A Visit to Corinth, Greece
By Elizabeth Stice
Do you go to Greece just to see ruins? No, you go because it calls to you. It feels so alive on the page that you need to see it in person, if even you know it primarily from the past.
You walk the grounds, observing columns, admiring details, and taking in the sun. Cats wander about. What has been excavated is impressive. It seems like everywhere in Greece there is more Greek history just below the surface, waiting for archaeologists to uncover. We can enter into the past and its familiar stories, if we plunge into the brown earth like Odysseus did the wine dark sea.
All of Greece is a seismic zone. Anything standing is special.
There it is, the capital of a Corinthian column. Since childhood you have heard about just this thing.
It is a quiet day and you cannot imagine the bustling city that the Apostle Paul wrote to or the polis allied to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.
Despite the years and the wear, the sophistication of the carving still distinguishes these stones from their unhewn cousins.
The isthmus of Corinth separates the Peloponnese from mainland Greece. On your way to the site, you cross the Corinthian Canal--attempted by the ancients, but only completed in the 1890s by the Ottomans.