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Thessaloniki 4, and another train
Sep. 19th, 2007 10:59 amAt last, I managed to get to the Museum of Byzantine Culture. Heads are knocked off statues by iconoclasts; my guess is that the genitals on Herms are knocked off by more prudish iconoclasts, but, unless it's the intrinsic fragility of marble, I'm not quite sure why so many statues are noseless.
This is reputed the best museum of its kind in Europe, and indeed its text is very good, but it still doesn't manage to explain what I should be looking at in a room full of icons. I suppose the story came across as purely of decline, retreating from grid-planned Roman cities to cramped walled fortresses on the top of hills placed with a paranoid care for water supply. I hadn't realised that Salonica was pretty much the second city of the Byzantine empire for a while, seat of a powerful tetrarch.
Also the Palace of Emperor Galerius, the richly-mosaiced third-century Church of Ag. Georgiou (formerly Temple of Zeus) and the church of Pantagliou (presumably 'all saints') where every available surface was gilded in a way to make a German rococoist jealous (though, he would counter, not quite as twiddly; twiddles were reserved for the altars and iconostases).
At about six I got onto a train which spent six hours taking me to Bulgaria, north then east then north to avoid the mountains; there is certainly a game mechanic possible in building railway lines to get from A to B to time and to budget, though it needs a Google Maps-like interface because there's a lot of unexpected small-scale detail, and it might turn out too hard to be fun. The contour maps of the world required for it exist, thanks to NASA, and there may be people who like the idea of planning out the all-Africa rail network that the British Empire would have built by now were it not for certain European altercations in the period 1860-1960.
Or maybe it'd just be Railroad Tycoon and has already been invented; more careful attention to the terrain might make it less fun.
James will be surprised that I managed to use my fifteen-year-old B-grade-GCSE Russian to get myself a taxi to the hostel, and even to notice that the first taxi driver I encountered wanted to charge a larcenous sum and avoid him.
This is reputed the best museum of its kind in Europe, and indeed its text is very good, but it still doesn't manage to explain what I should be looking at in a room full of icons. I suppose the story came across as purely of decline, retreating from grid-planned Roman cities to cramped walled fortresses on the top of hills placed with a paranoid care for water supply. I hadn't realised that Salonica was pretty much the second city of the Byzantine empire for a while, seat of a powerful tetrarch.
Also the Palace of Emperor Galerius, the richly-mosaiced third-century Church of Ag. Georgiou (formerly Temple of Zeus) and the church of Pantagliou (presumably 'all saints') where every available surface was gilded in a way to make a German rococoist jealous (though, he would counter, not quite as twiddly; twiddles were reserved for the altars and iconostases).
At about six I got onto a train which spent six hours taking me to Bulgaria, north then east then north to avoid the mountains; there is certainly a game mechanic possible in building railway lines to get from A to B to time and to budget, though it needs a Google Maps-like interface because there's a lot of unexpected small-scale detail, and it might turn out too hard to be fun. The contour maps of the world required for it exist, thanks to NASA, and there may be people who like the idea of planning out the all-Africa rail network that the British Empire would have built by now were it not for certain European altercations in the period 1860-1960.
Or maybe it'd just be Railroad Tycoon and has already been invented; more careful attention to the terrain might make it less fun.
James will be surprised that I managed to use my fifteen-year-old B-grade-GCSE Russian to get myself a taxi to the hostel, and even to notice that the first taxi driver I encountered wanted to charge a larcenous sum and avoid him.
