At Dion… Alexander the Great reviewed his 18,000 strong army before marching through thrace in 334 BC.
On 1 August 1960, I visited Mycenae for the first time. In my diary I described it as a terribly moving experience, seeing the shaft graves and the famed treasuries of Atreus and Clytemnestra. Looking back, what I recall most clearly was the romance of it all. My brother Richard and I walked from the local bus stop up the winding path to the Lion Gate, and were able to roam the site as freely as if Schliemann had just left. It was in front of this gate that, famously, Sir Mortimer Wheeler declaimed to a group of Swan cruisers that ‘Out of this gate marched Agamemnon to the siege of Troy.’ There was no ticket office, no uniformed guard to take our drachmas, and the only accompaniment came from a few goats. A year or so later, we were back, but by then there was a spanking new ticket office, uniformed guardians, and the regular arrival of tour buses. And just a decade ago, my wife and I returned once more to a site teeming with tourists. We were looking down at the shaft graves when we overheard a conversation between a woman and her husband. She was sitting on a stone wall as he ventured round the corner. She asked ‘Anything to see there, Elmer?’ His response: ‘No dear, just more of the same.’
Such is the impact of tourism, and I mention this as a background because this past summer we were back in Greece, staying in the villa belonging to the family of our Greek daughter-in-law in Thessaly. While we spent time on the nearby beach, son Tom suggested that we visit Dion. I confess I had never heard of this site. I do know Macedonian sites fairly well, having roamed the region hunting for Neanderthals, dug at Neolithic Nea Nikomedeia, and visited Pella and Vergina to enter the tomb of Philip of Macedon, but Dion was an unknown. The heat last June was intense, so we decided to set off early, and drove north for an hour. Although we did have to pay some euros, we were the only visitors.
