The Stories of the Greeks and Romans

Since we have been living out of 4 suitcases this past year, we obviously haven't brought with us our stacks and stacks of books that surround us at home. We have worked very hard at our schooling but in different ways than normal. Perhaps I will go into more detail about that in a later post, but here I just want to illustrate 1 example.

We have discovered a wonderful site called Baldwin Project at www.mainlesson.com. This is a site that is attempting to collect and make available online books for children in all sorts of genres. For example, in the ancient Greek section there are approximately 40 books which cover biographies, histories, mythology, fiction.

We only managed to read 3 of these - The Story of the Greeks by Helene A. Guerber, The Wonder book for Children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and an autobiography of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott. We also read a story of the Greek War of Independence by G.A. Henty. With the Story of the Greeks, we would read 2 (short) chapters and then Jacob and Zachary would each narrate one. At first they were dictating and I was typing for them and then about half was through they switched to typing for themselves. This practice of written narration was promoted by a teacher named Charlotte Mason, who is well known to many of my homeschooling friends. This promotes good reading comprehension and summarizing skills as well as the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. If you read their narrations, you can see that we still have to work on that!

The Story of the Greeks has approximately 125 short chapters, so to read and narrate/summarize it took a considerable amount of work.  Here is a link to the manuscript if you are interested.

We spent 3 months in Greece and it took all that time to work on the Story of the Greeks; when we went to Italy, we also wanted to read the Story of the Romans, but in the interest of time (since we only spent 2 weeks there) we read Story of the Romans but did not narrate it.

You can find the BALDWIN PROJECT at www. mainlesson.com

Story of the Greeks

Story of the Romans

Greece Top Ten

Top 10 Things I'll Miss about Greece (not in order)

Seeing shepherds along the road with their sheep and goats

Being able to bike everywhere

Seeing the mountains from our apartment windows

Loukoumades and Loukoumies

Souvlaki

Walking to the Bakery in the morning for bread

Greek lessons with Nick

Flopodopolous - our stray dog at the cafeteria

Having school at the university computer lab with more computers than we can use

Our friends from the university and church

Mount Olympus - Home of the gods

Monday we took a drive to Mount Olympus which is the highest mountain in Greece.  It is a multi-peaked mountain with the highest points being Mytikas, Skolio and Stefani at heights of 2918m, 2912m and 2909m, respectively.  It is also the second highest mountain in the Balkans. The diameter is approximately  25km and it is an independent massif (not part of any mountain chain) covering an area of 500 km2. It is located in the north - east corner of Thessaly.

In ancient times, Mount Olympus was considered to by the home of the twelve ancient Greek gods. Homer describes them as living in "the mysterious folds of Olympus." Mytikas was called the Pantheon or meeting place. The throne of Zeus was on the north-east face of Stefani. Artefacts have been found near Olympus dating back to the Iron Age. One of the small towns nearby, Dion, has archeological sites where artefacts  from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. have been   found representing Macedonian, Greek and Roman eras.

In more recent history, the armatoli hid here during the War of Greek Independence.  In 1941, battles were fought here between the Germans and Greeks, New Zealanders and Australians and the Greek Resistance had outposts here. Since the 1950's it has been the site of mountain adventures and some tragedies.

In 1981m Mount Olympus was declared a "Biosphere Reserve" and over 150,000 people visit it annually (although likely much higher since there is only one information check point and different points to enter) and approximately 10,000 people climb to the summit; 70% of them are international visitors.

We drove approximately 1/3 of the way up the mountain and hiked on a nice forested trail from elevation 1050m to 1450m. We had a few glimpses to the top of the mountain but not as many as we hoped for. Then we drove to Prioni, which is a trailhead are with a small restaurant at the end of the mountain road. You can hike 11km from the town of Litochoro or you can drive to Prioni and start from there.

On the way back down we stopped at the Old Monastery of Saint Dionysis. It was built in the 1500's and suffered many things but the worst was when it was completely destroyed in WWII. It is slowly being rebuild now.

On our drive back we stopped at Platemon castle which is one of the best preserved castles in Greece but it was closed. We also stopped at the Theater of Tempi which had a historical sign but was actually a modern theater. It is nestled between Mount Olympus and Mount Kissavos and is a 600 seat outdoor theater with amazing views. It was built to show the plays of Aeschylus (ca 525B.C.) who is considered the "father of ancient Greek tragedy." It is believed that he wrote over 50 - 90 plays but only 7 of them still exist.

Easter Sunday

Sunday April 15th was Orthodox Greek Easter Sunday. This is a big holiday in Greece. The school children have 2 weeks off school and  many people have extended holidays. The month before Easter, many people will fast from eating meat but on Easter Sunday all that is cast off. Many Greeks will go to church daily the week before Easter. Friday evening they will go to a service with candles and singing songs about the death of Christ and afterwards make a procession in the streets. Saturday night at mid-night they will again go and this time they bring home the candles still burning and use them to make a cross mark on the doorposts of their houses and bring the light into each room in the house.

Sunday tends to be all about the food. We biked to church on Sunday morning and all the way there we saw lambs turning on spits in almost everyone's yard. The smells were delicious. After church we stopped at our friend's to say hello as they were hand turning their 2 lambs on the spit.

We had lunch with the Dinas family. Mr. Dinas was up early getting the fire going and prepared. They roasted a lamb and "kokoritzi" - liver wound up with intestines roasted on the spit.  Mr. Dinas has an electric rotisserie so once he got things going they steam rolled ahead and everything cooked quickly with the hot fire.

There were 17 all together for dinner. Petros and his 2 brothers and their families and children, his parents and us. We had a lovely meal with lamb, potatoes, salad, bread, cheese dip, feta, and more lamb.   We also had an Easter egg hunt for the children and of course that was a success.

To Filos Mas Yiannis

Yiannis Koutedakis is the Chair of the Sports Science department at the U Thessaly. Definitely your larger than life and very entertaining Greek! Yiannis was also Andreas's advisor during his undergraduate degree, and sent him off to the world for his graduate studies and then brought him back to Trikala. My last week in Greece, we went over to his house for dinner with his family. The food was great and Yiannis provided excellent dinner theatre in the bargain!

Saying Yiannis likes to collect is like saying ducks like water. Vintage is the critical word when it comes to describing his many collecting passions. He has an enormous collection of vintage radios of every type and style imaginable. Yiannis has even more bikes than I do, and they are all of the classic variety like the one here. All the parts are as original as possible. Some he rides and others have never rolled more than a few metres.

Another of the big prizes is his classic jukebox, which he likes to blasts at high volume. Transistors are far too modern and high tech, this one uses valves! Quite the eclectic collection of 45s, from Beatles to Greek to ABBA to Black Sabbath!

Next up on the collection front are antique books. One of his prizes is this collection of Charles Darwin second edition prints of such classics as The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.

Yiannis in his younger days from the University of Wolverhampton, where Andreas also did his first M.Sc. degree. Rowing was his sport, and on the right is a medal from Seoul Olympics in 1988.

Thanks to Yiannis, another reason we truly loved our time in Greece!

Sharp Sharp and Pointy

When we went to the island at Ioannina we went to the hidden school, then to Ally Passa's house where he went to hide from the Turks but he was on the second floor and the Turks went beneath him and shot him from underneath then they took his body down the stairs and beheaded him and sent his head to the Sultin in Constantinople (left).

Then we walked to the dock and me and Zach bought some knives then we went onto the boat and sailed home to the castle.

Oh and here's my latest befunky design!

Volos

A few weeks ago, we took a day trip to the mountain village of Makrinitsa and the city of Volos. Volos is a city of approximately 140,000, located on the east coast of Greece bordering the Aegean. It sits at the foot of Mount Pelios (or Pelion), which is known at the Land of the Centaurs. It is the main home of the University of Thessaly and the third largest port in Greece. The port has connections to Europe, Middle East and Asia and also many of the local islands.

Centaur statue on the road up to Makrinitsa on the left, and the very nice main U. Thessaly building right on the main harbour front. The Uni is divided amongst Volos, Karditsa, Larissa, and us in Trikala. Obviously, this is where the top admin hang out, not in Trikala!

There are many new building in Volos since a massive earthquake in 1955 destroyed many buildings. Also, in 2006 there was severe floods in Volos. We walked along the pier and saw the rowing team practicing - apparently, Volos has a good rowing team but is usually beaten by that of Ioannina.

One famous person who came from Volos is the composer Vangelis who wrote the music for the movies Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, among many others.

In the harbour, was a replica of the Argos, which was the boat that Jason and the Argonauts took when they went out to find the Golden Fleece.

One of the main attractions in Volos is the nice pedestrian harbour front, with lots of cafes/bars and boats from many parts of Europe lined up along the dock. The protected pier is also very long and a nice place for a stroll, where the boys are on the right.