It was about an hour drive from Lavrio north to the Piraeus port. I drove my tiny little Fiat onto another ferry and just like that, I was off to my next stop, the island of Aegina, smack in the middle of the Saronic Gulf.

After driving off of the ferry I immediately headed clear to the far side of the island to see the amazing Temple of Aphaia. The whole island is only about seven and a half miles long. The temple turned out to be much better than I expected.

Aphaia was supposedly from Crete. She jumped into the sea to avoid the advances of Minos and was then turned into a goddess by Artemis who admired her. Then she landed on Aegina and was worshipped here after that. Or so the story goes. In any case, this is the only place in the ancient world where she was worshipped. Her cult started here in the 14th century BC, but the temple was built in the 5th century BC. This is maybe the most intact temple I’ve seen so far in Greece. Awesome!

There’s not much left of the outer decor of the temple. There are apparently some statues in a museum in Munich, and this small fragment of one of the pediments.

After that I started backtracking and found myself right in the middle of the island at Palaeochora. I could see the site pretty clearly from the road.

Palaeochora was started in the 9th century AD and was the capital of the island from its founding all the way up until 1826. Goodness!

It was once surrounded by a fortress which is barely visible now. All that’s really left are some of the medieval churches. Most of them were built in the late 13th century to the early 15th century. There’s a really nice trail network that goes around to all of them but the best part was all of the 500-600 year old frescoes in most of them. Just lift the latch and go on in.

Here comes the mind blowing part. To say these people were religious would be a massive understatement. In it’s prime this place had 366 churches, one for every day of the year. What?! Along with roughly 800 houses that had to have made this little hill a very crowded place. Today there are supposedly only 38 churches left. I’m not sure though, I wasn’t counting.

The paintings were really amazing though. Usually it’s exciting to find one church like these with ancient frescoes, but I got… however many there were, in one day. It was kind of overwhelming.

I took a couple hundred pictures of frescoes. As you can imagine I had a really hard time deciding which ones to include here. It wasn’t all beautiful frescoes, though. When I walked into this church seen below, it was full of bones. That was a surprise!

And being what I assume is the highest point on the island, the views were pretty spectacular too.

Apart from the frescoes, the insides of the churches were pretty sparse and not that interesting. The one below was the exception. And it was the last one I visited at almost the top.

Being such a small island, I figured I only needed one night and so I’ll be staying in Aegina Town on the west side of the island. I checked into my hotel and then walked over to the ruins of Aegina just down the street. The ruins were a real mish mash of prehistoric, Bronze Age, ancient Greek, and Roman, it was an interesting site.

The main reason to come here was for the remains of the 6th century BC Temple of Apollo. It only has one sad half of a column standing that is getting a LOT of help. You can see all the support cables in the pic. One of the signs had a couple of drawings from previous visitors, one in the 18th century and one in the late 19th century, and they both looked exactly like what I was looking at.

I enjoyed a quiet evening in Aegina Town and in the morning I was on the ferry and headed back to Piraeus. As soon as I got off the boat I drove across town to check out the Piraeus Archeology Museum.

There were some really beautiful pieces in the museum, but the real highlight was the small collection of bronze statues. Apparently they were hidden in a storeroom to keep them protected from invaders, though they don’t know exactly when or from which invasion. They were found when digging for some construction project. What a great find!

The museum even contains an ancient theatre right in its backyard. The 2nd century BC theatre of Zea.

I still had a whole afternoon to get to my next stop so I drove a little bit north to explore the ancient site of Eleusis. It was most famous as a sanctuary of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone.

This was one of those mystery cults, the Eleusian mysteries. No one uninitiated was allowed to know what went on there. There were even a couple of Roman emperors who went through the rituals. At the propylaeion, also known as the entrance, I saw something cool that I haven’t seen at the other sites, tracks. There was a set of tracks from cart wheels and what I assume was a gate.

I really had to use my imagination here. There were rows of columns supporting what was a very big building and those rows of seats lined the inside walls where the initiates watched whatever went on in there. Those that were initiated were supposedly granted an afterlife, instead of floating around aimlessly as a ghost in Hades.

The hill right next to the site got me some rare aerial shots. Above is the main temple and below is the later Roman Agora.

The attached museum was really good too. There were lots of artifacts depicting Demeter and Persephone, a really cool statue of Poseidon, and some of the decor from the outside of the temple.

Well, I finished up in Eleusis and started driving to the next stop on my Greek adventure. I’m a little over half way done with the whole trip. Time is flying by! The next stop will be a much longer one, so if you need a break, go ahead and knock yourself out. I’ll be back…