine leaves. Most meals average around $11 for two with wine. A feature of Delphi, however, is the tavernas with outdoor seating overlooking the valley and the bay, which offer fixed-price threecourse meals. The Iaionos, on King Paul and Queen Frederica Street, serves a range of three-course menus for $5.30 to $7.40 a person. Starters are usually a choice of moussaka, stuffed tomatoes or stuffed vine leaves, followed by souvlaki and then fruit or ice cream. Other tavernas offering a three-course set menu are situated in three hotels, the Lefas, on the same street, and the Phivos and Phaethon. Cheaper set menus are available from the taverna Dionysos and the restaurant Elatos.At the restaurants of the three hotels mentioned above lunch and dinner cost about $7.80 a person for a traditional Greek starter, main dish and dessert.The Museum Situated on the road leading into Delphi from Athens, just before you enter the town, the museum contains pieces from the ancient site and is particularly renowned for its bronze statue of the charioteer, excavated in 1896 after it had been covered in the earthquake of 373 B.C. The museum is open daily, except Tuesday, from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M (except for Sundays and holidays, when its hours are 10 to 4). Entrance is about $1.20.The Ruins The entry to the ancient site is $1.20. The site is open from 9 to 3 Monday to Saturday and from 10 to 4 on Sundays and holidays. Shopping Delphi is not renowned for its night life, shopping or special events. One distinctive offering is the celebrated honey from Delphi and from nearby Mount Parnassus. The honey is on sale at several Delphi stores. Ioannis Bakourou on King Paul and Queen Frederica Street, opposite the Hotel Phivos, sells Delphi honey for about $6.35 a kilo (2.2 pounds) and Parnassus honey for $4.90 a kilo. There are also several quality jewelry stores in the town, selling a wide range of gold and silver articles.PAUL ANASTASI<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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