Sunday dawned lovely but hot. The water looked lovely but I never quite made it to swimming.
I had a wander about town, but it was pretty quiet. The beach did slowly fill up though.
This boat was great. Someone's not been out in a while!
There's a lovely painted wall with Matala's slogan on it. "Today is life. Tomorrow never comes."
But then it was on to see the tombs!
There are no bodies in them, not to worry. But I did notice a couple that were filled in and/or still buried... But they were mostly pretty cool. Some have doorways and others have sort of eroded open with the wind and water over time.
A door!
This one had a second chamber through a second doorway. Most of these I had to crouch in to varying degrees in, but a couple you could stand fully in.
I also found a carved double axe! I suspect very strongly it is not ancient, but still cool! (Double axes are associated with the Minoans.)
This was the most elaborate tomb, with carved outlines of the niches and carved pillows for the entombed.
Others were designed for the bodies to be laid in sarcophagi type things and then covered.
This one was huge! The biggest one I saw.
I scrambled all the way up to the top so that I could see all the tombs and the view from up there was lovely, too.
But with the tombs having been seen, it was time to head onwards! The first stop on the way back was Phaestos, one of my favorite palace sites. Where I mostly played with the panorama function and tried to refrain from adding to the oodles of pictures I already have of the site.
This is the grand entrance to the left, which faces out on to this western court and theatral area.
The great storage magazines...
And the west court again! With raised processional walkways (or something of that sort.)
The central court, and one of the defining features of a Minoan palace:
Stairs! I do love stairs. These stairs were part of an older palace complex beneath the top one, and near to the location where the Phaestos disc was found.
Phaestos is in a lovely hilltop with good lines of sight in most directions.
From there we headed on to Gortyn. It has a very large basilica (which was unfortunately being worked on, so we couldn't see much).
And these fabulous old olive trees.
But the other big thing is a roman theater.
Yay panoramas!
It is most noted because it has a law code of Gortyn built into it in the back.
They've also have a couple nifty statues.
Monday and Tiesday saw us back to work. And Pretty Kitty back to napping. In chairs...
On water bottles...
And who knows where else. Freddy kept up his usual patrols, and continued to guilt people into feeding him.
All is going well though. The debate about the economy came to a head when they reached and agreement yesterday. Now it must be ratified by the Greek parliament, but it looks like Greece will stay in the Eurozone. For now the banks are still closed, I think, but it's not been a huge problem. Hope all is well at home!
