Down By the Sea
It’s fair to say that for most of us, it has been a revelation that we have been mispronouncing the name of Philippi wrongly for years. Marianna informed us that while the Greeks have spinach pie and cheese pie, there is no such thing as Philip Pie and the town is actually pronounced: ‘Philip-pee’. There you go.
We have become accustomed to Dean kicking off the morning bus trip with a poem but this morning, Jill consolidated her position as the group’s poet laureate, with a brilliant prayer/poem as we headed off. There was no denying that as far as cities go, Thessaloniki was high on good vibes. Patriotic Athenian, Marianna. might say the vibe couldn’t quite top that of her hometown Athens, revealing the healthy rivalry that exists between the two big towns. Athenians poke fun at the Thessalonian accent and think their local sweet delicacy, bougatsa, isn’t a patch on their own ‘pie’. Marianna believes the Thessalonian subway, which only has one line and doesn’t cover much of the city, was only built to keep up with the Athenians but the laid back folk in Thessaloniki have a saying: ‘halará’, which means chill out, cool down, it’ll get sorted. Kind of a Greek ‘akuna matata’.
The landscape out the window was majestic today, with lofty mountains and sparkling lakes. Greece is a lot more mountainous than I’d realised. Soon it was time to pull over for a pre-Philipee-pee-pee. The roadside diner had a huge selection of yummy Greek baked goods and a couple of shelves full of mysterious little foil-wrapped parcels. I enquired firstly, whether the sales lady spoke English, to which she nodded enthusiastically, but then when I asked my second question: ‘what is in those little parcels?’, she had no idea what on earth I was talking about. Was it cheese? Biscuits? Chocolate? She had called in reinforcements to help with interpreting but I was still none the wiser. Eventually, I called in my own reinforcements and Marianna came to the rescue, revealing they were all chocolates of some description. Still somewhat of a lucky dip, I bought a few, much to the annoyance, it seemed, of the fed-up sales lady.
Had we been on such a long bus trip in Australia, we would certainly have encountered some roadkill along the way. Someone asked Marianna about why we hadn’t seen any Greek roadkill and she informed us of the rules. If you kill someone else’s sheep, you need to compensate the farmer who owned her (the sheep that is) and give her back to the farmer for meat. Basically, it’s a no win situation. Your car will be written off, you will be out of pocket and you won’t get to eat lamb chops for dinner.
On the outskirts of Philippi, was the little town of Lydia, named after the very first recorded convert to Christianity in Europe. The town was very cute and noticeably graffiti-free - a definite contender for a Tidy Town award. Lydia was a widow who had been a seller of purple cloth when she met the apostle Paul so it was appropriate that little purple flowers were blooming all along the bank of the little Gangitis stream where she was baptised almost 2000 years ago.
A basilica has been built next to the pretty little stream, set in a garden full of sweet smelling, colourful blooms. The basilica was home to an incredible mosaic floor map, detailing Paul’s whole missionary journey in pictures, and the walls and ceilings were extravagantly adorned with vibrant scenes and patterns so bright, you almost needed sunglasses to look at them.
Molly and Toby have been working on decoding the written Greek language and Molly seems to have nailed it. All day today she was reading aloud - street signs, menus, posters…you name it - impressing us all with her newfound skill.
Next on our packed agenda, was a visit to the town of Philippi, established way back in 360BC. The city was conquered by Phillip II (father to Alexander the Great) just a few years after its founding and never one to be modest, he endowed the city with his own moniker.
Philippi has an incredible archaeological site with a vast array of ruins, across a huge area. The Ancient Theatre of Philippi is almost intact (give or take a few walls and a roof) and it was fun to climb high up into the nose-bleed sections and imagine some sort of drama unfolding below. When Paul and his friends were here in 49-54AD, Philippi was a flourishing community with shops, a town hall and even a library, the gateway of which is still standing. It was so cool to see what archaeologists believe was the famous gaol where Paul and Silas were kept in chains until their miraculous escape (Acts 16). It was surreal to be walking exactly where the apostles walked!
We were all intrigued to hear about the ancient ‘washrooms’, as Marianna refers to them. There was a long marble bench set-up with low privacy walls between the seats and a little stream of running water circling the area to catch all the ‘results’. It was quite the social event back in the day, to have a natter and a splatter (too much?).
Having worked up quite an appetite traipsing around all those ruins, we stopped for a lovely lunch in the nearby town of Kavala, right on the beach. Sam had a little cat sitting patiently beside his chair in the restaurant, waiting for scraps. Ross and I both tested out our Greek and were dubbed by our waiter as ‘Super Greeks’. When he was paying the bill, the waiter noticing his accent, asked Ross where he was from. Ross answered: ‘Table 6’.
After lunch, we made our way to our fantastic hotel on the water’s edge. Our room has gorgeous views of the beautiful coastline, bobbing boats and the sparkling Aegean Sea. Everyone was keen to don their cossies and go for a dip. I felt the need for a nanna nap but from all reports there was a lot of fun to be had, splishing and splashing amongst nibbling fish. My boys even had time to squeeze in a sauna before dinner.
