A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
nytimes.com
A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
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Re: A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
#2[deleted]
Re: A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
#3If you want a less "modern" visit to an ancient site, visit the ruins of ancient Sparta, once one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world.
It's a preserved parcel of land on the outskirts of a small city, filled with ten times more olive trees than actual ruins. Some gypsies camp at the outskirts; best to keep your distance. The few ruins give you an idea of the dimensions of the old structures, but what really hit home for me was a tree that had actually grown into and through one of the walls of the ruins since they tumbled.
Not far is Mystras, the former seat of Byzantine power in Greece. It's a lot more impressive because it's newer and better preserved. And a handful of old nuns, the very last of their order, continues to climb the thousands of stairs up to the cloister that has been continuously occupied since who-knows-when.
Re: A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
#4If you want a less "modern" visit to an ancient site, visit the ruins of ancient Sparta, once one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world. It's a preserved parcel of land on the outskirts of a small city, filled with ten times more olive trees than actual ruins. Some gypsies camp at the outskirts; best to keep your distance. The few ruins give you an idea of the dimensions of the old structures, but what re…
Additional tip, it takes a couple of hours to see everything properly, so take care which hour of the day to visit them.
Re: A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
#5Plato was lowkey a baller
Re: A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy
#6If you want a less "modern" visit to an ancient site, visit the ruins of ancient Sparta, once one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world. It's a preserved parcel of land on the outskirts of a small city, filled with ten times more olive trees than actual ruins. Some gypsies camp at the outskirts; best to keep your distance. The few ruins give you an idea of the dimensions of the old structures, but what re…
One of my favourite visits was to Ani - a massive deserted ruined city in the middle of nowhere on the Anatolian steppe, we encountered literally only two other tourists and an utterly bored looking shepherd boy with a few sheep in several hours walking around, awed by this incredible lost settlement and the eerie atmosphere of the place, with thousand year old ruins scattered and decaying uncared for, and the barely audible sound of a bulldozer building a Russian gun emplacement across the Armenian border about half a mile away.