Malahini in Greece and Turkey

NOTE: This was actually yesterday’s blog written on the weekend, but I could not connect yesterday for some reason.

Plateia is your Greek word today. It means the central part of a city. In Kansas City they have “the plaza” which is a similar idea. Here in Old Corinth it is where three roads come together and there are a bunch of restaurants and bars right there where people congregate. There are also two small grocery stores and quite a few shops selling items for tourists.
Here is a picture of each of the views of the plateia from the three roads:

Saturday evening we wandered down to the plateia at about 7 pm to see what was going on. The first thing we see every time we walk down to the plateia is the columns. These are the columns of a temple called the Archaic Temple built for Apollo. They are huge! I am including a picture of some people next to them (someone taking wedding pictures) so that you can see how huge the columns are.
First we visited with Paniotis who was in the first shop where he sells pots that he has painted. You can see is shopon the left in the picture. These are replicas of ancient pottery and are not made in the same way as in ancient times, but are souvenirs that a lot of people buy. He offered us apricots (which are in season right now) and so we sat and ate some apricots with him. He told us that there was a race coming to town and that the finish line was just down the street and it should be coming any time, so after that we wandered down the street and found a place at a restaurant where we could sit outside and wait for the runners to come.

This was quite amusing. No one seemed to know what time to expect people to come. First a bunch of people showed up with red t-shirts and hats that were (I guess) volunteers helping out with the race. Then a police car came. Then two policemen and one policewoman came walking up the street. They found one car parked in the way and whistled loudly, but then did not wait for anyone to come and move the car, but walked on. A bunch of cars kept going either way through the area. It only takes three cars to make a traffic jam in the plateia. Then the bus came. Here is a picture of the bus coming through the platea.

You can see that there is not really room for a race and the bus. The bus is bigger than the van in the picture and it passes through the plateia and then does a loop through the next village and comes back through, so we knew that most likely the runners would not be arriving until the bus did its run through town.

Finally, the first runner came, then the second and much later the third. Much later the rest of them came one at a time (maybe 20 racers total)hjv .. Then there was a small ceremony giving awards to the winners. They got a medal and a large gold cup. We are guessing that it was a 10k run. It was from Kenchrea to Corinth and was called the St. Paul race because that is a trip that Paul (from the New Testament of the Bible) made when he was here.

We ended the evening by watching the sunset (and the bats) from the upstairs veranda of a restaurant whle we ate pizza and Greek salad. It has been very hot out during the day, but it cools off and there is a pleasant breeze in the evening. A nice end to another interesting day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 1:59 am and is filed under modern Greece, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.