Corinth in the spring is bursting with exultant acres of wild yellow mustard. Not by chance, the air is intoxicating with enriching scents. Swallows, who have just arrived, sense it and dip and weave through the ancient ruins and knee-high grass. Anticipation is in the air, too, as the tourist year is getting started. Lumbering buses are inching like leviathans into the village next to the excavations, many bringing pilgrims to visit where Paul preached to the Corinthians. This year has brought a special excitement. Hollywood has landed here. Christopher Nolan was filming at Acrocorinth, the Frankish castle that high above on its rocky eyrie dominates the ancient town. Notices invited locals to be extras in the filming. Following his success with Oppenheimer, Nolan is now making the Odyssey. Frankish Acrocorinth in the film has become Bronze Age Mycenae, the real palace being apparently insufficiently martial in its architecture to portray Agamemnon’s return from Troy. A lion gate was erected to provide a cardboard veneer of historical accuracy. The chromatic opulence of the surrounding landscape may have persuaded Nolan to make Acrocorinth into Mycenae. Of course, no less important are its sinewy battlements running like a slumbering reptile up and down the precipitous crags. This is a landscape that lies close to the sky. The form of things is irregular and refracted by the ringing morning light. In the enfolding viewshed that Nolan surely understood, to the west the surging heights rising to the mountains of Arcadia are still snow-capped, sparkling; to the north, beyond the blue miles of gulf waters, the faintest contours of the Pindus mark the trembling curtain of the farthest horizon. The Corinthia, at this time of year, feels blessed.
Two millennia of monuments
Corinth was once one of the great places in the Mediterranean. It has Bronze Age origins that account for the many myths about the town. In the 6th century, its argonauts established colonies from Italy to Crimea. Matching Athens as a power, it evolved into a metropolis by the standards of the early Hellenistic age. The Romans respected its antiquity. Its townscape was reinvented by the emperor Augustus and the wide plain running down to the gulf was centuriated. It was this fame that drew Paul to set up a mission here in AD 50-52. Like most Roman towns, it met its end in the later 6th and 7th centuries. Acrocorinth on its rocky pedestal high above, once the site of a Hellenistic temple dedicated to Aphrodite, became a refuge in post-Roman times and then, after 1204, a powerful Frankish fortress. In its shadow, overlying the ruins of the ancient city, a new Frankish town emerged. This prospered under Venetian rule and then faltered under the Ottomans. Now it is no more than a village that has grown up around the excavated areas, largely to serve the archaeologists and the tourists.
The many monuments of the earlier classical, pre-Roman city are scattered within the exposed remains dominated by Roman-period buildings. In the principal excavated area, the fractured remains of the Temple to Apollo catch your eye before anything else: its Doric columns soak up the sunshine and are evocatively photogenic. Beyond it lay the Roman Forum, surrounded by a cluster of civic buildings. Off this lay the cardo maximus of the Roman city, known now as Lechaion Road. Dating back to earlier classical times, the paved road lined with shops is another landmark of Corinth. The excavators encountered a palimpsest of later buildings overlying the Roman ones: some date to late antiquity, many belong to the reinvention of the site as a later Medieval town, when it was an untidy mass of small dwellings.
