Category: Week 2

A Postcard from Distomo

by Vivien Wong

In the late 1960s, when the Hellenic Ministry of Culture commissioned sculptor Stelios Triantis to design a memorial for the Distomo Mausoleum, he found inspiration in the metopes of ancient Greek temples. Metopes, rectangular slabs between triglyphs on a Doric frieze, may be decorated or plain. The most famous incorporation of this architectural element appears at the Parthenon:  almost a hundred metopes adorn the four sides of the temple, each sculpted with a scene from a mythical Greek battle.

Triantis crafted seven metopes for the Distomo Mausoleum. Together, they narrate the German occupation troops’ massacre of over 200 inhabitants of the village of Distomo on June 10, 1944. In these panels, violence conveys tragedy rather than triumph: the forced march of six faceless figures, three men slumped on the ground, three women weeping. A stiff German soldier aims his machine gun at a family huddled around a square table. The father, weaponless, stands and leans over the table toward the soldier. 

Normally, metopes sit atop the vertical columns of a temple. Triantis’s panels, on the other hand, span a horizontal column, marble, a few feet off the ground; perpendicular to this lies another column, engraved with the names and ages of the massacre victims. The two axes converge at the mausoleum’s cubic ossuary. Each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, relatives may enter and light candles inside. Otherwise, the room is closed to the public. 

A slatted window allows visitors like myself a partial, obstructed glimpse of the victims’ remains inside, displayed in a wall of shelves to the right. The skulls are of varying condition: some cracked, others missing a mandible. Counted together, they still number fewer than the names engraved outside.

*

When my grandfather, whom I call Ankong, was seven, the Japanese invaded his hometown of Linyi, in the eastern province of Shandong, China. By the time he’d turned twelve, his father, accused of being part of the Japanese opposition movement, had been captured, tortured, executed, and beheaded. 

The Japanese occupied Linyi for seven years, until the end of the Second World War. After his father’s death, Ankong’s mother disappeared with his baby brother. His younger siblings sent off to an orphanage, Ankong fled south: the first leg of an exodus that eventually took him to the Philippines. There, in a village on Negros Island, he met my grandmother, my Amma, whose father, brothers, and uncles had once lined up before the Japanese machine guns and lived. 

There’s a picture of Ankong, sixty-eight, during his final trip to Linyi. He’s kneeling in the dirt of the Cemetery of the Revolutionary Martyrs of East China, which honors those who were killed for resisting the Japanese. Behind him crouch my mother and my aunt. Both are smiling; he is not. In the center sits a bouquet of flowers. 

My mother used to tell me Ankong’s father was buried in that cemetery. Recently, she returned with a correction from my great-aunt: in fact, he’d been buried in a completely different cemetery in Linyi. Only Ankong knew where it was. Years ago, Ankong had been there to visit his father’s grave and found the area razed for construction. “All the tombs and tombstones were gone and turned into flat land,” my great-aunt wrote. 

I also recalled my mother saying she’d seen my great-grandfather’s name on a plaque in the revolutionary martyrs cemetery. Now she’s not certain. Ankong told her at the cemetery that he was happy his father was being commemorated, she said, “but I don’t know his father’s name was even there.” 

Why bring the flowers to a grave that didn’t exist? “I think Ankong just wanted to have a place to go to remember,” my mother said. 

Proposals to build a memorial for the victims of the Distomo massacre began in 1944; the mausoleum was not completed until 1976. According to Amalia Papaioannou, the historian who curates Distomo’s Museum of the Victims of Nazism, one survivor’s son had “never experienced a caress or a sign of tenderness from his own father,” whose brothers and fathers were killed in the Distomo massacre, until the day the bones of his father’s family were transferred to the mausoleum. “That was the first day that he showed affection to his son,” she said. 

Papaioannou is herself a third-generation descendant of Distomo massacre survivors. Growing up, she told me, “we didn’t hear any other story, any other fairy tale from our grandmothers and grandfathers, except the story of the victims of the massacre. Again and again and again.” 

“The memory is a debt,” Papaioannou explained. “The debt has become a way of life.” The biggest concern in Distomo, she added, “is that this memory will die together with the last survivors.” 

Since leaving China, Ankong has stopped talking about his father. He prefers to think of his mother and youngest brother as long buried. But there is some inexplicable force that compels his daughters and grandchildren, I among them, to continue exhuming their bodies, as if knowing exactly how they were killed or what they were wearing when it happened can make murder less bloody. 

Each Christmas, we gather—in Ankong’s living room, or else over Zoom—to hear about the day the Japanese invaded. The debt is paid: again and again and again. ♦

By Valerio Castellini

At the entrance to modern Delphi, the structure that once hosted the Hotel Apollon sits quiet and empty. Its balconies are rusting, the paint on its facade faded to a dull beige. Shuttered windows overlook an almost deserted square. A small, sun-bleached sign still bears the name of the town’s first tourist establishment. Now it’s a ghost of an ambitious past—a mirror, perhaps, of how Delphi’s present struggles to live up to its legacy. Today, Delphi feels like a stage after the audience has left. 

Today, while the ruins of the ancient Oracle still draw thousands, the modern town of Delphi is quietly crumbling—its fate sealed by the economics of a changing tourism industry.

Second only to the Acropolis, Delphi has long been a cornerstone of Greece’s cultural heritage circuit. Large tourist inflow began in the second half of the 20th century, when Greece was under the dictatorial rule of the Regime of the Colonels. 

Delphi was one of the sites identified by the Xenia project, a program sponsored by the regime that promoted the construction of touristic infrastructure in selected historical locations that would uphold Greece’s image building on its glorious ancient past. It was pure propaganda, but it is representative of the importance of Delphi in antiquity, when it served as the cultural and religious capital for the Hellenic world (and beyond).

Perched on the slopes of Mount Parnassus and overlooking the stunning Pleistos River Valley, it has ever since offered generations of visitors not only the weight of history, but the promise of immersion. In recent years, that promise is fading. 

This is a result of a wider crisis that had been brought up in our conversation with Giorgos Lialios, a journalist at Kathimerini who covers overdevelopment and tourism. “There is an issue with the quality of tourism,” he said. “The tourism industry is not developing—it’s just growing.”

Lialios points to the rise of short-term rentals and low-cost flights, which have made Greece more accessible than ever—but at a cost. Tourists can now easily and affordably spend their vacations here, but they often opt for more superficial activities that in most cases do not touch, or only hastily, cultural destinations.

This is especially harmful for the site of Delphi, which is located off the beaten track for most itineraries. In order to visit Delphi, one must plan specifically in order to include it. It is a three hour (often more) commute from Athens or any other major port of arrival, and clearly, unless vehemently passionate, many will happily disregard it.

This is reflected in data. According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, Delphi saw a 41% drop in visitors from January to November 2024 compared to the same period the year before—plummeting from over 460,000 to just 284,000. 

Many factors may be at play, but the numbers are too stark to be dismissed.

This has a huge toll on the adjacent town. If overall visitors have decreased, the number of them having an overnight stay is even lower. “Most people come as a day trip from Athens,” said Sophia Theona, a longtime guide at the ancient site. “Not many people spend the night.”

Today, the streets are lined with hotels and souvenir shops—proof of an infrastructure built for crowds that rarely come. Most storefronts are either shuttered or open for only a few hours a day. It’s strangely difficult to find a place to buy groceries, not even a mini-market in sight. The few shops that remain open sell the same plaster statues and fridge magnets found in Plaka or Monastiraki. 

“Businesses are shutting down—they just don’t have enough customers to stay open,” added Sophia.

From behind the counter of an ice cream shop on Delphi’s main street—the only place open in the late afternoon of a Tuesday—36-year-old Iordanis sees the same pattern. “In the spring we get school groups, but they come and go. They might take a walk in town, but they don’t stay.”

A quick informal experiment reinforces these theories. On popular platforms such as Booking.com and Airbnb, the vast majority of properties are still vacant for the coming peak season—most of them being available for same-day bookings. 

For a town built around the expectation of overnight guests, the loss of that rhythm is minatory.

Delphi seems to have lost its individuality, eroded by the very industry it hoped would sustain it. A town that sold its soul for tourism, and that is now facing the consequences of its decline.

It is not necessarily the result of bad choices. Delphi is rather the victim of a change in demand that it has not been able to—and probably would not be—accommodate. The hordes of tourists that arrive on cruise ships daily in Mykonos or Santorini would not find in Delphi what they are looking for. They will rather enjoy an ‘Instagrammable’ spot, or a restaurant disguised as traditional. Most now prefer performative tourism, without any significance or genuine learning behind it.

Tourists now spend less and stay shorter. Just the time to get some good pictures in and tick Greece off their wish-list. 

Good for visitors, maybe. Less so for Greece.

Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century Orthodox monastery, is just down the road from Delphi. Are they linked by more than proximity?

By Noah LaBelle

Father Anthimos left home at the age of twenty and spent fifteen years without seeing his mother. If that’s what devotion to the Almighty demanded, it was fine by him.

“Mount Athos is a peninsula, and it is not allowed for women,” he said, describing the Eastern Orthodox monastic community where he’d spent nearly all of his adult life. Twenty monasteries. Some two-thousand monks. “I liked it very much there, because I did not have my mother,” he quipped.

Now, he’s at Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century monastery tucked into the olive-covered foothills of Mount Helicon. It’s just over a half-hour’s drive from Delphi, another site of ancient sanctity.

At first glance, the two—Delphi and Hosios Loukas—seem at odds. One, in ruins, is stone-strewn. Its temple, treasuries, stadium, and amphitheatre are now divided among reconstructed fragments, displays in the adjacent museum, and still-buried remains. The other, intact in an elegant mélange of brick, stone, and marble, beams with golden mosaics, as revered today as they were in Byzantium.

Then there’s the tension between God and the gods. “Phoibos [Apollo] no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay, nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up,” the Pythia lamented in 362 A.D., in one of the final Delphic auguries. Gone were the days when Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates, and Alexander the Great schlepped up to the vapor-dazed oracle. Predictions ceased. 

That is, until Luke of Steiris, a Hellenic hermit, came along half a millennium later. With his mother’s blessing, a fourteen-year-old Luke left to live as an ascetic on a mountain called Ioannitza. A life of Christ-centered divinity—over Apollonian divination—ensued, and with it, prophecy. In his teens, Luke foretold the Bulgarian invasion of Ioannitza. He also predicted Emperor Romanos’ conquest of Crete: fulfilled in the 960s, a decade after Luke’s death in 953. By then, he’d already settled down, founded Hosios Loukas, and, as tradition holds, got caught levitating during prayer.

The gods had gone silent on Mount Parnassus. Luke’s monastery still prays. God, it appears, never left central Greece.

***

I met Anthimos in the courtyard, apron pale against his black habit and kalimavkion. Together, they mirrored the charred conifer abutting the entry walkway. In August 2023, a wildfire swept the valley, and a pine cone-turned-grenade torched one of the oldest buildings to a crisp. Anthimos arrived this March.

Inside the octagonal katholikon—christened the finest surviving church interior from the first centuries after Iconoclasm—his phone rang. He let it. First, he scrubbed the icons a visitor had just kissed, post-signum crucis. Mary. Loukas. I watched, pondering the contents of the spray bottle. Windex? Certainly not. (Later, I consulted The Byzantine Forum, an online hub for all things Eastern Christian, which suggested a mix of waters: rose and holy. But, as one commenter warned, “Rosewater doesn’t remove lipstick.”)

“I never imagined that one day someone would call me to go outside of Mount Athos,” Anthimos told me. 

Then the Archbishop called. “‘I have this monastery,’” Anthimos recalls him saying. “‘There are three monks. Can you help me?’”

Only the Archbishop himself knows if it was the wildfire that prompted Anthimos’ move, or the lopsided ratio of fathers to foreigners. Perhaps both. 

Still, it beats Mount Athos. There, the monks rose at two o’clock sharp. After devotion: hours toiling on trees. “Here, we start at seven,” Anthimos said, smiling. 

I wasn’t sure whether his chats with visitors, myself included—“from Australia, from Canada, from Hong Kong,” he said—counted toward his eight hours of work or his eight hours of rest. Prayer, I surmised, was separate. Then again, sharing the monastery might be a kind of devotion in itself.

What was clear: this wasn’t the Delphi crowd. The day before, to my chagrin, a woman in a safety vest—just a stone’s throw away—screamed into a whistle when she spotted a pack of kids trying to hop the stadium wall. Delphi sees close to a million visitors a year. For Hosios Loukas, there’s no public figure. Enough to keep Anthimos busy, and make him want to stay.

“But, I’m open in everything in my life,” Anthimos said, once certain he’d die at Mount Athos.

At Delphi, there was a phrase for that: kairòn gnôthi—know the right moment. Stobaeus found it etched near the Temple of Apollo, and recorded it in his fifth-century anthology of Delphic maxims. This was just years after Theodosius, the Roman Emperor, had outlawed the old gods, cementing the empire’s shift to Christianity. 

That alone didn’t shutter the oracle. It took a natural disaster: an earthquake in 381 A.D. sealed the fissures releasing ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas that induces euphoria, and with them, the vapor trances that powered the Pythia and their prophecies. 

One more rogue pine cone, and Hosios Loukas might’ve gone the way of Delphi. ♦