Sunday, March 7, 2010

Athens Pt. 3: Sounio

On Monday, since we'd exhausted the big tourist sites in Athens, we decided to take a side trip to the coast for a few hours. We chose Sounio because of favorable reviews we'd gotten from my Frommer's book and other people; it's a tiny village on the southernmost tip of Attica that is famous for a very well-preserved Temple of Poseidon. It's claim to fame is a myth about how the Aegean Sea was named. King Ageus sent his son, Theseus, to Crete to slay King Midos's minotaur. He told Theseus' crew to return with white sails if he was victorious but black ones if he had perished. Upon his victory, Theseus was so excited that he forgot to switch the sails upon returning home. Seeing the black sails on the horizon, King Ageus threw himself heartbroken into the sea from the Temple of Poseidon at Sounio and the sea was forever after named after him. Kind of interesting.

Sounio was a two-hour bus ride away, so we got there around two in the afternoon and had about four or five hours to mess around before taking the last bus back to Athens. We first off explored some of the cliffs that make up the peninsula near the temple, and then headed down to a relatively calm rock cove to take a dip in the sea. I was under the impression that the Mediterranean was warm year round; unfortunately I quickly remembered we were bordering the Aegean. The water was pretty cold, but after going swimming at the ranch in November and being in a Norweigan glacial lake before, it was the kind of cold that I wasn't absolutely opposed to. Felt super good to go swimming again, even if I was wearing gym shorts and nearly freezing. Once I sucked it up and dived all the way in and swam about a little bit, it was definately refreshing.



After swimming for about an hour we reclothed ourselves and headed up to the Temple of Poseidon. We did the normal picture-taking and then headed back down to the lone cafe in the village to watch the sun set over the Aegean.

No comments:

Post a Comment