Greece

“You just missed Chris Hoy. He was here leading cycle rides over the summer,” the Peligoni Club’s receptionist informed me breezily as he lugged my suitcase down the gravel path to my villa. Lively Greek music drifted on the (non-existent) breeze, thick air seeming to press down on us despite the late hour.  I’d come to Zakynthos seeking some solo restoration — and sure, even self-improvement. I hadn’t pictured puffing up a rock-strewn hill behind a six-time Olympic gold-medal-winning medalist, in 90-degree heat. But that’s how they roll, here; this family-run, members-only beach club regularly flies in experts to add star quality to the pared-back, luxurious spaces.

I first visited the Greek monastery of Agios Stefanos on the rocks of Meteora in the early spring of this year, one week after my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Greece was heavy with Great Lent fasts and preparations for Christ’s resurrection — Easter. I had just escaped the clutches of an extremely sweet but annoying young tour guide with whom my very Greek now-father-in-law had set my fiancé and me up for a tour of the ancient churches. I wanted nothing to do with this young man in a tour van who sounded like he was reciting words from a tape recorder. Later I found out he was, and had taught himself English by doing so (which is pretty endearing in hindsight).

I’m drawn to sketchiness but even by my sketchy-drawn standards, the state of Athens is deflating. The cradle of Western civilization now appears to be the graffiti capital of the Western world. The luridly colored scrawls are everywhere; Greek grannies air their carpets over balconies marred by multicolored tags and swirls. The Parthenon temple still looks mighty grand atop the ancient Acropolis citadel, but down in the modern city a lot of people look hard-up and downtrodden: lined faces, permanent frowns, hastened aging, disheveled clothes. Wandering through central Athens, I passed two shuttered shops set back from the street. About twenty homeless people lounged in the alcove, amicably passing round substances to smoke and ingest.

It was not an auspicious start. Arriving at JFK the specified three hours before my departure to Athens I was met with a check-in line stretching out the door. The man behind me, in traditional dress and with a shocking amount of luggage for a single traveler, kept shouting ‘Senegal!’ Two hours later, check-in for my flight was closing. I was still at least half an hour away from the desk and so I shamelessly cut the line, earning myself a tongue-lashing from a dyspeptic German but also a boarding document one minute before the flight closed.

I decided to walk from Athens to Byzantium — Constantinople, the medieval Queen of Cities, lately Istanbul. I had a little red tent and a vision of noble penury that evoked the ghosts of Cyriaco of Ancona (d. 1452) and Paddy Leigh Fermor (d. 2011). My girlfriend said she'd join me later. The lines that now smudge my map look more like the flight of a woozy bluebottle than the traces of a man with a plan. My earliest memories of the trek are melancholy.

The 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis — the decisive naval battle of 480 BC in which the Greek fleet, vastly outnumbered, devastated the invading Persian armada in the straits near Athens — fell on September 29. So we went to take another look at the nautical objects in the Piraeus Archaeological Museum. It is not exactly a small museum — it is housed in a high-ceilinged, two-story building in the port of Piraeus, next to the remains of a Hellenistic theater — but it receives few visitors. Even Piraeus taxi drivers don’t always know where to find it. Tourists usually give Piraeus a miss; they tend to be ‘museumed-out’ from the big museums up the road in Athens.