Vergina, Greece

 

A reasonable bus ride from the most excellent 4Ever Station, Thessaloniki's bus terminal, will take you on a fairly sceninc drive to a little town called Veroia. There, a very efficient lady will direct you to the ongoning bus or bus stop to Vergina and one of the greatest sights of the ancient world you will ever lay eyes on.

 

The bus stop in Veroia. A charming little town in the mountains and well worth a visit in itself. I wish I had had the time to spend a day there. As it was, I just hustled between buses coming and going.

 

 

 

Let's start off with the only photograph I dared to take, in a strictly 'no photos allowed' museum. You are looking at the actual entrance to King Philip II's tomb. And what a story there is behind this discovery. As you travel around northern Greece, the Macedonian Empire's heartland, you will see funeral mounds all over the landscape. Needless to say, most, if not all of them have been robbed in the 2000 years since they were built. So it was with this rather large mound near the old Macedonian palace and Pella, once the center of the Macedonian Empire. They robbed this mound, too, that goes without saying, and two empty and largely destroyed tombs attest to that. It is like the old game show, where they show you a door behind which you can see what you did not get. Well, what the grave robbers did not get was one of the greatest funerary treasures in history. The tomb of Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. After having conquered through military action, or in one case, through marriage, almost the entire Balkan and all of Greece, with his innovative phalanx battle system, he died. Alexander gave his father a funeral commensurate with the standing of an emperor and conqueror of much of the known world. He had returned shrunken, then land-bound and dominated Macedonia to world power status. Alexander buried his father with his horses, weapons, all sorts of things one might need in the afterlife and even had his youngest wife walk into the funeral pyre and be elevated to near Goddess status for it, and buried with her husband in almost identical manner. The museum is actually located inside of the original mound and all of the tombs are still exactly where they had been placed at the time of the burials. The ancient tomb raiders had no idea that they had left untouched the tomb of an emperor, his wife, and of Alexander IV, a son of Alexander's, who died apparently fairly young. Their loss is our gain.

 

Part of another shot I took of the largely destroyed (probably by moisture) painting above the tomb's entrance. I had planned on more pictures, but immediately after this, the museum suddenly was swarming with military academy students and their leaders, who had been bussed there to see this. I never had a moment alone after that.

 

 

 

The funeral mound and the museum entrance

After this, I left to go to the Palace (or what's left of it), but it was closed for reconstruction and preservation.

 

It is obvious from this sign how much there is in this area, and excavations are going on all over. However, few will want to do the huge, multi-hour walks that I did and a car would be best to have.
Wherever you see these metal covers, an archeological site is protected from weather, since once out in the open, erosion starts.

Down a long path, away from the road I was walking on, I saw a distant sign. Behind it was a fence and a lot of shrubbery. When I finally got there and walked around the far side of that fence, I saw this, an old Greek-style stadium. You can see where the field of honor is and the stands along the length of it, probably on both sides. This is close to the palace, so I assume lots happened here. I remember this layout from the excellently preserved stadium up above Delphi.

 

I did walk the landscape for miles and was at one time passed by a car that stopped not far ahead of me. The occupants, archaeologists, went to this metal cover.

I followed them quickly, and took this shot, before they disappeard. The had locked a gate of a barbed wire fence in front of me.
I then walked around the field for a better vantage point, which I found here, and saw a well preserved Macedonian tomb.

 

 

When I finally got back to the Thessaloniki bus terminal, I was shocked to see this. It had escaped my attention, being busy getting information and tickets, earlier. The terminal is topped by the seal of the house of Philip II and Alexander the Great and the large letters read Macedonia. I then remembered the official sign by the highway on the Greek side, after we crossed the border, which read, Welcome to Greece and below that, Welcome to Macedonia. What you can read below sheds a little light on this, what I had naively assumed was neighborly pride. Instead, so I learned, Greece wants that name for itself. That's the dark side of politics.

 

 

The Ugly Politics of Nations

Looking deeper into what might be the political problems between the Greeks and the Macedonians, this is what I just learned from the Magazine, The Economisti: Greece, far from being satisfied with having the treasures of Macedonia's past inside of their borders, even begrudge Macedonia its name. The article I refer to pointed out that Macedonia may now officially keep their 1000s of years old name (whch they have had since before they even conquered and owned Greece). Greek politicians have fought that, for fear that Macedonia then will claim the northern parts of Greece, that they once owned which had, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, been given to Greece. Moreover, for many years, Greek politicians had been fighting to keep tiny Macedonia out of the UN and NATO, and had blocked Macedonia's access to the EU. What a great trade-off for the EU that one was. Maybe now, finally, that the name issue has been resolved in international courts, Macedonia can go forward and join the rest of Europe.

 

 

Greece 2011

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