Peloponnese
Peloponnese
Photography & Art Direction: Edvinas Bruzas
Assistance & videography: João Henriques
Writing: Antonia Quirke
Published in Condé Nast Traveller UK May/June 2023
Location: Peloponnese, Greece
Commissioned by Karin Mueller, Condé Nast Traveller
“I am looking for the gates to Hades, but have overshot the turn. Somewhere below is a cave from which Heracles dragged the fearsome three-headed dog Cerberus into daylight so bright its slobber formed yellow flowers of aconite. Instead, I find a beach of bleached rock and hundreds of little fish with flanks of tarnished silver, curling in water that’s glass-calm to the horizon. Midway through an epic road trip, I’m hurtling from the east to the west of the Peloponnese in mountain- ous Southern Greece, via a deep drop into the Mani peninsula – the middle tentacle of the region – to where the Ionian Sea meets the Aegean. Classical and Venetian fragments, Byzantine and Turkish shapes, the genesis of European history and upsurge of revolution: the Peloponnese contains all this. Sparta and Olympia: words that sound so like myths of antiquity you can forget they’re actual places. Towns such as Kardamyli, so lovely that Agamemnon offered it to Achilles to lure him out of his sulky bed to fight the Trojan War. And then, down in deepest Mani – one of the remaining wild parts of Europe, a place even the Ottomans shuddered to conquer – where cliffs and gorges are made of shadows and empty stone villages rupture the sky like mausoleums.”
“Sunset spreads so quickly on the west coast that you can count it down as it consumes the horizon, with happy bodies colliding and whooping in the waves.Three, two, one: the light is gone and the water darkensto oil.By then,pretty much everything I’ve seen on the trip – even momentarily, or casually, in passing – takes on a strange patina of immortality.The unrhythmic rhythm of young voices in the water could be a peal of Archaic bells.The women sweeping goats out of a yard with brooms could be a masked chorus. Three winged dolphins drawn onto a lamppost in the fishing village of Ermioni look branded by Eros.Especially at Olympia,home of the first Games and the Delphic oracle.On a quiet afternoon here, Isee the spiritual,sentimental pull of Greek history crystallised in one jewel of a moment:sitting near the remains of the Temple of Zeus, a group of little girlsin heavy trainers and bandT-shirts,faces smooth,serious and lovely as a fresco,winding fresh stems of olive into wreaths for their waist-length hair.”