Περιπέτεια

On Friday, February 22, we took a day trip to East Attica.  Attica is a peninsula region of Greece that encompasses Athens and projects into the Aegean Sea.  Since Athens is in this region, it's easy to take day trips around the region to see different things.  That's precisely what we did! We left our apartments at 8:30 and traveled to Brauron (today it is known as Vravrona).  Brauron was an ancient city of Attica and it was the home to a fairly large cult to Artemis, the goddess of hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, the Moon, and chastity.  The reason for this actually originates in the second Trojan War (the one Homer wrote about).  The most popular version of the story is that King Agamemnon of Mycenae had to kill his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to Artemis in order for the winds to be strong enough to carry his ships to Troy.  However, there is another version in which Artemis switches out Iphigenia for a deer at the last second and esca...

This past weekend, we had our first field trip!  This one lasted all weekend, and we went to the island of Aegina.  This island is pretty close to the Greek mainland, only about an hour long ferry ride.  The Aeginetans were fairly present in ancient Greek history, especially in the Persian wars.  Now, it's a quaint island with a nice seaside town.  The weekend was packed with lots of activities, so this post is probably going to be fairly long. We started our journey on Friday, February 15 in the morning.  On the way to Aegina, we stopped at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus. Piraeus is a port city (the largest one in Greece) in the Attica region of Greece (Athens is also in the Attica region).  At the archaeological museum, we saw lots of stuff recovered from the Piraeus region.  Most of them were some type of burial monument. My favorite was this really big mausoleum type of thing: After that, we boarded our ferr...