Aegina Island
The struggle between the two seafaring powers was long and bitter, broken only during the Persian wars when Aegina joined Athens to defeat their common enemy at sea, supplying thirty ships at the battle of Salamis, where they were acknowledged to have fought the best of all the Greeks.
Today the ‘flying dolphin’ hydrofoils take only forty minutes to reach Aegina from Piraeus, even though they have to round its north¬western cape to arrive at the principal harbour on the west coast. As they round Cape Plakakia you see first the headland of Kolona, where the sole surviving column of the temple of Apollo stands; then the town itself shows up white against the land, with the blue cupola of St Nicholas church looking like a bubble of the sea that has strayed on to the shore. South and to starboard is the separate island of Angistri, and beyond it the peninsula of Methana, humped against the mainland like a stranded whale. The waters in between are usually alive with yachts and fishing boats.
The small town of Aegina occupies part of the same site as the classical city. The modern harbour was the ancient commercial one, its moles built on a bank of shoal; at the end of the north mole a tiny whitewashed church seems almost to stand in the sea. There is a wide, sweeping front, with some good nineteenth-century houses at the northern end. Along the southern quays local boats tie up, their decks not displaying catches of fish or piles of nets, but heaped with fruit and vegetables for sale like barges on Venetian canals - bright patches of colour under protective canvas awnings.
The old naval harbour was further north, now distinguishable only by its sunken moles — the kruptos limen (’hidden harbour’) as it is called today. It lies between the commercial harbour and the Kolona headland which sheltered both harbours from northerly winds. This bold natural site, commanding the sea approaches, was fortified in Neolithic times and occupied well into the Christian era, but now it is little more than an extensive muddle of ruins. The single weather¬worn tufa column stood in the opisthodomos of a big temple to Apollo; the foundations are there, built up to a high level with a walkway around, but the other buildings are difficult to trace after frequent destruction and reworking in different periods. There is some good walling on the inland side, and one interesting detail stands out - two circular ‘eyes’ cut on a large stone facing the approach, a psychological addition to the defences.
It may be a surprise to find that the Archaeological Museum has been moved to a new site just below the ruins, for the official maps
show it in the centre of the town. It contains nothing much of interest
-a lot of restored pottery of different periods, and a nice little Sphinx
-but is well laid out in rooms built round a courtyard. Another piece of public misinformation is that the curator controls entry to the thirteenth-century Omorphi Ekklesia, just outside the town. This is one of the smallest and (on the outside) simplest of island churches, dedicated to the two Saints Theodore and probably built with stones from a classical temple. Its great interest lies inside, with fine frescos of episodes from the life of Christ in the nave, a Crucifixion on the west wall and a Resurrection over the altar. To protect them the church is now kept locked, and it needs a special application to the demarcheion to see them - a pity, but Aegina is flooded with tourists in the summer, not all of them reputable or trustworthy.
The destruction of buildings on the headland of Kolona, including the temple of Apollo, was hastened by Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first leader of independent Greece, who in 1826 quarried the site for material to build new quays when Aegina became the seat of a provisional Greek government. Needless to say, it was soon dispos¬sessed by its ancient enemy, Athens, but it was one of the first places over which the Greek national flag was formally hoisted - though its colours were then red and gold, quite different from the blue and white we know today.
Before 1826 - and indeed from the ninth century onwards - the capital of the island was on an acropolis site a few miles inland to the east, now known as Palaiochora. The move from the coast was made after frequent Saracen raids, and like the mediaeval capitals of so many Aegean islands it was a witness to the long centuries of piracy and anarchy when to live on or near the sea coast invited
disaster.
The mediaeval history of Aegina is not greatly different from that of the western Aegean as a whole. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after the crusaders had split up the Byzantine empire, it was ruled individually by a succession of Venetian and Catalan fami¬lies. In 1451 Venice herself took over in the hope of stiffening resis¬tance to the conquering Turks, and held it until its formal cession in 1718 by the treaty of Passowitz - though it was captured and devas¬tated in 1537 by Khair-ed-din, the Greek renegade from Lesbos who became a Turkish admiral (generally known as Barbarossa) on his brief but terrible rampage through the Aegean.
The acropolis of Palaiochora is an extraordinary place today.
Apart from the ruined castle walls at the top, every vestige of the mediaeval city has disappeared except for some twenty churches scattered on the steep sides of the hill. It seems that empty private houses could be plundered for building material, but not buildings where God was still present. The result is that you can now examine better than anywhere else the different types of small church archi¬tecture which cover centuries from the thirteenth to the seventeenth, close together and not obscured by other buildings. The most unusual one is Agios Georgios, which is rectangular on the north-south axis, but has its apse projecting to the east at the northern end. The most attractive in style and position is the tiny cross-in-square church of Episkopi, left like all the others in its original bare stone. In many of them there are frescos, more or less damaged, and it seems a pity that more care is not taken to preserve the whole group as the outstanding mediaeval monument it is.
Apart from their individual interest they illustrate the custom by which different families in the town built and maintained a church at their own expense. Few visitors find their way up here, and the grassy paths between the churches are alive in summer with marbled white butterflies and continental swallowtails.
Palaiochora is just off the main road from Aegina town to Agia Marina, the most popular resort in the island. Before you reach the mediaeval acropolis, your eye will be caught by the huge modern church of the monastery of Agios Nektarios which spreads across the valley below. He was the Metropolitan bishop of the diocese in the nineteenth century, canonized by the Orthodox church in 1961, so no architectural subtleties can be expected there. The road to Agia Marina gives you a good view of the island’s chief product, pistachio nuts. The trees line it on either side, and looking at their copious clusters one wonders who eats them all.
Agia Marina is a lively and colourful place on the east coast opposite the capital, but those interested in the past will want to stop for a look at the Doric Temple of Aphaia, which stands on a pine-clad hill above the bay. It is easily the best preserved of classical temples in the islands, and was built about 485 BC on the same site as two earlier ones. A good deal of what we see today depends on the restoration - or rather re-erection - of elements such as columns, triglyphs and metopes, but the clean outlines of soft golden limestone are very satisfying. The pediments at either end of the temple had sculptures depicting two sieges of Troy: the first was mythical, in¬volving Herakles and Telamon against the Trojan king Laomedon;
the second was the ten-year siege described by Homer, involving Ajax, the hero of Salamis. The central figure of both pediments was Athena, and this gave rise to the belief that the temple was hers. However in 1901 the German archaeologist Furtwangler discovered an inscription including the name Aphaia, a local variant for the Cretan Britomartis or Dictynna, a nymph in the service of Artemis. The name itself can mean ‘dark* or ‘invisible’, and some have taken it as an appellation of the moon goddess herself in her dark phase.
Greek mythology is a confusing study, especially when it involves gods with legendary and near-historical characters. Wherever such complications lead us, the fate of the sculptures is interesting in view of modem controversy, for they were carried off in 1811 to Zakyn-thos, which was then under British control, and later bought at auc¬tion by Ludwig of Bavaria, He had them restored in Rome and handed them over to the museum of sculpture in Munich, where they are held to this day without to one’s knowledge any protest from the Greek Ministry of Culture.
This northern half of the island accounts for most of its population and nearly all its crops, for down in the south a series of mountain summits gradually increase in height to the final cone of Mt Oros, one of the classic viewpoints of the Mediterranean. These central mountains contain two important sites, the seventeenth-century con¬vent of Chrysoleontissa and considerable remains of a sanctuary of Zeus Hellenios which originated in the Mycenaean age — but the whole area is accessible only by rough tracks on foot. Mt Oros is a tautology, as oros means mountain in ancient Greek, but its more specific name, Mt Prophitis Ilias, is all too familiar in the Greek islands for an often surly, cloud-capped peak. The sanctuary of Zeus is said to have been established by Aeacus himself when he visited the mountain to pray to his father for rain at a time of desperate drought. He was successful, and local wisdom has it that whenever Ilias (the Jewish Elijah) pulls on his night-cap, rain can be expected in the Gulf and on the southern shores of Attica.
The other two main roads serve chiefly to connect coastal resorts with the capital. The chief centre on the north coast is Souvala, but the road which hugs the western coastline passes holiday centres at Pharos and Moundi Bay, and ends at Perdika, perhaps the best spot of all, which looks across at Moni Island, home of wild flowers, birds and goats but otherwise hardly inhabited. Boats cross over there from Perdika with parties for swimming, while from Aegina harbour
there are excursions to the more distant island of Angistri, where there are hotels and more beaches. Aegina has a greater range of attractions and a more interesting history than the more popular islands further down the Saronic Gulf.