Ancient wanders: Arcadia, Greece

Classical landscapes make for classic holidays: Jeremy Atiyah tours Greece's Arcadia



Driving to Arcadia? It sounded comical. Preposterous. Like catching a train
to Elysium, or cycling to Utopia. But this was no fantasy journey. I was in
my car, with the windows down, driving up from the seaside town of Navplion
into the mountainous centre of Greece's Peloponnesian peninsula - a region
known since time immemorial as Arcadia.
This was the real thing, all right. Not just an invention of Virgil or
Shakespeare. There were the mountain streams and the wild fruit trees, and
the limestone hills set to the sound of goat bells. This was the cradle of
Hellenism. The old mother. The bloodstained roots. The place where even the
mule- drivers were haughty about their ancestry. Thus did Nikos Kazantzakis
(possibly Greece's greatest writer since Sophocles) describe the
Peloponnese. And as for Arcadia itself: this was the heart of the heart. All
the Greeks I had met seemed proud to trace their origins back there.

The man in the Navplion car-rental office; a woman on the train from
Corinth; my hotelier in Athens: "You are visiting Arcadia?" they all cried.
"Oh, but my family is from there. We left years ago - no work - but we
Arcadians never forget our ancestral villages. We keep our own music. Our
own philo- sophy. Our own way of life."

From ancient myth, I already knew that Arcadia had been the birthplace of
Pan, that goatish, lustful character who haunted the higher hills, playing
his pipes. Likewise, in the first words recorded by western civilisation -
the Iliad - the Arcadians had been referred to as keepers of flocks, knowing
nothing of urban niceties such as ship-building (according to Homer,
Agamemnon was obliged to give the Arcadians a lift to Troy in his own
vessels).

Then came Virgil, whose Eclogues, in the last decades before Christ,
cemented the reputation of Arcadia forever as an idyllic world where
shepherd-poets sang of their simple joys and sorrows. Ever since, Arcadia
has been known in the West as a place of lightness: a place where the
pressure of work did not exist, where man and nature were in perfect accord.

The antithesis, in short, of urban hell. What a reputation. It made me feel
as though I were driving towards the cradle not only of Greece, but of
Europe's most ancient dream.

Beyond the clamorous regional capital, Tripolis, I found myself on some of
the most beautiful roads in Greece. Swooping hillsides yielded to vast
panoramas. Traffic was nonexistent. I stopped off at the village of
Dimitsana to find stone houses with red roofs crazily perched on a mountain
ridge. Suitably rustic fare was not hard to find. I was soon eating stuffed
aubergines with rough white wine, as a requisite flock of goats jostled past
my table, followed by a shepherd who appeared to be drunk.

Only Megalopoli provided a discordant note that day. The original "Great
City" had been built here by Epaminondas, a Theban Stalin, in the 4th
century BC, and was surrounded by 5 miles of strong walls and towers, with
temples, gymnas-iums, arcades, markets and assemblies. Epaminondas forc-ibly
resettled the residents of 40 Arcadian towns here.

But Arcadia's nature had not been so easy to transform. By Virgil's time,
Megalopoli had been reduced to a settlement of shepherds. And the verdict of
Kazantzakis, 50 years ago, was this: "The Great City has become a Great
Wasteland."

I stopped only briefly. The semicircle of the ancient theatre had become a
steep, grassy bank, and from its upper tiers sprang a line of giant trees at
odd angles, as if nurtured on the fertiliser of Greek culture. But then,
beyond, I glimpsed the giant smoke-stacks of a 20th-century power station.
No matter. Beyond this particular valley, more rustic purity beckoned.

I drove on to Karitena, across the roaring River Alpheios. Here stands the
tiny Byzantine church of Agios Nikolaos, dwarfed by surrounding pine trees.
And the local ruined castle (every Peloponnesian town has one), from which,
as the sun set, I found old ladies descending with bunches of wild lupins in
their hands.

When I climbed up and stood inside the ruined ramparts, I felt as though I
had the original European paradise at my feet. An ocean of sweet pea, iris,
cowslip and wild garlic surrounded me. The landscape spread out beyond:
grander than Tuscany, more cultured than Andalusia. Arcadia indeed.

Over iced coffees the following morning, a man with a grey beard told me in
fluent English that of the 175 children who attended his school here 40
years ago, he was the only one still living in the village today.

"In those days, all the young men sat in pastry shops discussing the great
issues. We all left. I worked for 15 years in America. But then I came back,
because I didn't want to be just a cog in the machine." His face was
becoming gloomier by the minute. "The trouble is that life is so ... boring
in Arcadia."

Boring? How could he say such a thing? I left him to his coffee and set off,
bumping down empty country tracks to the site of ancient Gortys, and yet
more rustic perfection. At the entrance to the gorge of the rushing River
Lousios, I reached the ruins of a temple of Asclepius. The statues described
by Pausanias had gone, but the atmosphere of the healing god was still
palpable. I found a circle of stones and a few half-columns amid the
cowpats. There was not a soul in sight. Bees buzzed over the roar of the
river, which Pausanias described as having the "coldest water of any river
in the world".

From here, there was only one way to go - on foot into the narrow Lousios
gorge. In the distance, high up on the cliff face, lodged the monastery of
John the Baptist - evidence that the ancients were not the only people to
feel the holiness in this gorge.

An hour later, I emerged from a jungle of fig and honeysuckle trees below
the monastery, which now appeared, perched perilously under the crags, like
some Tibetan lamasery. Huge boulders from above threatened to pulverise its
fragile balconies and walkways.

"It's a hard place to live, but a beautiful one," cackled one bearded,
ponytailed monk whom I found watering a herb garden. Two potbellied donkeys
and a mule waited at the gate. Rabbit hutches and ramshackle cottages
surrounded the monastery. Behind me, the gorge seemed clogged up, as though
its trees had floated down from the sky in giant bunches of fluff. Birds
wheeled far below me.

The monk stopped. "It's much easier to hear God up here, you know," he
mumbled, "than down there in the towns."

By now, I had almost forgotten what a town was, but just at that moment, a
group of English tourists appeared in the monastery forecourt, long skirts
having been provided by the monks for those ladies in hiking shorts. Only
then did I realise that a road had been built down to the monastery from the
village of Stemnitsa above.

It was time to move on. I retraced my route southeastwards to ancient
Arcadia's last destination, perched more than 1,000 yards up on a remote
hillside: the Temple of Apollo at Vassae.

The mind could only boggle at the challenges faced 25 centuries ago by its
architect, Ictinus, the Norman Foster of his time (he also built the
Parthenon of Athens, and the decorative friezes of both buildings are now in
the British Museum). Today, to protect it from the elements, archeologists
have resorted to covering it entirely in a rigid plastic tent. Inside the
tent, I found a strange coldness. Few tourists come this way outside the
main summer months, despite the existence of a tarmac road. The standing
columns looked ready to fall to dust; they seemed to be millions of years
old, rather than mere thousands. Pausanias had pronounced this among the
most beautiful buildings in the Peloponnese, and it was still not hard to
see why.

Then, out in the sun again, I heard a group of tourists conferring about
directions. From here, the road dropped steeply down from the plateau to the
sea. "Olympia that way," someone was saying.

Not that I much cared. With its crowds and its tour buses, not to mention
its heroic winners and humiliated losers, I knew that Olympia had always
belonged to another, less rustic, tradition.

From down there, Arcadia would seem like scarcely more than a pleasant
dream. Or perhaps, even, a myth.

TRAVEL BRIEF:


Getting there: British Airways (0845 773 3377, www.ba.com) flies to Athens
from Heathrow and Gatwick; from £206. EasyJet (0870 600 0000,
www.easyjet.com) flies from Gatwick (from July 1) and Luton; from £82.
Olympic Airways (0870 606 0460, www.olympic-airways.gr) flies from Heathrow
(from £190) and Manchester (from £215). In Dublin, Ebookers (01 241 5689,
www.ebookers.ie) has Lufthansa flights via Frankfurt; from ?384. Charter
flights to Athens go from Gatwick, Manchester and Newcastle. Flightline
(0800 036 0777, www.flightline.co.uk) has flights from Newcastle; from £210.
Or try Holidays by Phone (0870 444 5450, www.holidaysbyphone.com) or Charter
Flight Centre (020 7854 8434, www.charterflights.co.uk).


Getting around: for car hire in Athens, Sixt (01246 506776,
www.e-sixt.co.uk) has daily rates from £25.50, all-inclusive. Or try Autos
Abroad (0870 066 7788, www.car-hire-greece.com) or Budget (0800 181181,
www.budget.co.uk).

Alternatively, consider the scenic three-hour train ride to Navplion (£3pp),
a good place to begin a drive through Arcadia. Local car-hire companies
include AutoEurope (00 30-7520 24160).

Where to stay: in Stemnitsa, the traditionally styled Trikolonion (7950
81297; doubles from £26) is the pick of the area. For a list of
alternatives, visit www.greekhotel.com.

Best guidebook: Greece (rough Guide £12.99)

Further information: Greek tourist office, 020 7734 5997.