Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
speciality, with prices for shrimp starting at just €12.
Daily
lunch & dinner.
Ì
Grigoris
T
27230 22621.
This warmly welcoming,
bustling place one block up from the port has appealing
home-made dishes that change every day, and there's
inviting garden seating out back. €10-15/person for a full
meal.
Daily, lunch & dinner.
YIÁVOLA
To Spitiko
T
27230 22138.
This pleasant taverna is
situated on the water and has excellent home cooking,
Cypriot style, using many ingredients from that island,
including cheeses; about €15/person for a full meal.
Daily
lunch & dinner.
2
Nestor's Palace
Summer Tues-Fri 8am-7.30pm, Sat & Sun 8.30am-3pm; winter daily 8.30am-3pm • €3 • The site is a 30min drive from modern Pýlos.
Buses run from Pýlos to Hóra (3-6 daily), 4km east of the site, where the site museum is located
Nestor's Palace
, 17km from Pýlos, is the best preserved of all the Mycenaean royal
palaces. Flanked by deep, fertile valleys, the
palace site
looks out towards Navarino Bay
- a location perfectly suiting the wise and peaceful king described in Homer's
Odyssey
,
though now sheltering rather prosaically beneath a giant metal roof.
The site was discovered in 1939, but left virtually undisturbed until after World War
II; thus its
excavation
- unlike most of the other major Greek sites - was conducted in
accordance with modern archeological principles and techniques. The most important
find was a group of several hundred
tablets
inscribed in
Linear B
, which, given their
similarity to tablets discovered in Knossos (see p.457), proved conclusively a link
between the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations. The tablets were baked hard in the
fire that destroyed the palace at the time of the Dorian invasion around 1200 BC,
perhaps as little as one generation after the fall of Troy. The site guide by excavators
Carl Blegen and Marion Rawson is an excellent buy.
The site
The remains of Nestor's massive complex are in three principal groups: the
main palace
in the middle, on the left an earlier and
smaller palace
, and on the right either
guardhouses
or
workshops
. The basic design will be familiar if you've been to Mycenae
or Tiryns: an internal court, guarded by a sentry box, gives access to the main sections of
the principal palace. This contained some 45 rooms and halls. The
megaron
(throne
room), with its characteristic open hearth, lies directly ahead of the entrance, through a
double porch. The finest of the frescoes was discovered here, depicting a griffin (perhaps
the royal emblem) standing guard over the throne; that work is now in the museum at
Hóra. Arranged around are domestic quarters and
storerooms
, which yielded thousands
of pots and cups during excavations; the rooms may have served as a distribution centre
for the produce of the palace workshops. Further back, the famous
bathroom
, with its
painted terracotta tub
in situ
, adjoins a smaller complex of rooms, centred on another,
smaller, megaron, identified as the
queen's quarters
. Finally, on the other side of the car
park there is a
tholos tomb
, a smaller version of the famous ones at Mycenae.
TELEMACHUS TAKES A BATH
King Nestor rates several mentions in Homer's poems, but the scene from Homer's epic that is
set here is the visit of
Telemachus
, son of Odysseus, who had journeyed from Ithaca to seek
news of his father from the king. As Telemachus arrives at the beach, accompanied by the
disguised goddess Pallas Athena, he comes upon Nestor with his sons and court sacrificing to
Poseidon. The visitors are welcomed and feasted, “sitting on downy fleeces on the sand”, and
although the king has no news of Odysseus, he promises Telemachus a chariot so he can
enquire from Menelaus at Sparta. First, however, the guests are taken back to the palace,
where Telemachus is given a bath by Nestor's “youngest grown daughter, beautiful Polycaste”,
and emerges, anointed with oil, “with the body of an immortal”. By some harmonious twist of
fate, an actual
bathtub
was unearthed here, rendering the palace ruins as a whole potent
ground for Homeric imaginings.
