The Annals of Decimus Volume something or other: Thessaloniki, or A Threat From The North

My penultimate trip in Greece, Thessaloniki was a breath of fresh air after so many months in Athens, both figuratively and literally. Named after Thessalonike, the half-sister of Alexander and wife of Cassander, who was the ruler of Greece for a time after Alexander's death. Considering the fact that Alexander's horse and dog both had cities named after them, this isn't too bad of an origin.

First up was Pella, the ancient capitol of Macedonia. As any respectable ancient capitol ought to be, Pella was a port city. With this in mind, I was rather surprised to see this: a distinct lack of water. Pella is now many kilometers away from the sea, bay and then some having been filled in by alluvial deposits.








Pella itself is a huge site, and has one of, if not the, largest agora (central market place) of any ancient city. The excavators have spent most of their efforts excavating one side of the agora, which gave me an idea of the scope of the place but not much more. Once you've seen the floor-plan of one shop, you don't really need to see a dozen more. There were, however, pretty columns. We also got to meet the excavator, a man who enjoyed giving exceptionally long and detailed answers to simple questions.

Sadly, real life archaeologists are not as charming as Indiana Jones, and I have trouble imagining any of them raiding tombs with Laura Croft (I'm still holding out hope that I'll find an Egyptologist like Daniel Jackson from SG-1).













It was Thanksgiving several days after returning from Thessaloniki, and I gave thanks that toilet-technology has advanced since the Hellenistic age.
That, to the left, is a toilet.

As I mentioned earlier, Thessaloniki was a wonderful contrast to Athens, filled with friendly people, cheap food, safe cross-walks, drivers who did not seem determined to run you over, clean air, and bookstores (I bought a Virginia Woolf novel and the English poems of John Milton relatively cheaply).

On the way back to the hotel from dinner, some students and I walked into a tense protest in the middle of the street. Most of us kept walking after asking what the protest was about (the Greek government shut down a radio station or something like that) because there was every indication that something nasty was likely to occur.

There were several museums with such low lighting that I did not bother taking photos. After that, there was the (probable) site of Aristotle's famed Lyceum, where he taught young Alexander many things which young Alexander probably ignored thoroughly. It was a pleasant site with lots of trees, some caves and stone benches, but nothing more.






There was also a cat, but there have been cats at nearly every single archaeological site I've went to. I like to imagine them as following in the footsteps of great German philologists and archaeologists, feline Nietzsches and Schliemanns, piecing together the tattered and torn image of a lost civilization out of pottery fragments and the torn papyri of a literature long since written, trying to both recreate what was and to confirm their ideas of how it should have been, and how it may be again... but I only do that when I'm taking liberal advantage of Greece's drinking age.

On the return trip we took a moonlight stop at Thermopylae, which, like everything to do with the Spartans, was horribly disappointing. As you'll recall from the awful movie 300 (the historical inaccuracies of which, with the exception of that rhinoceros thing and the dude with swords for hands, actually made the whole thing seem less bad-ass than it really was), the whole point of Thermopylae was that it was a narrow pass with mountains on the one side and ocean on the other. Well, those damn alluvial deposits ruin everything again, and the ocean is now many kilometers away. At the very least, I got to see more of Leonidas than I ever needed to.

Photos and memories were not the only thing which followed me home. Out of the wilderness of the north, pouring down onto civilized Greece comes... THE BARBARIAN HORDE!

 Reveling in the Roman ruins, rejoicing in a raucous rampage, rancorous roars reverberating round and round, raving with rage, rugged, ragged and... I think that's enough of that.

Will anything stop this beast from scaling the walls of peace and justice? Is there any force that can save civilization?

Can anyone decimate this foe?