GREECE - CRADLE OF CIVILISATION :: Australia and South East Asia by David Beal and friends

Greece, the crandle of Western civilization

Greece then.......

In the early part of the 1960's I was based in Athens working for the Black Star, photo agency, New York . Most of the assignments I covered were in other parts of Europe, France, Italy and behind the Iron Curtain. There were some in Greece, such as the Tower of the Winds for National Geographic magazine. Olympia for the lighting of the Olympic flame at the temple of Hera.

...... and now.

Princess Soraya and Richard Harris in a movie, Three Faces of a Woman, partly filmed on the Athens Acropolis. And between assignments we would see and photography as much as we could but it was never enough. Even visits in later years didn't touch the wealth of the splendour that is Greece. Here any a few meagre galleries.

The Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion.

Place me on Sunium marbled d steep,

Where nothing, save the waves, and I,

May hear our mutual sweep.....

"Isles of Greece"

Lord Byron

Cape Sounion is the southern most tip of the Attica peninsula and is the site of the ruins of the ancient Greek Temple of Poseidon, the god of the sea in classical mythology. The temple was built between 444-440 BC. Visiting the Temple is as popular today as it has been for hundreds of years.

Lord Byron, on his Grand Tour of Europe visited Sounion several times, the first visit in1810-11 when he spent several months im Greece. His name is engraved into the base of one the columns of the Termple of Poseidon, although there is no direct evidence of this. Cape Sournion a is refered to in Byron's peom "Isles of Greece"

The Tower of the Winds, Athens.

Sundials and a water clock were part of the features of the Tower

A team from National Geographic Society investigate the workings of the anicent water clock.. NGM August 1967.

The Tower of the Winds,, Athens

Tower of the Winds

Is an octagonal marble clocktower on the agora below the Acropolis and could have built as early as 2nd centuray BC. The structure used to contain a combination of sundials, a waterclock and a wind vane. In early Christain times it was used as bell-tower of a Byzantine Church. Under Ottoman rule it became a tekke (lodge) used by the whirling dervishes. At that time it was buried to half its height and waas only fully excavated in the 19th centry. In the early 1960's a National Geographic Society team investigated how the water clock operated.

The Greek Islands