Sparta!

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Couldn't resist doing the kick from "300"...

At last Sparta! We drove a few hours deeper into the Peloponnese today and made it to one of my top goals of the trip. It's well known there is not a lot left over from classical Greece. but actually that's wrong, there's a lot of ruins, just not a lot of buildings and structures - there's plenty of pieces!

Here is the famous modern statue of Leonidas




















Here's a statue of a hoplite warrior - some think it to be of Leonidas. There is a little 4 room museum in the town.












Just past the statue up top are the ruins. Here is what the ancient ruins look like today. The place was pretty empty and we pretty much had all of ancient Sparta to ourselves for a while this afternoon.





















Something I really wanted to visit was the Eurotas river that I've read about in historical books. It was quite difficult to find, we walked up and down it looking for a path to it. We eventually got an escort from an elderly farmer to the river by his farm.


Here it is. Something pretty amazing about the river is...








... there are actual Spartan ruins sticking out of the river bank and in the river itself! Walking along the river we actually found 2 pieces of marble columns, here's one of them. Maybe I have a future in archeology?


We'll only spending one day here, but it was pretty memorable.




Tomas