"non licet omnibus adire Corinthum"

The famous Roman poet Horace is quoted as saying, "non licet omnibus adire Corinthum" which translates to "not everyone can go to Corinth" due to the expensive living standards that prevailed the city. But here we are!!

After a crazy night in Gazi, and literally having ONE hour of sleep, we took a 7:30 AM bus ride to the Argolids- more specifically, the city of Corinth. As we crossed the Corinth Canal, the scenery and architecture began to change and I could tell that we weren't in Attika anymore.

Corinth is much more rural but with a beautiful ocean backdrop. It's a narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnese to mainland Greece (basically a halfway point between Athens and Sparta). The city has two main ports: one in the Corinthian Gulf and one in the Saronic Gulf. In the Corinthian Gulf lay the ancient road Lechaion, which connected to ancient city to its western colonies and Magna Graecia, while the in the Saronic Gulf the port of Kenchreia served the ships coming in from Athens, Ionia, Cyprus and the rest of Levant. Today, we visited Lechaion (shown below) part of which passes through the Corinthian agora.

At the Corinthian agora, there was also the Temple of Apollo which was built around 550 BCE. The Temple of Hera (located at the sanctuary of Zeus in Olympia) and the Temple of Apollo were the first earliest surviving Greek temples that we have today. These were the models that people used in order to build the Parthenon a century later.

Stylistically, the Temple of Apollo is referred to as "austere" because of the severe aesthetic presentation that it provides. As you can see, it is very simple and yet the columns are not perfect; when you look closely, the fluting is crooked. There is also a complete lack of sculptural decoration, which were too expensive and time-consuming at the time. All the columns are in the Doric order (there are four main temple orders, as they are called- Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Aeolic). Nevertheless, the Temple of Apollo gave way to some of the most fantastic buildings in the world such as the Parthenon.

Afterwards, we hiked all the way up to the acropolis of Corinth, known as the "Acrocorinth," which you can see its fortified walls of the citadel on the top of that mountain above. Yes. I was on the top of that. The VERY top of that.

It is arguably the most impressive of the acropoleis on all of mainland Greece, and the north side overlooks the beautiful, blue Gulf of Corinth.

It was a 30 minute hike to the absolute top. There were a select few of us that actually decided to venture all the way up and when we finally got there, the view made you feel like you were in an airplane, that's how high up were were. Insane!!

Yes, that is my sneaker at the very edge!! Ah!!! And for those of you who happened to read my Facebook status today, yes, I peed here as well. I couldn't help it! When you gotta go, you gotta go! It was a nice view at least :)

It was a little scary descending down because the pathways (when they are present) are cobble and they can get very slippery. Some people ate it on the way down. Slow and steady wins the race, kids.

Afterwards, we took a quick visit to Tiryns, a Mycenaean citdel in Corinth. It's fortification walls are so impressive, 15-20 meters high, 20 feet thick, made of huge boulders. The Greeks call this style of fortification cyclopian because they believed that only Cyclops could have been able to lift these boulders in order to construct these citadel walls! Shown below is one of the galleries within the walls. You can see how they placed each boulder, leaning on one another, in order to form this corbeling technique.

By this point, I was exhausted. After getting no sleep the night before, and having a full day of visiting sites (including an hours worth of intense hiking), I was spent. We travelled from there to the quaint, seaport town of Nafplion where we will be staying in a hotel for the night. Took a nice nap to make up for my lack of sleep, a hot shower (because we all know that those are few and far between here in Greece) and going back out to explore the town!

We're seeing the Mycenae citadel and the Epidaurus theater tomorrow.