A Rough Map of Greece: The Bus From Athens

GREECE is full of buses, ranging from dented bone-shakers that rattle around a daily circuit of villages to glass-topped palaces on wheels that carry tourists to points of interest. The boneshakers are good-humored, adaptable, and always get there, but they operate in Greek and attend solely to transport. The tourist buses are polished and feather-sprung. They provide iced drinks and a guide who speaks three languages. They propose to waft the traveler about the countryside as though upon a magic carpet, and would succeed if the traveler didn’t interfere.

Travelers being what they are, the intentions of the bus companies are invariably thwarted by misunderstandings over tickets, seats, or destination, and progress is interrupted by emergency stops and enlivened by missed connections. Every bus party contains one member who, at the moment of departure, must be enticed from a shop, a cave, the top of a pillar, or the washroom. It also contains, unfortunately, one member who thinks he (or she) has been cheated out of the front window seat and refuses to be consoled.

These difficulties aside, sightseeing by bus is convenient and pleasant. It takes the traveler anywhere within reason, and the schedule is flexible. A passenger who falls in love with Naufplion can improvise arrangements to stay there, going on by another bus when his interest in the place is exhausted.

The bus trip out to Cape Sounion is an afternoon’s diversion. The road follows the coast eastward through a plushy beach resort district and some scattered commercial enterprises, among them a salt plant. The open pools for evaporating seawater are surrounded by stacks of reddish tiles — slabs of salt awaiting further refinement.

When open country begins, it is all hills and sea. The coast is not high, but very steep and irregular. Peacock-blue water lies below, and bare, dustbrown scrub above, with the road hung between and clinging to the rocky, sharply indented coastline like a panicky climber to a ledge. Now and then a small hut appears, or a half-built house, but nobody really lives on these breezy heights. This is strange, for the view lies clear for miles around and the beaches, although narrow, are smooth, attractive sand. The guide explains it briefly. No water. No rain.

Cape Sounion is far enough east to provide a wide view of the sea-lanes leading to Athens, and therefore of any enemy fleet approaching the city. It is near enough, in a straight line, so that the spearpoint of the gargantuan statue of Athena on the acropolis could be seen, a single fleck of gold light, from the cape. There must have been a lookout at Sounion as soon as there was a town at Athens, and various fortifications have been raised and fought over. Today there are the ruins of Poseidon’s temple, the much-obscured remains of a lesser temple to Athena, the parking lot, the office selling tickets to view the ruins, and an inoffensive tourist pavilion hunched down on the western beach, where it offers food, drink, and lodging without obscuring the antique prospect.

Very slightly offshore, east of the temple, stands the huge rock from which Aegeus threw himsell into the sea when Theseus’ ship came back from Crete with black sails, indicating to Aegeus that his son had been killed by the Minotaur. Having led his pack up the steep path to the temple, the guide sat us on fallen stonework and told the whole legend before going into the history of the building, which is interesting and a source of scholarly controversy.

POSEIDON’S temple is Doric in style, but its proportions are not those of the Parthenon. Debate rages over just what the differences indicate. Is it an earlier, less expert structure, or is it contemporary, but adapted to different stone and a different setting? To a nonexpert eye the temple, although stubbier than the Parthenon and made of a coarse local marble that lacks the Pentelic radiance, is a splendidly ruinous ruin. A drift of stormscarred columns rises from an open rectangle piled with blocks and drums of stone. The marble is a soft silvery sand color, and since the interior walls are completely gone, light falls from all sides across the pillars. Reflections and shadows cross and tangle in a delicate, continual motion, as though the marble breathed. Every change of ground reveals a different pattern, the standing columns, the broken columns, and the fallen pieces wheeling lightly around each other like the glittering fragments in a kaleidoscope.

It is a little disturbing to imagine what the building was like when it stood intact, with a sanctified blockhouse set among the columns and a sturdy roof closing out the sky. Would we like Doric buildings half so well if they came to as undamaged? This one must have looked a bit like a Victorian bank — aggressively respectable.

Filled with information, the bus party exploded and went scurrying over the ruins with cameras, each person intent on photographing the temple minus other tourists. A stout German with a thatch of rusty gray curls struck a Byronic pose that suited his hair if not his accent and held it while his friend adjusted the camera. At the crucial moment, a man trying to photograph his lady perched on a wall backed in front of the German, and Byron was blotted out by an alien rump. Problems of this sort led to a war of maneuver, which was conducted with patience and the taciturn chivalry appropriate to a hopeless cause. The guide withdrew to a remote corner, out of everybody’s line of fire, and sat down to laugh. He did not resent interruption, however. Byron’s autograph? Chagrin. What a thing to forget. Around on the east front. You can’t miss it.

You certainly can’t. It leaps out and stabs the eye. Not that his lordship was more of a vandal than the hundreds of other visitors who have knifed their names into the stone; he merely has more friends. Generations of romantic travelers and Greeks with a kindly memory of the poet who died in their war have run gentle fingertips across the letters. The name Byron stands in its own little polished plaque, an oval of shimmer created entirely by anonymous caresses.

The program of this excursion included a swim and tea at the tourist pavilion. The guide presently collected the troupe for the quarter-mile bus trip down to the beach, but he was not bigoted about it. Sounion is noted for sunsets, and if I wanted to sit up there and watch one, he had no objection. He delivered warnings about missing the bus and finding the proper footpath, and left.

Either the sunsets at Sounion are overrated, or this was a poor specimen. The west merely turned pink, but the shadow that crept up the eastern sky was worth watching — a slow rise of violet stalking a brightening half-moon. I climbed down to look at the old tufa foundations which support the whole terrace. (There was an earlier temple built of this same tufa, which the marble structure replaced.) Rough, thick bushes overhang the stonework. As I looked back and upward, Poseidon’s columns seemed to grow out of a green mat and lifted against the amethyst sky in stripes of pink and silver.

The proper footpath required a scramble back up the wall and a considerable loop to the east. Under my feet, a tipsy goat-and-child track zigzagged down through brush and thistles to fetch up against the wire fence that keeps freeloaders out of the area. These fences always look horse-high and hog-tight, but where I come from, if there’s a child’s path, there’s a negotiable hole at the end of it. I was pleased to discover that arrangements are no different in Greece.

As we drove back to Athens, the bare hills came to life. In the shadows of a ravine, three men wearing long black cloaks and carrying the traditional crooked staffs were hustling sheep into a fold, a low fence of straw piled over brush and stakes. Children trotted along the roadside, bound on mysterious errands. One disastrous-looking shack, hung askew on a rock, had turned into a tavern and oozed light and the tinkle of bazoukia music. The guide admitted that Sounion supports more life than a desert should. Besides the sheep, there is reputedly good bird shooting in season.

The bus trip to Delphi is a more formal affair, requiring advance reservations and much checking of records to be certain that the same window seat has not been sold to three different customers. Window seats become a neurotic preoccupation with bus travelers, who have come to see Greece rather than a neighbor’s ear.

ATHENS to Delphi is a better than four-hour drive, and starts early in the morning with all the passengers half asleep. Fortunately, there is nothing to observe on the main west road but a sacred lake of which, at the guide’s insistence, we all took disgruntled note. It is dull and reedy and surrounded by small factories, no object to arouse enthusiasm in the semicomatose.

The party was finally aroused by a stop. Everyone was suddenly lively, talkative, and hungry, and the local restaurant did a monstrous business in orange soda and miniature souvlakia — small wooden skewers strung with tidbits of freshly roasted lamb. The guide demolished sentimental imaginings about our glorious predecessors on the route. Most clients went to Delphi by sea. It was much easier.

This information was backed by the road, which now began climbing at an alarming pitch. The ridge on which Delphi is located follows the north shore of the Gulf of Korinth, rising almost straight from the water into high, improbable turrets and minarets squiggled out of the rock. This line of hills is slashed crosswise by equally steep, narrow ravines cut down almost to sea level.

The highway mounted the ridge by the inevitable loops and switchbacks and settled, halfway up, to progress along the edge of nothing. Once or twice, in what must have been moments of unusual exuberance, the road builders had provided bridge shortcuts across ravines, but for the most part, the route followed each canyon north to its inner end, rounded a short turn dug into the mountainside, and rolled southward to the next salient. The people in the rear of the bus peered out of the windows and reported, unhappily, that everything behind the back wheels hung over space on the turns. Moral: those subject to vertigo should not sit in the back of a mountain bus.

The slopes below the road were covered with dull-green olive trees and fields where grain, already being harvested in the lowlands, still stood mottled gold and green. Above us, the rocks were splashed with flaming yellow broom and shrubs as dark as spruce. The air turned sharply cool. Patches of snow appeared on the hilltops, and Mount Parnassus, heaving up to the north, was white.

Innumerable small tracks wandered up and down the mountains, their purpose obscure until we passed, in the depths of a canyon, a string of horses and donkeys. They were on a path above the road and were followed by a brisk old lady in black, loaded, like her animals, with grass and brushwood. The procession headed straight up the hillside, seemingly walking on air, and clinking softly with bells. The bus churned out to the open end of the canyon, rounded the turn, and wound its way to the head of the next canyon, where the old lady and her train were pattering along the path above the road. She had gone straight over the hump while modern machinery went a half mile around, and she grinned down at us with impish triumph.

The present town of Delphi hangs on the mountainside like a swallow’s nest. Houses and gardens swarm up the hills, spilling flowers from every wall and window. The main street is lined with shops on the inner side. Restaurants and hotels are on the outer one, where their windows overlook the downward sweep of gorge and valley to the gulf.

The whole town is relatively new. It used to lie smack on top of the ruins, but when the French undertook excavations in 1892, the entire village was expropriated and moved, at the expense of Paris, up the road, where it now stands. These high-handed methods were resented at the time, but since the new site is as beautiful as the old and somewhat more convenient in regard to water, the Delphians got the best of the deal, with a thriving tourist business thrown in.

Among its other elegancies, Delphi owns a new hotel hung down the cliffside, an arrangement that gives everybody a balcony overlooking the valley, and a bar in hunting-lodge style with a large fireplace, bright handwoven rugs and cushions, and a veranda that overlooks everything. This bar is known to tourists as “tó nightclub,” and to Delphians, who take it over in the winter, as “the club.” Winter, they confided, is the best time in Delphi. When groves and vineyards have been bedded down against the cold and the fireplaces roar with wood collected throughout the summer, the grave Apollo departs, leaving his shrine and oracle in the hands of Bacchus, an altogether more agreeable god. The Delphians then relax and enjoy life uninterrupted by outlanders, for snow closes the roads.

By mid-May, summer traffic had begun in Delphi. Our two buses had traveled in tandem for three hours without serious competition, but they could hardly be wedged into the museum parking lot. A rival bus company and a fleet of cars were there before us. The guides sorted out the party — French and English over here, German and Italian over there — and laid out separate routes, for there is something hilariously distracting about the same spiel heard simultaneously in two languages.

The information rattled off by the Chat girls was extensive and well organized, and it was reinforced by real knowledge and affection for the subject. The official speech was a good summary, but questions brought out more facts, along with personal opinions and lively comparisons of Delphi with other sites. The museum guards, meanwhile, mercilessly drove from our path the passengers of an earlier bus: uniformed schoolchildren, all armed with rattling boots and ringing voices. Schoolchildren are constantly to be found in Greek museums, herded by teachers and invariably hissed at, shoved, and admonished by the custodians, who view them with undisguised loathing.

LIKE every major Greek museum, the one at Delphi is a marvel, full of the wonders unearthed by the French archaeological teams that have worked there, off and on, for seventy years. An archaic frieze from the treasury of Athens represents the labors of Herakles and the adventures of Theseus, a parallel dear to Athenian hearts. (Athens, as other towns are still quick to point out, was always bumptious.) The thick, simplified figures still show traces of red paint that must have added considerably to the ferocious effect of these struggles with monsters and bandits. The frieze from the Siphnian treasury is more complicated, less barbarous, and, with its overlapping files of lions and horses, altogether more sophisticated.

The famous charioteer dominates a long room that actually holds other fine pieces, all invisible in the shadow of this superb bronze which is in itself justification for the effort and money lavished on Delphi. Tons of dirt and debris were hauled away. Archaeologists prowled the valley hunting for stones rolled downhill in the earthquakes which, along with housebuilders and Christian fanatics, were the curse of the place. Once found, the heavy blocks had to be identified and lugged one by one back to their original places, and eventually a quite surprising number of shrines, treasuries, and subsidiary buildings were at least partially reassembled.

The charioteer gave no such trouble. He was found behind a retaining wall where he had evidently been stowed away as too old-fashioned to display and too sacred to destroy. Severely controlled, straight as a column, the figure is serenely formal but vibrates with energy, an effect peculiar to the brief period between Archaic stylization and the softer manner of the later fifth century. Nothing is left of the young man’s team but some heartbreaking fragments of leg and hoof, just enough to prove that the horses were worthy of their driver. It is a sore disappointment to Delphi that the track where he won has not been located.

The temple of Apollo, who displaced a much older oracle belonging to some disreputable earth spirit, was the center of an extremely crowded sacred community that climbed well up the mountainside and rolled, as time passed and prosperity increased, far down into the valley. The one-day bus trip allows three hours for the whole thing, which is inadequate. Hachette’s guidebook recommends five hours for a “cursory tour.” I hesitate to differ with Hachette, a formidably thorough and careful authority, but I believe there is a question of temperament involved here. Hachette’s schedule is calculated on a particular type of tourist. He wears sturdy, comfortable shoes and carries a stout stick. Having selected a route, he never deviates from it or pauses in his even progress. He is not tempted by shade trees, or rustles in the grass, or strange flowers, or children who want to practice their English. He may drink from the sacred spring where it bubbles icily over black and white pebbles, but he does not paddle in the lower pools or climb into the wild, narrow gorge after maidenhair fern. He’s a thoroughly admirable fellow, and I’d hate to travel with him. He would hate to travel with me, for my cursory tour took a day and a half, thanks partly to the storm.

If came with no warning but a cold wind smelling of wet moss, mint, and goats. The sunlit sky instantly went bruise-blue, and the whole landscape took on the thunderstorm look, the olive trees and highland brush turning purplish black while rocks, grass, grain, and the yellow broom flowers glowed with a chill, brassy luster. Rain and lightning arrived while everyone was still running for cover, and hail followed the rain. The heights vanished into mist, which rose swirling out of the valley like a tide. Every crack in the rocks ran a brown torrent. Over the rush of water and the irregular beat of windswept hailstones, thunder racketed from crag to crag, the echoes rolling back and forth across the valley.

In the drizzling tag end of the storm, an old gentleman in a blue pinstripe suit rode into town on a donkey. He had converted his coat into a cloak by putting it over his head and fastening the top button under his chin. Water clung to his eyebrows and dripped off his luxuriant mustache. He sat straight-backed and indomitable, his face expressing patient contempt for all the insanities of the universe.

The storm, which was nothing unusual by local standards, cleared more slowly than it had begun. Thin sunlight picked out the golden broom on the hillside, then the pewtery gloss of olive trees, then a herd of sheep and their shepherd emerging from the lee of a large tree to shake themselves dry. Then everything suddenly blazed in full light that picked up a watery glaze everywhere but on the open spaces up the hill, which all sparkled sugar white with hail. The last of the extempore creeks dried up. The great birds that circle above the heights and below Delphi’s hotel balconies reappeared and took up their slow, arrogant patrol. The tourists jogged off to the ruins, and the shopkeepers came out to rehang the pretty rugs, bedspreads, and embroideries that had been taken in out of the weather. The town was back in business.

Next door to the white painted hotel where I had a room with a balcony jutting into a loquat tree full of luscious, not quite reachable orange fruit, I found the shop of Georgiou Petrou. Mr. Petrou is remarkable among the proprietors of tourist shops in that he shows no junk, despite the established fact that tourists, under the influence of haste and excitement, will buy almost anything. The place is stocked with fine large rugs woven on a three-woman loom whose operators lay in colored medallions on the white background; fur hats and neat, ankle-high fur boots; embroidered linens and smart, simple coats and dresses in handwoven materials which Mr. Petrou says are of his own design.

Being a shopkeeper in Delphi has its unsettling aspects. Mr. Petrou belongs to a large local clan with vineyards, olive groves (“Olives from your grandfather’s hands, grapes from your own”), and animals strewn about the district. Always a trifle amazed at his success, which began with a capital of three hundred dollars put up by a kinsman in the States, Mr. Petrou occasionally goofs off from commerce to look at crops and real estate. Last summer he had a notion to do some hunting, and like a good countryman shooting over his own land, dressed down for the project rather than up.

Observe the prosperous Mr. Petrou, then, in comfortable old boots, patched trousers, frayed shirt, and sagging hat, slouching along the ridge with an ancient but accurate shotgun under his elbow and a donkey trailing at his heels. He came down a path that passes the highest drivable level of the ruins, and there was a busload of tourists. They were delighted with this mountain peasant and fell upon Mr. Petrou with cries of, “Poor boy, he’s so ragged,” and “Isn’t he picturesque !”

Since a picturesque peasant, by definition, speaks no language but his own, Mr. Petrou couldn’t get a word into the torrent of admiration and sympathy until it was too late. “They kept saying, “Poor boy,’ ” he reported, “and I was ashamed to hurt their feelings by saying I am not a poor boy. They made me pose for pictures, and then they wanted to give me money. When I said no thank you, they stuffed it in my pockets anyway. ‘Poor boy,’ they said, and I certainly was. When I got home and counted up, I had about twenty dollars from being a poor boy for fifteen minutes.” He had figured out, given the number of tourist buses per week in Delphi, that a man willing to hang about the mountainside with shotgun and donkey all summer could make a very respectable living. “You could get rich on being a poor boy,” he concluded, adding plaintively that it was disgusting.

The ruins at Delphi, like all such places in Greece, open at sunrise and close at sundown. (The Acropolis can be visited for three nights at the full of the moon, however, and there are stories current of travelers whose whole lives have been blighted by a cloudy spell.) I sat on some old stonework under a tree while the light softened and the guard, lounging on a lower course of foundations, bragged of the charioteer’s bronze wire eyelashes and advised against going down to the harbor of Itea for dinner. He said the place would be dead at that time of year, and he was right.

A faint ripple of music floated romantically from somewhere beyond the half-dozen columns that are all that survives of the temple of Apollo. The guard leaped up and blew deafeningly on his whistle, following the blast with an enraged howl. “Radio,” he explained apologetically. “Verboten.”

The radio owners came down the path, a trifle sheepish with their obscene machine, to ask if those birds up there were eagles. The guide said they were. “There are always eagles at Delphi.”

There should be eagles, for the center of things was determined by the eagles of Zeus. He released them from the eastern and western limits of the world, and they met at Delphi. The guard was not the only Delphian to tell a tourist, out of pure kindness, that the birds marking their easy, invisible spirals against the sky above the sacred spring were eagles. The manager of the hotel, however, is a man of stiffer standards.

“Engles?” he said. “No. Those are not engles. They are another bird. I don’t know the English name, but they eat dead meat.”

Vultures, then.

“Wait. I will find out.” He searched the desk drawer and, not finding what he wanted, seized and frisked the nearest bellhop. A small, fat, worn dictionary was recovered. “What did you say? Vulture? You are right. Here it is. Vul-chure. Now,” with the triumph of the born scholar, “I know.”

I foresee the total extinction of the eagles of Delphi.