The day in Volos

Volos lays on the eastern coast of modern Greece.

Today after a rather short night of sleep (less than 4hours), I spent most of the morning relaxing. Around 11am I got a quick 45 minute nap in before we grabbed a quick lunch. We headed out for our tour of the day just before 1pm.

This was what we saw when we looked out of our stateroom this morning 

This is what was out the other side of the ship

The city is a more modern looking city to me.

This was today’s museum 

There is a nice garden attached to it.

This was really an archaeology museum and our guide for today was an archaeologist and a museum curator

She told us that this area has had settler in the city for 9000 years. In early time to have a chariot and a horse or two meant the person was wildly wealthy 

It is also the oldest place were working clay pottery was found

They have reconstructed where some of the oldest homes have been

Gold jewelry started to show up in the tombs and home excavated from around 4500 BC

Burial was also very important as they believed in life after death.

This is one of the areas shown

This is one of the first kilns know 

The guide had a lot of art representation of what the ruins we were looking at were

She show us how in the ancient art, the gods are represented as much larger than mortal man

This was the trophy give to a winning runner of the ancient Olympics. It was filled with olive oil. The run took the oil as it was very valuable and gave the trophy as tribute at the temple.

Volos is also credited with the birth of the theater

Here are a couple of miniatures 

Each only a couple of inches tall

This is a representation of the layers of one of the local digs

This was a model of the early 4500- 6,000 BC homes

Some diagrams on the building the first few centuries of settlers had

They even made miniatures of their homes

The more decorated the pottery, the wealthy the person who owned it

Clay figurines from thousands of years BC

One of the well preserved headstone with painting. Some of these are in such good shape as the were moved and used to build walls in times of  the city being attack

Jewelry was first used not as decorations, but had meanings for protection and other things desired

It was interesting in this museum that they brought some of the sites in total to show how things were found. Before they had cemeteries, family buried their dead under their house

This grave site shows a stone marker that represents a male and female saying a temporary farewell as one dies before the other

More of the jewelry found in burial sites

Outside in the museum’s garden, I spied on of my family’s favorite fruit trees. A pomegranate 

Volos is also the home of the first stories of centaurs. They were one of the first people to domesticate wild horses, so as they rode them, visitors created the idea of centaurs

We drove up the mountain and this is a look back to the bay and the town of Volos

We stopped at the town of Portaria. This is a small village. Their are some older places but all of it that we saw were around 600 hundred years or newer

This is part of the church that has altars walls made up of carved raised stone panels on the outside

Some were carved for the church while some are older grave stones reused to build the church

This was one of the old monks churches. 

Here is a close up of the frescos

There is a modern road up now to this town, but until the 1960 this was the only type of road to get from the villages above Volos to Volos. You walked or used a donkey, even horse and carts could not do them

One of the older building still in use

We talked around this village, but most of the stores were closed

There were a couple of eating establishments open

But not much pedestrian traffic except us from the tour buses

This is where we took a break from our walking. It opened the same year Dale was born

The one dog and four cats were checking us all out

We got this Greek donut dish

And some mountain tea

This is an older home where the roof is the local slat. It was the cheapest roofing in the villages

Most of the more modern homes have  tile roofs

We are heading back to Volos and passing their local harbor. The statue of the ship Argo is in the roundabout. This was the vessel which Jason took to find the Golden Fleece. Many think this is just a myth, but there is proof that there was such a journey and there was a royal named Jason who undertook it with a group of other nobles. The Golden Fleece is believed to be a fleece of a sheep that was used to trap gold in in the mining of it from the rivers. So until it is processed, it was full of gold

This is our ship

Here is a ship under construction at the same dock our ship was tied too