#pelopennese

[rosefrancaise8]

We have been admiring the beautifully crafted and lovingly maintained dry stone walls that terrace this Island for days now. For the past 5 centuries they have made farming possible on these steep hills, creating enclosures for farm animals, olive groves and crops. These days they also host the remnants of tiny little stone barns that have long since lost their lids. The walls are of a uniform height and depth and the enclosures appear to be of similar proportions. We surmise that there might be a science to this. Some look like they have laid fallow for most of those centuries and others look prepped and ready for work. They all look full of potential!

We had read about the walking trails criss crossing the Island but until today when we took the Number 1 trail from Artemonas to Kastro hadn’t really known what this system of paths looked like. We didn’t know that they hid behind and between those stone walls. It was a revelation as we made our way downhill one cautious step after another and then stumbled all the way back up again. It was only a few kilometres back but it was a very steep few kilometres that hugged a rugged coastline dotted with churches before pointing straight up.

We had an unexpectedly delicious and non-traditional lunch in Kastro and then as we sank slowly into our seats and started gazing at the terraced hills in front of us we started to see those walking trails plain as day. They emerged out of the landscape like in those 3D images where if you stare unfocussed long enough you see a different image from the one you saw first. Now that the mystery has been unlocked we will see them everywhere and be grateful.

On first impressions, Artemonas had a different feel to the other villages. To understand just how different would have required many more steps that we were not prepared to take. What I can say with absolute confidence from my quick whip around is that there are at least 3 statues within a 300 step radius dedicated to important men. One situated in a shady and sociable little square dedicated to Nikolaos Ant. Chrissogelos (1780-1857) included a very helpful English biography. He was a man of culture and one of the great educators of his time. He was the first to see off the Turkish occupiers, hoisting the Flag of Liberty to seal the deal, and then went straight out and led 150 Sifnian fighters into battle in the Pelopennese. He was what you would call an all-rounder.

[luimnigh]

Yes, Michael Morbius, son of Makarioa Morbius, from the coastal city of Nafplio on the Pelopennese Peninsula.

I'm not sure when him being Greek was established, though. His second appearance makes it clear he's European but not English, but that's it.

The earliest I can find direct reference to him being Greek is 2012, but his established backstory before then did have his lab partner be a man named Nikos.

Y'know, with Morbius' British accent, it's sometimes hard to remember that he's actually Greek.

[theworldatwar]

German soldiers in the ruins of Olympia in the Peloponnese, Greece following its capture - April 1941

[hellopendulum]

And feeling more minuscule around this grand ancient theatre! 😱 #epidavros #epidavrostheatre #epidaurus #ancients #pelopennese #argolis #greece #griekenland #summerinseptember (at Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus)

[cashew-dad]

i am very fine young man and you too could be if you eat a part of greece

[swartzmark]

The cranes I have never seen but Cretan shepherds have told me of that endless caravan lasting for hours stretching from beak to tail from one edge of the sky to the other so high above Mt. Ida as to be almost out of sight, but accompanied by a strange unearthly sound like a far-away conversation; all, it used to be thought, heading for the forests of Central Africa to re-engage with the pygmies, who are waiting for them with full quivers and, according to Aristotle, astride goats, in their never-ending war.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Pelopennese (1958)

[dustedmagazine]

Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson — Refuge (Dead Oceans)

Photo by Lauren Dukoff

Refuge by Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson

Devendra Banhart and his longtime producer Noah Georgeson had been talking about making an ambient album together for years before the pandemic hit. Banhart’s interest in non-western philosophical traditions aligned with Georgeson’s fascination with deep listening composers like Pauline Oliveros. Both had dallied with all sorts of countercultural influences; both had a sneaking fondness for new age music. But when the lockdown came and the two friends could no longer meet face to face, the project gained new impetus. Among the necessary things in short supply in 2020 — like toilet paper, baking yeast and dried pasta — calming music came near the top of the list.

And so, working remotely Banhart and Georgeson reached out to mostly LA-based artists they’d worked with before. Make something beautiful and simple and resonant, they urged. Send it back to us. As sounds arrived piecemeal, the two shaped them into compositions of deep stillness and minimalist beauty. Refuge is just what it sounds like, a quiet space carved out of confusion; an offering of lucid, solitary tones that glow softly and fade into silence. Two of the cuts were serene enough to make the Calm app’s selection of soothing music.

Listening to Refuge requires a bit of mental adjustment. Notes come at widely spaced intervals with plenty of silence between, so that they seem like separate sensations rather than a connected run of melody. Things change very slowly. Sounds unfold like flowers, unfurling and then retracting as if responding to sunlight. Nothing much seems to happen. And yet that nothing, that stillness, that blossoming aura is quite beautiful, and as you listen details begin to emerge. “Rise from your Wave,” for instance, throws up gently corroded arcs of pedal steel (that’s Aircrafting’s Nicole Lawrence), the notes decaying as they slide off into silence. “Pelopennese Lament,” begins in a wandering ghost of clarinet, played by David Ralicke, a composer and musician who has played with Banhart before, but also Beck, Lucinda Williams and many others. “In a Cistern” lets loose a glistening string of harp notes—Mary Lattimore no less—that is so clear and precise and full of clarity that it seems like the platonic ideal of harp music, rather than the thing itself. After a while, tendrils of pedal steel curl around this lattice, subsuming its regularity in a riot of organic tone and overtone.

Towards the end, the two musicians incorporate some spoken word into their glacially paced, temperately volumed soundscapes, threading a bit of narrative into inchoate mists of aural sensation. But that narrative, too, tunes into otherworldly vibrations. “Asura Cave” begins in the rumble of thunder and encompasses Buddhist chant and meditation. “I have this feeling I’m about to…” says an uncredited voice a couple of times, but about to what? It nudges right up to the ineffable, communing with it without trying to explicate its meaning.  “May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease” intones another voice at the end of “Sky Burial,” a closing benediction at a spiritual service that has so far been without words.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.  

Jennifer Kelly

[undeadcourier]

Lil headcanon before I go to bed: Arcade is trans and got his name from that phrase “et in arcadia ego” bc in the context of the writing it comes from “Arcadia” is synonymous with “paradise”. It means like “even in paradise, there is death”, I think. I’ll have to google it again. But anyway it’s very on brand and teenage arcade loved it.

conveniently i am a classics scholar and i know latin - it means "even in arcadia, i am [there]."

arcadia, a region in the middle of the pelopennese, was a rural shepherd community which ancient greeks held to be an idyllic paradise, like you mentioned, and the speaker is understood to be death, so you're correct that the message is that even in a perfect society, people die and everything eventually ends.

the exact phrase is the title of a french baroque memento mori painting by nicolas poussin, and a painting of a similar theme with the same title was done by the italian artist guercino several years earlier.

in poussin's work, the title of the painting is in reference to an inscription on the tomb depicted there. if we go all the way back to antiquity, we find that the first depiction of a memorial inscription on a tomb amid the idealized utopia arcadia comes from virgil's fifth eclogue, and you may remember that if you take arcade to fortification hill, he asks the courier if he's "playing the virgil to your dante."

it's a beautiful, layered allusion that in one line tells so much about arcade's character ♡ it's probably my favorite line in the game, honestly, and it's a crime that it wasn't the quote they put on arcade's playing card (though, let's be real, nothing about that card is good lol)

i'm right there with you that baby trans arcade would name himself after arcadia, love that for him

[tlaquetzqui]

I was putting the northernmost part of my main continent at Reykjavík’s latitude, 64°. But that put the furthest point south parallel with the south tip of Africa, and more importantly put my story’s setting one degree north of the Tropic of Cancer (or whatever that is in my setting), which is much too hot. My story does involve there occasionally being snow in winter, which there is not, in most places on the 24th parallel—even with the 7° Celsius cooler temperatures a Glacial Maximum causes. Not unless they’re at much too high an altitude to be on the edge of a Great Plains-like steppe, if it’s not on a plateau, and this one isn’t.

So I put the highest point up at the 72nd parallel, about halfway between Qaanaaq, Greenland, and Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, which brings my story up to the 32nd, around like Savannah, Georgia (USA), or Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. Having moved everything 8° further from the Equator, though, I also had a bit more wiggle-room before I would be moving people into a different country, so I put them up at the 37th parallel, like the Pelopennese in Greece, or Bowling Green, Kentucky, or the whole central part of Honshū, in Japan.

[anaioanaolar-blog]

Richard Long - Pelopennese line

Well this is an amazing artist that I discover some time ago for his work “A line made by walking”, but I didn’t have the occasion to see his work live. Until today. - you can find his artwork at The Store, 180 The Strand, London, Everything at once exhibition. (where you can also find Anish Kapoor, Ai Wei Wei, Lee Ufan, Marina Abramovic and other heavy contemporary artist’s works). 

I am mentioning his artwork because I find it inspiring and an important name in my research with clay, as a basic material. His relationship with natural environment, his close surroundings and this kind of direct interaction fascinates me. 

[eglencelilercom]

Nafplio-Pelopennese-Yunanistan

https://goo.gl/WJvStt

[kimbalayah]

LATE OCTOBER 2016

Road Trip!

I am lucky to know people that drive in this country and have been met with audible laughs when I tell people that at 23 I have never had a driving lesson and it isn’t uncommon in the UK. But boy am I grateful here as I got to spend three days with friends (pictured here myself, Elle, Sofia and Aleksandra and Cristos acting as photographer) travelling from Athens to the Pelopennese visiting Napflio, Patra and a lovely little beach town where their holiday home is. I ate great pastries and had my first try of proper Greek chocolate (thumbs up) laughed at playing ridiculous games, and saw beautiful scenery everywhere I went. I got to visit ancient Mycaene, where King Menelaus ruled and the theatre of Epidauros where you could hear from the back of the ampitheatre if the singer was placed strategically! It is these types of memories that I will cherish forever.

[hellopendulum]

The theatre of Epidavros! We just sat there for a few minutes, in awe of such magnificence! 😱 #epidavros #epidavrostheatre #epidaurus #ancients #pelopennese #argolis #greece #griekenland #summerinseptember (at Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus)

[hellopendulum]

There are moments when you have to pinch yourself just to make sure that what you are looking at is real and true. I mean wow just wow! 😱😍🌞⛵️👙#epidavros #palaiaepidavros #epidaurus #ancients #pelopennese #argolis #greece #griekenland #summerinseptember #beachlove (at Palaiá Epídhavros, Attiki, Greece)

[hellopendulum]

The Lion Gate, the main entry way to Agamemnon's glorious Mycenae. My love for this is all coming back in waves. 🤓 #mykines #mycenae #mycenaeancivilization #agamemnon #clytemnestra #argolis #pelopennese #greece #griekenland #historyaddict #craycrays (at Mykines)

[swartzmark]

Patrick Leigh Fermor on the interpretation of dreams in the Southern Pelopennese