Second attempt at Parga today.
Another historic site distraction as well, but this one we planned for, since I had already wanted to check out the Acheron River — the “River Styx” that Charon the boatman used to ferry the souls of the dead into the underworld. What I hadn’t seen at our first attempt, but read about in the meantime, was that we would also be right by the Nekromanteion, an ancient Greek temple that was supposedly used to speak to the dead, and that Odysseus used to speak to the dead and then enter the underworld in the Odyssey.
The site itself was (of course) destroyed and buried and built on top of by the various conquerors of Greece — I think the last structure was built by the Ottomans — but excavations in the 1950s turned up the original site and were matched back to descriptions by Homer and Herodotus.
(I lamented, again, to H on our drive home that I feel like I am not properly using these ancient Greek sites for their intended purposes. Here I am, in a place where you can speak with the dead, and I ask H who she would have talked to and she says Augustus Ceasar or Marc Antony, and the best I can come up with is Marilyn Monroe.)
We also did actually make it to Parga, a little touristy town on the Med that was occupied by the Venetians for a good piece of time, and sports a big castle on one end, and a hillside full of colorfully-painted houses reminiscent of the villages of Cinque Terre.
We parked and wandered along the waterfront, taking some pictures of the castle and the houses and the tiny islands in the harbor, then found a cafe looking out at the sea and watched the sun set with a beer and a plate of charcuterie.
(We did attract some strays towards the end, and after we got up to leave, one of them jumped up on the table and snatched a skewer of cold cuts. He ate like a king that day.)
Took a bunch of video at the Nekromanteion and will piece it together into something watchable.