Surprised by Time

The picture to the left is a detail of the oldest known image of Nauplion and shows the city's circumstances in the 1530s. There is the...

A long entry, after two short ones. Isabelle Villhardouin was a true princess and a lady, but as a princess in the 13th-century Morea, the r...

If you are a Turk, the Greek Palia-Patras, Old Patras (not to be confused with New Patras near Thermopylae) sounds like Bali-Batra, which me...

Evliya Celebi learned this when he was visiting Patras in 1668: Sari Sadik Baba is visited by the Greek infidels too, for they say that ...

I see how fine he is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal Book because of his strange organs of breath. His lungs are holes...

Rossini's opera, The Siege of Corinth -- L'assedio di Corinto , is not an experience to be undertaken lightly, say, the way one woul...

They sang sometimes with half-closed eyes as we were passing the abandoned island to the west with the prickly pear, past the cape of t...

There are a lot of studioli in paintings of St. Jerome because he was a scholar and scholars need privacy to work. The studioli are small w...

 In 1540, the Minio brothers--Alvise, Almoro, and Francesco-found themselves in severe fina ncial trouble. After several years during whic...

In the summer of 1485, diplomat Giovanni Dario and the Ottoman court had to attend the hunting camp of the Sultan, Beyazid II. The weather w...