Malahini in Greece and Turkey

While I am writing Steve is packing up our bags for the next leg of the trip. This morning we are supposed to fly to Samos. This is an island just off of Turkey. I am looking forward to being on an island. It has gotten very hot here and getting to the beach is a challenge witihout a car. I am not sure what Samos will be like. It is Friday and we will stay there over the weekend and then go to Turkey for a few days and then be on our way home.

I hope I will be able to write about Samos and Ephesus in the blog, but I don’t know what type of Internet connection I will have.

I was hoping on this last blog to have an update to the kiln and a picture of the finished kiln. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it out there yesterday and so I do not have a picture. I did go and talk with Paniotis and Maria to say goodbye. Paniotis gave me some corpozi (watermelon). He is always feeding me something when I stop by. Here is Theo having some stuffed zuccini that he made one time when we stopped by! Yesterday he told me about finding coins. He has always been an antique coin collector. As a child he learned that after the rain he could go and pick out the coins that came to the surface. He has collected over a thousand coins. While he was collecting he also learned about them and how to clean them. Someday he may set up a coin museum in back of his pottery store.

He explained why he thought that was different than antiquities theft. Antiquities theft is like what I wrote about the tombs being looted. It is not like Paniotis finding and collecting coins. People actually search for treasure and then they sell it for LARGE amounts of money to dealers who eventually sell the pieces for millions of dollars to museums. This has happened to a lot of very important items from Iraq and has been happening with items from Greece. Many countries are very concerned about losing evidence of their rich histories. Recently there has been a crack down on museums to prove where they got certain items and to return what they cannot prove to the countries that they came from. You may have seen some of that news in the papers.

Here in Corinth there was a large theft of items directly from the museum. Because of good record keeping the curator of the museum was able to clearly identify all of the pieces that were missing and they were eventually returned to the museum, but this does not always happen. All of these items are now on display in a special part of the museum.

There is a big difference between collecting things that you find in your own area and keeping them and searching for things to sell for huge amounts of money. In the United States in many places this is an issue for Indian Tribes because people have found and collected things from their ancestors that have become valuable.

Here are a few stray dog pics to finish out the blog for today!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Archaeology, Greece, modern Greece, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.