Saturday update; the new town and the fortress of Palamidi

It rained till well after midday, but I got stir-crazy after a while and went out anyway.  Heavens, it's only rain!  I went for a walk in the new town.

I haven't taken any photos, partly because it was raining and I am protective of my camera, and partly because it feels a bit weird photographing ordinary people doing their Saturday shopping, when they're buying vegetables and bread and lamb chops, and school shoes and face cream and so forth...  Voyeuristic; as though I'm implying it's really sweet that they go out shopping - just like you and me >gasp<

 

But I like the new town.  It feels very real compared to the immense prettiness of the old town.  It's practical and ordinary, with the kind of shops and cafes every small town needs; fruit and veg stores, bakeries and butchers, stationers, clothes shops, shoe shops, pharmacies, hairdressers...  It may be because I lived for a large chunk of my life in Canterbury, which is very similar to Nafplio in a way - hugely picturesque old town, very ordinary modern suburbs - I appreciate the existence of the suburbs precisely because they aren't full of tourist shops and people taking photographs and cooing over the ancient buildings. 

And I may be wrong, but it looked to me as though with the exception of the supermarkets and the betting shops, pretty much every other shop was an independent private business.  No chains, or almost none.  How marvellous!

 

I know I keep saying I won't be political, and in a way this is political.  But the British High Street has been gutted and emasculated during my lifetime- and yes, I am using those violent terms for a reason, for I regard what's been done to retail in the UK as a kind of violence.  The average British small town has mostly chain stores, chain restaurants and chain cafes in it, and independent retailers a tiny minority at best.  I know there are exceptions, but they are exceptions, not the norm.  So it gives me a real buzz of pleasure to walk along a shopping street in which every single one of the half-dozen opportunities I have to get a coffee is an independent café, not a branch of a national or international chain.  If I wanted to get a new work wardrobe while I was here, I'd have my pick of small clothes shops and boutiques, ranging from the soberest to the most upmarket and chic, and all of them seem to be independents too. 

 

It appals me to think that the demand of multinational big business to have all the market everywhere could be allowed to destroy this, the way it has all-but-destroyed the British independent retailer.  This, what the Greek people have here already, is proper capitalism; individuals running businesses, keeping money circulating in the local economy, providing what local people want and need.  It may not be working well in some cases, I may be idealising it because I've seen what happens when it's lost; some of those retailers may not be making a great living, but the overall economic ecosystem should be supported and kept in health, not undermined.  Here's to the Hellenic high street, long may it continue to be sans Starbucks and Caffe Nero, Marks and Spencer and Accessorise!  Honestly, folks, they aren't that great; and you can't get a spanakopita (or for that matter a decent cup of filter coffee) in Starbucks...

 

Anyway, sorry, rant over.  I bought some lunch and then went back to the little art gallery near my hotel.  It's a regional branch of the National Gallery of Greece, and they had a photography exhibition that looked intriguing.

 

There were a lot of snails in the forecourt, too, including a kind of snail I haven't seen before.

The photography was tremendous; hauntingly beautiful, almost-abstract images of the white interiors of small rural chapels, taken by a photographer called Evgenia Koumantaros.  Really stunning; incredibly subtle shifts of tone, Rothko-style blocks of different shades of white, and every now and then an image with a single detail or point of colour that both draws and startles the eye.  Very impressive.  I've tried to find her work online, to do a link to, but can't, which is irritating.  I thought her work was brilliant.

 

Upstairs is a small collection of pieces relating to the Greek War of Independence; these vary from the earnestly sincere to the really bloody good.  Highlights were a really fine bit of late nineteenth century naval battle painting, and a haunting, almost Goya-esque pastel drawing by Nikolaos Gyzis illustrating the poem about Glory walking alone on the blackened ridge, after the destruction of Psara (I think it's by Solomos but I'll have to look it up).

"The sortie of the Ares"

By the time I came out, the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing.  So I took a gamble, bought a bottle of water, and set off to climb Palamidi, to visit the Venetian fortress.

 

Palamidi, I should explain, is a rock well over 200m high and almost sheer.  You ascend by climbing a staircase of 913 steps which zigzags up the near-perpendicular rock face. 

Starting up the 913 steps

Views over the old town get progressively more amazing as you climb

More steps still to come

The dog of Palamidi

Almost at the top now

The fortress, when you finally reach it, is huge; it takes a good 2 to 3 hours to look round thoroughly.

The views are pretty fabulous too.

I've absorbed a certain amount of fortification-know-how (& vocabulary) from my brother Stephen, who is a real military architecture enthusiast; so I had some idea what I was looking at most of the time.  But I  wish he could have been there; he would have known so much more about what I was looking at, and I'm pretty sure he would be thrilled with the place. 

I visited Palamidi in 1989 and found it very overgrown and wild inside the walls; These days some areas have been tidied up; yet in others it was still just bare rock and plants between the sections of the fortress.  It's built as a series of seven separate forts, linked by massive curtain walls, so there's a lot of walking involved to see it all.
 

Oddly enough, the fortress also has a very good view of the football ground!

After that hard climb up, and a long mooch about inside, I had to go down the same 913 steps, and of course, going down is fairly hard work too, when you do it for a long time. 

I think my quadriceps have now stopped quivering.  It's a great workout, I have to say.