Off to See the Oracle

Our final Greek destination was the town of Preveza, from which we left to see the ancient ruins of the city of Cassope early that morning.

Apparently these ruins are quite unique because usually ancient cities don’t ever cease being cities, meaning that many ancient buildings are not preserved because they’re replaced or built over as the residents live their lives for hundreds of years there.

Cassope differs because its residents moved to a different location as time passed, leaving the existing buildings (or at least their strong foundations) relatively intact.

Here I am standing at the doorway to one of the houses, welcoming you in.

Can I just interrupt this broadcast for a moment to remark on how beautiful all of these places in Greece have been in the springtime? All the sites are littered with wildflowers. It’s so pretty.

We were told that if we walked in a certain direction we would find one of the original arches in the wall to the city. We found the wall, but this was the only thing that resembled an arch in any way.

Because it’s almost invisible if you don’t approach from the right direction, at first we thought it was only a drain, but that didn’t make much sense. So, we have decided that this is the arch.

The woods that we had to walk through to approach Cassope were very pretty.

Next stop on the tour was to the Oracle of the Dead at Nekromanteion.

The church building above was a later addition, not related to the oracle.

This oracle wasn’t like the one at Delphi. Apparently it was a very elaborate fraud, where visitors were fed certain types of foods that encouraged hallucinations over the course of a week or so, and left on their own in dark rooms (you can see the rooms below).

It was apparently a very lucrative operation. Pilgrims were expecting to speak with the souls of the dead to foresee the future, and brought very generous offerings for the privilege. This is one of the treasury rooms.

Going back to how the place operated, once the pilgrims were deemed sufficiently loopy after their solitary confinement and toxic diet, they were led down this opening.

Into this room, which was no doubt much more poorly lit at the time. Apparently they have found pieces of something that they think was a pulley type of apparatus that may have had a human-like figure attached to it to make people (in their very compromised mental state in the dark) think they were witnessing a spirit from the underworld.

Scary.

After our tour, we elected to spend the afternoon enjoying the very pleasant little town of Preveza.

We found a few more sources of amusement.

Yes, that is a pile of old electrical equipment. In a shop window.

This building reminds me of the architecture in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Very Ottoman.

And then we fell back on what is fast becoming our favourite European activity – sitting in a café looking out over the water, sipping something sweet and coffee-ey.

We really are doing it tough over here.