Wondering Why We Ever Go Home: Greece, 2007

High above the ruins and the modern city of Corinth, I sit in the precinct of Aphrotite's temple, looking out over the world so far below. There, the wind whipps by, running over two thousand years of ruins and blowing through my hair and tearing at my clothes.

I imagined coming here to seek the favours of this temple, of Aphrodite's famed sacred prostutites, and know that for this instutution to have sustained itself on this rock, so high and so inaccessible, it must truly have lived up to its legend, and even surpassed it.

The walk to the precinct was tewnty minutes, up 45° inclines, warn marble steps, and past hundreds of not-so-benign plants, all without a map or guide. I made most of it at a run.

On my way to the shrine, I was about 20 meters down the slope when I encountered a line of nubile young American girls processing down the path as I moved up it. As they paraded by, moving down the path I was struggling so hard to climb, I found myself already aware that Aphrodite still held court here. How else could I explain the exquisite line of twenty-somethings winding down the hill?



But to be here now, to see this view and sit among the stones, my imagination runs wild.

• there, the priestesses meet their customers
• there, they entertain them
• there, they take their money
• here, the pleasures of the flesh are combined with the sacred

And now, here, in this silence of the roaring wind, I can hear their sounds of pleasure.

Pics zylch asked for
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View to the Northwest | View to the North | View of the Ithsmus   
To the north, directly across the water, is Perachora

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 View to the East | View to the South