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Our travels in Greece or... How I Left My Heart in Potadaia

by

Kamouraskan

Disclaimer:

This article is copyright to the author Sept 2002. All photos used within the text were taken by and are the property of Lariel & the author, with the exception of the Alexander the Great bust, the map of Halkidiki and the 'Gabrielle in Potadaia' picture above, which was created by Lizzy Tendre from one of our Potadaia pictures.

Having a dream that I was dying in a fiery plane crash was not how I wanted to start my vacation.

I mean, I had been truly looking forward to travelling to Greece for the first time. I didn’t begin screaming ‘We’re all going to die’ until we were actually in the plane, and even then it was a sort of light-hearted whimper. I’ve never been all that frightened of flying and I didn’t want to think that the nightmare was a premonition, so I decided to do a little research to calm my fears. I took out our tickets and began an online search for our airline, travel arrangements, and the location of our resort.

I came up with nothing.

No flights at the time registered, no such airport, or resort. With all the calm I had available, I called the agency. "Soloniki on the tickets was Thessaloniki", they assured me, and the airline had farmed out our flight to a ‘subsidiary’ airline, Transjet, so the flight wasn’t listed. Polichronos was a new resort with many spellings and not likely to be online yet. Okay, fine…

I was still relatively calm that night when I found myself watching a fascinating documentary on the Discovery Channel, all about the new computer controlled cockpits that were causing several recent crashes (including a recent mid-air collision close to our flight path.) That might have been when I began to develop the twitch. The program described how the computers had been given ultimate control of the planes, and often struggles resulted between the pilot reacting to circumstances and the engineered factory ‘safety’ specs.

Or it could have been the news headline “Passengers Shrieked In Terror in Fall From Sky!” in our local paper as we prepared to leave that morning. I smiled and got into the car anyway.

We’d arranged on the net for a parking space with transport to the South terminal at Gatwick, and that worked out well once we found the place. We arrived with our tickets to nowhere with an hour’s time to spare and I was beginning to shake off my nervousness. Until I saw the plane. It was not Olympia, or Transjet; it was a new player, Excell. I’d flown D6, 707, 727, 737, 747 767… but 717? Twin engine? Where was the spare? When the valiant stewardess was flying the plane and one engine blew, how could she say that wasn’t a problem? As we settled into our seats, I tried not to imagine the onboard computer saying “Dave. I’m afraid I can’t let you go to Soloniki. There is no such place.” Or “There are too many passengers, Dave. I’m afraid I’m going to have to drop some off…”

I opened the inflight magazine and tried to relax by reading the kid’s section. There were some jokes. One was ‘Why did the squirrel fall out of the tree? Answer:  Because he was dead.’

What sort of maniac puts that in an airline magazine? Fortunately there was a follow up joke. ‘Why did the second squirrel fall out of the tree? Answer: Because she was holding hands with the first squirrel.’ I held Lariel’s hand while grinning a manic grin and it was this point that I think began to babble quietly in a sing song voice, ‘we’re all going to die…’

But as you all know, and as fate would have it, we didn’t die. We landed in Thessaloniki three hours later almost on schedule and spent only two hours in the sweltering heat waiting for our luggage.

Now Chalcidice (hahl-kee-dee-KEE) is usually described as having three fingers dangling into the Aegean, but let’s face it, it looks more like an udder with three teats. Thessaloniki is on the lower west side of the udder, with Potadaia being the gateway to the first of the teats, Kassandra. (We saw each of these place names written in several forms in English, so in true western imperialist fashion, I’ll pick one or another randomly.)

We drove south through the pitch black night, fighting sleep, peering through the window still trying to find an identifiable landmark. My anticipation that we were finally at Potadaia was rewarded as we passed over a large channel. Finally I knew where we were, something I had stared at on a map for several years and we were actually there and passing over it.

By this time it was after 10:00pm and I realised we hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in four hours. Lariel in her usual optimistic way assumed that all would be closed but as we passed through the larger resort towns, there was drinking, dancing and shopping going on a-plenty and I began to hope for something other than the crazy British shopping hours. Sorry, non-shopping hours. If any of you have tried to buy anything in Britain after four on a Sunday you will know what I mean. Lariel continued to insist that Polychronos was much smaller than the big resorts we were passing and we would go to bed hungry.

So I was delighted when we pulled into what must be Polychonos and passed by an active square with a large modern supermarket lit up, doors wide open, with people milling about inside and out. The bus stopped on a quiet, palm lined street in front of some balconied apartments. I’d never expected to find a country that could compete with Quebec for an obsessive love of reinforced concrete, but Greece clearly was trying. The ever present clipboards were consulted, and we were given our room numbers and access to our luggage.

Now at this point I was pretty happy. Not only hadn’t we died screaming in a fiery collision with the Alps, but Lariel had been wrong. Then I looked at our slip. Number 13, it read.

I was stoic as we climbed the three flights to the room. Lariel had already cut off any possible superstitious objections by stating firmly, ‘It’s a corner room. We’re keeping it.” The keys were in a door marked 13 with pride, as though it had no reason to be embarrassed about being the Door to Doom. All about us, excited tourists were unlocking their apartments and soon the balcony and rooms were ablaze with light. Except ours. There was no electricity in Room Number 13. I looked at the circuit board, and read that it was 230 Amps, which is a bit excessive as only 210 is needed to kill. Finding my manic smile again, I reached in and flipped the switch. I was rewarded by being blown back by a bright blue explosion. I didn’t scream or cry out. I merely asked plaintively, “Now can we change rooms?”

No.

So I went next door to one of the un-doomed rooms, and was allowed to check out their circuit board and memorised the configuration. Went back to try again and was shown more free Greek fireworks. Again I managed to control my bladder just because I was afraid I would be more of a conductor in sodden pants.

We went outside and found the building custodian. He was a 60ish type, overweight, wearing only shorts and a happy smile, who spoke no English. After some hand waving (who says that mime is dead?) I managed to get the situation across to him. I think I had my own happy smile as he tried the board himself. I wish I’d caught that string of curses, they might have been handy later on. He went off for some tools.

In the dark I looked about the room and found more evidence that it was evil. Two single beds. Then as time dragged on I read the safety instructions. They showed a pencil map of the floor, with an arrow indicating the only exit as a staircase in the middle of the outside terrace. The stairway we’d just used. Glad it was marked out. This was our fire escape. Thank God they explained that, I’d hate to have spent time tapping walls for more egress. It also said we should remain calm, and hit the fire alarm, marked with an ‘x’.

There was no ‘x’ on our floor. Presumably the fire alarm was a personal one; me screaming, ‘we’re all about to die!’ It also indicated there would be a fire extinguisher where the black dot was. There was no black dot for our floor. But I had a feeling one was appearing above my head, as if the room number hadn’t been sufficient cause.

The concierge returned, and he must have known more than he let on, because he went immediately to a bedroom wall by our bed, and pulled out a plug that wasn’t properly mounted. He cut the wires, shoved everything back into the wall and, still smiling, clicked on the power. We thanked him and I made a note to get buckets of sand and water to sleep beside. We did a quick run through of the rooms and assets. Bathroom with instructions not to put toilet paper down the toilet. Two foot square shower area with no curtain. But there were plates and cutlery, pots and pans, a good sized fridge and stove and a large bedroom with balcony.

We took some time to stroll about the village hand in hand and I was again filled with optimism. After a year in Britain, the prices were wonderful. In Britain, a meal with drinks starts at $50.00 (all figures in US dollars, which is aproximately the same as the Euro.) Here, the main courses were $5.00, and a litre of house wine in the shops was $2.50. All the Greek food I could eat, day after day, night after night! The beach was hardly the 2 minutes walk we’d been promised, but a leisurely 5-10 minutes we weren’t going to quibble about. Dozens of open shops and restaurants lined the boardwalk, less than 15 feet from the water itself. We bought eggs, milk, snacks and dish detergent for a few Euros. We went back to our room (which was about 90 degrees) and due to noise, shut the doors to the balcony. Though for two years we have always cuddled in order to sleep, for the first time ever, we lay apart with just our hands touching.

Part Two:
Never Trust Your Holiday Rep, Alexander the Great’s Birth Place and why the Greeks are legally in Cypress you ignorant British swine.

We hadn’t slept well thanks to being used to cold and damp of Mother England, but we unglued ourselves from the sweat filled sheets at about 9:00am and I made a quick breakfast before getting ready for our meeting with the Travel Agency Rep.

Now I have been whining for a while, so let me enthuse for a moment. We stepped outside into what would become the norm. Nearly cloudless blue skies stretching down to the Aegean Sea at the foot of the store strewn street. The beaches were already filled for the half mile stretch and the second teat of Chalcidice and its mountains were clearly visible the across 15 or 20 miles of water.

Polychronos is squeezed between the main highway and the sea, with two other parallel roads running between for about a half mile. There are lanes, alleys and streets linking each, all lined with palms and flowering bushes and trees I’ve never seen before. The houses have exterior balconies, are mainly made of freshly built coloured concrete with pinks, orangy-yellows and white predominating. All under a scorching sun and the brightest of blue skies. The main roads are home to hundreds of shops, galleries and restaurants that overflow into the streets with chairs and tables and racks of all sizes displaying everything a tourist could ask for. So we had a nice walk along the Boardwalk to the Elite Restaurant for the meet.

Now, we booked on LastMinute.com and like the airlines, we experienced another triple play from LastMinute to Apollo to Golden Sun travel. Golden Sun was represented by Sarah; blonde, chubby, and about 12 years old. Okay, maybe 20.

From where we sat, sipping our complementary orange juice, she was impossible to hear, but it was clear she was heartily recommending the restaurant and passed amongst us with cards for a 10% discount on all meals there. Which was an amazing coincidence, because we’d already noted that the prices there were about 15% above anything else we’d seen.

After her mime show was finished, we looked through the billboards and decided to go on the Alexander The Great tour, passing on the Mount Athos Tour, Visit to Waterworld and the Greek Night. Greek Night we figured was silly, considering we were in Greece (and expensive at $50 per person); Waterworld was a waste because we had the sea and Mount Athos refused to allow female humans, of which apparently Lariel is one and I am not. Up until a few years back, the monks that populate the peninsula Mount Athos occupies had refused to accept females of any species. I assume someone explained that females of several forms were constantly polluting their air and seas, or the border patrol was becoming prohibitively expensive so despite the entreaties of tourist agents, talk show hosts and the Guinness Book reps interested in keeping this freak show alive, the monks decided to compromise with sanity. All sexes of mammals other than humans were now welcome. An attempt was later made to persuade me to go by claiming that the area had several wild clubs, but the picture of monks rampaging each other in all male leather bars pushed us to decline again. We strolled over and made arrangements to pay later that day for Alexander. At that time Sarah also told us that we could find a detailed description of everything we needed to know in a tour book at our lodgings.

Instead we went back to the suite and got into bathing suits.

Now Lariel hadn’t owned one since she was twelve, and ‘shopping’ for one had taken about five years off of my life. Finally I had bought a big club and forced her to purchase one. She looked great in it, but refused to believe it. I looked ten pounds overweight and glad that my braincells still worked well enough that I wasn’t wearing a Speedo.

Now, I have a question. I want to know why Poseidon hates all men? I know I barely qualify, but somehow he knows. I mean, I have monthly cramps and bleeding, I’m the only guy I know who can do the ‘lift the chair’ thingee with only my hip muscles, but somehow, Poseidon knows. Lariel, like all women, stepped gingerly into the salt water, lay back and floated perfectly and effortlessly. I lay back and was flipped over into the dead man’s float. Is that just chance? No matter what Lariel did, she always ended up lying back as if in a perfect deck chair position, and I would be turned over face down in the water. I take this phenomenon personally.

Later that evening we met our rep again. Sarah was quite friendly, and happily told us several ‘facts’. One: she had been on all the tours. Two, the Alexander trip would return by five; and finally that we might have to pay one entrance fee of $6.00 each at a Museum on the trip.

She lied.

But we didn’t know that and we handed over $68.00 with some misgivings as it blew a huge hole in our budget. It was only the next morning as we were leaving when we found the tour book at the hotel and the handwritten sheet that said ‘DO NOT GO ON ANY OF THE TOURS RECOMMENDED BY YOU’RE REP. THEY ARE A RIP OFF.’

At the time I only barely managed not to correct the ‘you’re’ and noted that ‘recommended’ was spelled properly…

The Alexander The Great Tour was scheduled to pick us up at 7:50 AM. at the traffic lights where Sarah told us ‘everything is!’

Some people have Times Square, Polychronos had the Traffic Lights.

Lariel had deliberately left our alarm clock at home on the odd and unproven theory that we didn’t need it on vacation, so that left me to do the job as usual. Unfortunately I was still on Greenwich time, so I woke at 5:00 AM as I would normally at 7, afraid to go back to sleep because I’d wake up at noon. Not with $68 on the line.

So I read, made breakfast for the lady and finally we set out at 7:30am.

Now I’ve lived and visited many places, but I’ve never walked into blazing hot sunshine like that at 7:30. It became very clear that we were immediately in need of the sunscreen we packed, and we bought some bottled water on our hike up the hill. So you have to imagine this searing heat throughout the day. Otherwise our half hour wait at the side of the road for the bus to arrive loses its edge slightly.

When the bus finally arrived, the driver checked our paid slips and we boarded. Once again we passed over Potadaia. I say passed over because in the daylight I could finally see that a huge concrete overpass jumped the ancient canal and the town simultaneously. We drove for another 20 minutes until we had gone beyond my little map of the region, and there in this Terra Incognita, we were told to get out.

We were later told that the bus driver had been late waiting for the tour guide who had never shown, and he decided that he would leave us at this parking space until another bus with a tour guide could come by. Apparently picking up a tour guide was not possible as tour guides were seemingly installed into buses like brakes and radiators.

So we waited for another half hour in a steaming hot parking lot until a bus pulled up. Streaming to it as though it promised us salvation from the Sun God, we were immediately swept back and told that this was the bus for Water World. At that point it sounded like a nice place to be, but we were not of the Chosen.

A second bus pulled up, and despite our pleas to the Water World tour guide we were similarly vanquished. After several minutes of grumbling there was a surprise announcement. This bus was for the Alexander the Great tour. We could board! Blessing our good fortune, we climbed on and travelled another hour back to our old favorite Thessaloniki.

Somewhere along the line we picked up the tour guide. We only discovered this when a disembodied voice spoke up from up front. In a slightly clipped and almost Germanic accent (sorry Steph) she introduced herself as Di- meetrr, which she said was one of the six top Gods in the female Greek Pantheon. It took a moment to connect Demeter with Di-meeetrr, but as we soon found out, we were an ignorant lot.

She immediately began discussing the oil refineries we were passing, and explained for ten minutes how the Americans had exploited the Greeks and now the oil reserves belonged again to the Greeks. I was prepared now for a Marxist interpretation of history, though I did think it was a bit surprising on a celebrity history tour.

She sat down and for the next hour we heard nothing from her even as we passed through several interesting little towns with no doubt some history comparable to the oil refineries.

After a few hours more we arrived in Ancient Pella, which we were told was the original capital of Macedonia, and the most important city in Greece. All Macedonia was Greek, she lectured. They spoke Greek, they gave birth to Alexander (her first mention of the name) and they were Greek. The tone of this harangue became more and more strident and somehow led to an address on the occupation of Cypress. “The Turks are there illegally, illegally!” she ‘explained’. ‘All Cypress is Greek.’ From there we were lectured on the Turk's claim to be called Macedonia because of a ‘small strip of old Macedonia of no importance’ within their boundaries. Now I’d read much of the same opinion in unbiased papers, but her tone and manner seemed more fitting to a forced indoctrination centre than a tour, especially while towns and cities flitted by; but we accepted it all as part of the experience.

We arrived at Pella, and were not disappointed by our first view. Acres of an extensive dig stretched out before us, with several pillars still standing.

We rushed out but were stopped and imperiously led to a notice board by our guide. For the first time we saw her, and instead of the huge overbearing woman I might have expected, she was thin, slight with dark, short cropped hair and a face that never smiled. That part I had gotten right. She stood surrounded by the 50 of us, shouting over the sound of the nearby highway for over 15 minutes about the invention of drainage and how that was crucial to the development of civilisation. “And the Greeks made this!” Now all this was true, but a few yards away was a massive historical site which she was preventing us from seeing, and I eventually left the group and wandered off.

I found to my surprise, the largest and most impressive floor mosaics in situ that I had ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few. They were also covered by a piece of wondrous shade (it was now high noon) and were intact in all aspects. Still she continued to lecture away in the corner until more and more people followed our lead and left her. Finally she began to quickly run through the site, and we were told we had only 15 minutes to see the museum. Which as we’d been warned cost $6.00 each.

We paid our fee, and got a better run down of the site, and the many aspects that we had not seen, including the palace on the hillside; but now that we knew what there was, we had to leave. After four hours travel to get to this place, we spent just over an hour before being dragged away.

After another hour’s travel, we were told that we could disembark for 25 minutes and eat lunch. She had kindly selected the restaurant for us, (“Good food, good food, you eat here!”) and like the mindless drones we were, we lined up. After ten minutes we were able to see inside the restaurant and watch the tour ahead of us choose their meal from the buffet and then hit the cash register. There were no prices listed anywhere but apparently the charge at the cashier was a bit of a shock, because the manager seemed to have to calm each victim down in turn. We later discovered that two plates of rice and chicken cost almost $20.00 and a salad was $4.50. So though we didn’t actually see our tour guide taking the money from the owners, the arrangement was fairly clear.

With 15 minutes to spare, we got out of line and wandered down the street, checking out the dozen or so empty restaurants. We found one nice café with a pathetically grateful woman who rushed us a Greek salad for $2.50 that Lariel claimed was the best she’d ever had. Wishing desperately that we could stay and spend more money, we left and rejoined the tour who were not a happy group after their hurried and overpriced meal.

We were led through the streets of the town, past empty restaurants with employees staring yearningly at this rich feast of unreachable customers until we came to ‘Philip’s II Tomb.’

Price $8.00 per person. Something our tour rep, the Sweet Sarah, had not told us about.

Several of the tour did more than groan; they began to stalk off. They were berated by our tour guide who thrust a pamphlet in their faces and lectured, “You WILL go in. Is worth money. Very important.”

Shaking our heads, Lariel and I paid the price and entered.

Now I have to say we were pissed off that this was another charge we hadn’t been told about, but it was the best thought out  archaeological site I’d visited. They had dug out the series of tombs in a burial mound, and then recovered them with a steel ceiling. The lighting and the atmosphere and the blessed cool were properly sombre, and respectful. You could walk to the doors of the ancient tombs, which were two stories high and covered with frescos and supported by massive pillars. Above were the untouched remains of the excavations and stones, and in glass cases were the original finds, technically not removed from their crypt.

There were also even a few mentions of Alexander the Great here, as according to historical record, he had buried his father in a lavish ceremony, according to the detailed and scholarly exhibit boards. Each item of gold and iron was referred to as belonging to Philip, including the remnants of his shield, the box that his bones were placed in, and the woman who was buried with him was his favorite concubine.

http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~murray/classes/aa/philip%27s_tomb_images.htm

Unfortunately for all this detailed examination of history, I later discovered that two years previously a Greek university had shot down any association with Philip, and declared the bones and tomb to be those of his half-brother. For some reason the managers of the Tomb and our guide neglected to mention this minor point.

Once again, our tour guide dragged the group to the furthest reaches of the tomb to lecture on one section she was familiar with. She stood beside the copy of the mural depicting the ‘Rape of Persephone’ and we knew that she’d be there for a long time if only to expound about Demeter’s part on the whole thing. Lariel and I went blissfully about in the sacred tomb alone, though Lariel might have been affected by the Spirit of Death in a very different way than most. She made shadow puppets with one of the tomb pinlights. After 15 minutes we went to check the tour, and found our guide still only up to the part about the pomegranates so we ducked into a 15 minute film about the site. It too claimed that the bones were those of Alexander’s father, but was still more informative than anything the guide was doing. The film finished just as our guide dragged the group through the rest of the tomb in ten minutes, and our hour was up.

We got into the bus for another two hour trip and the only time the guide spoke was to inform us that cemetery was a Greek word. (It isn’t, it derives from Latin, but the Greeks were the first to use it in reference to the dead.) She told us, “it is a Greek word. You use it in English but you do not know this. You do not know your language. We do.” I would have corrected her but she might have had a gun.

Oh yes, she also was good enough to point out Alexander the Great’s birth place and its monument. As we passed it at sixty miles an hour. I think I caught a flash of white stone, but that might’ve been wishful thinking. Or a petrol station.

At the end of our ride we were taken to a very nice garden with waterfalls and no historical importance. Entry to the man-made grotto was 50 cents. It was pretty and perfect for wedding style photos, but it had taken us two hours out of our way, and I had to think it could have been cut, or replaced with something on the way back. I mean, it wasn’t as if Macedonia was bereft of beautiful or historical sites. But no, we took four hours of our day in order to spend 25 minutes looking at the gardens before being rushed back on the bus and the very long ride to the parking lot we’d been dropped off at earlier, and then another bus to the Traffic Lights of Polychronos at 8:45. PM.  I was very very happy to see it, as I’d somehow gotten stomach flu, and we’d had very few opportunities to visit a toilet throughout the day, much less eat or drink. So I was trying desperately to control my bowel muscles as we drove at a leisurely pace along Kassandra. I nearly leapt off the bus, and waddled towards our apartment, the toilet and relief. Of course, I wasn’t looking forward to not being able to put the toilet paper down the toilet, but it did give me some time to contemplate our journey and why it was called toilet paper if it couldn’t go in the toilet.

Our calculations of time spent on the trip:

13 hours (and you think I’m just foolish about that number, eh?)

8 hours travel

25 minutes to eat

10 minutes on Alexander the Great

Am I whining? No, because it made us all the more certain that we would rather travel on our own, and after recovering from the tour, we would set out for Potadaia two days later on the cheap regional bus service.

Part Three:
In Search of the Living Gabrielle!

Several years ago I was doing research for a fanfiction story called And It’s Only Love.(What, ME, doing RESEARCH, for FANFIC? What can I say, it has happened.)

A friend of mine’s son had been abducted by her ex-husband, and I thought if I used their names and situation, with a mention of the boy's real name in the disclaimer, possibly through some fluke I might be able to help with her search. As usual, Gabrielle was my surrogate, and I invented a friend from her childhood in Potadaia, and had her return there. The story was a series of journal notes as the journey home progressed, so I got out my Ancient History atlas to find out exactly where Potadaia was.

Now when we booked Polychronos through LastMinute.Com , we had no idea where we were going other than Greece. We assumed it was an island. It was only when I began checking maps that I recognised the three teats and the udder of Chalcidice, and although it wasn’t on the map provided, I remembered where Potadaia had been. At first I doubted that it still existed, but on further examination I found it and Amphipolis. The town was listed as ‘Nea Potadaia’, as the original town had been destroyed several times in ancient times and the present one had been reconstructed by the Turks in 1831. There was no website and the tourist organiser knew nothing of the history of the location. Not of the two year siege caused by its then leader Perdiccas, the wars it had been prominent in, or the forced migration of the population.

But because of the name and the TV show, we wrote friends and this list and promised to send postcards from the town.

So what would you see if you went to Potadaia? Well, first question we were asked was; why would we want to go? The highway bypasses the whole town, as does the tourist industry. It wasn’t even on the maps of the area given to us by our tour group. Each of the people we spoke to about visiting it looked surprised. Travelling above it by the overpass showed us nothing but the tops of several buildings. We were not even sure if it would be possible to find any shops that sold the postcards we had promised friends. All of which seemed odd as it was clearly the oldest town on the peninsula by at least a thousand years and should have beaches on both sides as it straddled the Kassandra peninsula at its narrowest point. So we had to assume that there was nothing left of the ancient town or its history and that it was not prepared to receive visitors.

But the sheer silliness of going to Potadaia filled us with a certain giddy joy as we got onto the bus, even if there were no remnants of its past.

It was again very hot, over 100 degrees, but at least we were free of the tours and other tourists as we paid our $2.20 for the ride from Polychronos with the locals. We passed through the main tourist villages with their packed restaurants and beaches and within twenty minutes were at the overpass.

We disembarked, and found ourselves between 50 and 100 feet above the town. Although Potadaia was the gateway to the peninsula, and anything travelling either way had to pass this point, we crossed under the busy highway to make sure we could take a return bus back. Being us, there was no listing for Polichronos on the bus sign or a confirmed time, but containing our nervousness, we went back to the tunnel to start our exploration. 

As I said, the overpass is between fifty and one hundred feet above the town, and you descend by an exposed stairway, which in the summer’s heat was blindingly white. Once on the street level, the road continued to slope downwards so we followed it, hoping to find a few shops.

We found a full boardwalk of a hundred shops, restaurants and bars, all completely empty. Unlike Polychronos where the boardwalk was right along the water and everything was jammed, Potadaia had their main concourse constructed hundreds of yards from the sea. With the shops and amusements on one side, and a series of massive, mainly ‘Kon Tiki’ style bars along the seaside. Except for a few dozen people in the distance on the beach, all of these dozens of places were empty. We shrugged and entered one of the largest of the bars to find all of its several hundred seats empty, with no-one minding the bar. It was shady, built in a fake South Seas motif, and there were fans under the umbrellas scattered about the place. We waited at the bar for over 10 minutes before someone popped out of nowhere and asked for our order. She spoke no English and with some pointing I managed to get a diet coke and a half a glass of draft beer. The bill for it was $7.50

Now remember, the same order would cost under $2.50 at any place in Polychronos, and we soon discovered that was the going rate in each of the bar and restaurant menus throughout the deserted town. As well, we never met a single person who spoke a word of English, even if only to recite something by rote, and most seemed unable to do their jobs with any familiarity. The gift shop attendant took ages to work out how to make change for a simple purchase, the waitress brought the wrong order and messed up on the bill in our favour. What was even creepier was that everything was brand new. Clearly millions had been spent on landscaping, renovation and we were the only people to wander its empty bars and streets.

Yes, there were a few old men hanging about some of the shops, but generally the younger sales people would magically appear from some back room only after we wandered in. It began to feel like a sunny episode of Twilight Zone or more properly Star Trek. It lacked only a Village elder appearing once they realised our confusion.

VILLAGE ELDER: Why do you wish to leave? We have studied your needs, and built all this for you! To make you happy!

KIRK: But… how can we be… happy? Without… Freedom? And Cheaper Beer?

Embracing our theme of being pathetic losers, we followed the boardwalk until we reached the south western portion of the canal that had bisected the peninsula for 2,500 years. There was a great deal of rubble that might have been the original walls of the waterway, and in as surreptitious a manner as we could, we extracted our camera and our sad little secret. A ‘Gabrielle’ bookmark we’d bought years before. We placed it on one of the ancient rocks and snapped a furtive picture, sure that we’d brought the bard home. Appropriately for this witless act, we hadn’t learned the frame of the camera yet, and all but her hair was cropped from the shot.

We continued along the channel hoping to find some remnants of the ancient city that hadn’t been tossed aside by the future generations.

Now let me try to describe the town. As I said in the earlier section, the canal cuts the peninsula of Kassandra off at the very top, where it is thinnest, thus allowing ships to reach the next finger of Chalcidice without the long voyage around. It also was a natural barrier to anyone progressing down the peninsula, so it was easy to see why it had been a crucial battleground for any would be conquerors. As well, on the western side facing open sea, it had high mountains making a natural fortress, sweeping down to the water where we later spotted a series of evenly spaced ruins under the clear water, which I assumed had once been places to dock. The canal itself seemed to have been redug with no attention to its past, though we found remnants of massive walls lining one side. Every fifty feet or so, there were higher and stronger guard posts which extended the whole of the almost mile distance high above the canal, and I wondered at how impregnable the town must have been as the small ships had crept along the waterway with these huge battlements looming above them. No wonder it had managed to hold out for two years in its ancient past before surrendering. They had in the end only capitulated after been forced into cannibalism

It was an odd experience. Everywhere was money. A beautiful but empty park had been built on the point looking out to the sea, probably on the detritus of a past blockade. The broken ruins of the walls had been left standing only in the vacant lots or where they could be used as a garden feature. There was one attempt at a dig that seemed to have been abandoned. In it we found what appeared to be more recent stonework, including a face and flowered design and they had managed to clear all of the garbage from the what I supposed was another guard tower. There were some plastic cards indicating depths, probably marking a discovery of some pottery, but these had mainly fallen to the ground, their positions lost. There was no museum, no plaque except one in the main square to the Turks that had rebuilt the place, and perhaps that explained the town’s lack of popularity. The Turks were hated in Macedonia and Greece in general it seemed, so this acknowledgement of their links to Macedonia might have placed Potadaia beyond the pale. Or maybe they didn’t pay enough kickbacks or they weren’t properly connected.

Whatever the reason, everywhere we went we saw money spent on transforming the town into the perfect exclusive tourist engine, and not a single dime on resurrecting the reality of its glorious past. No map we found indicated that there were ruins in Potadaia, though they listed hundreds of other spots. No tourist information, no indication anywhere that the town had existed before 1831, except for its silent and derelict walls.

I climbed down the steep stairway to the sea facing Athens, Corinth and all the other cities of Greece I had written and read about. I took off my shoes and waded to get closer to the lines of submerged boulders, their fingers stretching out in parallel abandonment. A few children played along the mile long stretch of beach under the cliffs, and I wondered what a metal detector might find if passed along the surf where I stood. I wondered at the ships that might have docked here, the navies and commanders, their intent and cargoes. But as far as we could tell, we were the only ones interested.

Part Four:
You can’t go home again!

Our various brushes with history had left us, well - broke, mainly due to the Alexander tour, and so we decided to spend the rest of our holiday relaxing. Each day found us down at the little beach, stretched out on our towels or paddling about in the water. In the evenings, we would amble about the town, discovering all the little Greek nooks and crannies, before we would make our way back to the bustling restaurants and tavernas that spilled onto the busy beachfront.

On Wednesday morning, we were woken up to the sound of something slithering under our door. It was a note from Sarah, who had slipped it under our door and then promptly scarpered. It informed us, roughly speaking, that there had been a slight delay to our homebound flight in two days time but not to worry, as we could check the new flight and pick-up times etc on the noticeboard downstairs. So, not worrying as instructed, we had a leisurely breakfast and the necessary showers before getting ready to go out. We checked the noticeboard on our way.

We got a little worried by the crowd that had gathered around it.

Sarah, in her chubby handwriting, gaily informed us that our 14.30pm on Friday flight had metamorphosed into a 5am on Saturday flight. Apparently, our carriers had been swapped again. 'If you have any questions,' her note happily continued, 'I will be visiting the apartments at 4.30pm.' She forgot to mention that we still had to vacate our apartments by 11am on Friday. Leaving us with about 15 hours to kill before the bus picked us up at 3am. We weren't happy.

4.30pm came but Sarah didn't. A phone call revealed that 'she was on her way' but miraculously wouldn't be there for another hour. Or so. She looked a little nervous when she walked into the apartments later than evening, to be greeted by a mutinous crowd. But all credit to her, she rallied and refused to budge an inch from the party line. Which consisted mainly of not telling us why our flight was cancelled (or 'rescheduled' in her words), offering no apology or compensation whatsoever and in fact telling us that we were lucky. 'There's lots of people this happens to,' she blithely informed us, 'and they can't even get a shower.'

'Neither can we,' pointed out the girls sitting at the opposite table.

'Sure you can,' replied Sarah smoothly, pointing to the outside water tap and its hose. The girls - to their credit - didn't thump her. Apparently, Sarah thought that we should be pleased at the news that we could pay another 15 euros to hire our rooms until 6pm, and we felt that to appear otherwise would've been ungrateful.

'Is this the way Golden Sun treats all its customers?' seethed Lariel and the rest of the group.

'It's not our fault,' excused Sarah. 'It's Transjet. Terrible things have been happening. It's been in the news at home. Haven't you heard?'

'No, what's been going on?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Why not? Is it a secret?' The fact that I was posing as a writer and making detailed notes on all her comments - even asking for names and dates - didn't throw this girl off her stride.

'I just can't tell you. But it's been in all the papers.'

'If it's been in the papers, why can't you tell us?'

'I can't. I'm not allowed. Haven't you read about it? It's been in all the papers.' The woman's tenacity was admirable, in a warped sort of way. But she did falter for a moment when Lariel pulled out her ace card... that she worked for the BBC and knew the producer of The Holiday Programme and Watchdog. Sarah left us, promising to speak to her boss about compensation.

We knew we wouldn't see her again.

We managed to get through those last, endless hours in Greece - it's amazing how long a meal can last when you have 15 hours to kill - until we found ourselves back on the bus, crossing the Potadaia flyover and staring out over that ancent canal for one last time as we crossed on our way to Thessaloniki, the airport and home. Regretting that we hadn't had enough time to properly explore Thessaloniki itself (a large town with a rich heritage and many ancent monuments of its own), we vowed to put Greece back on our List of Places To Visit. Next time, we'll check the guide book properly first.