The view from the parking lot wasn't very promising. A long-suffering concrete building seemed to occupy a large part of the plot and although the day was brilliant it gave me an uneasy feeling. The guard made it even worst. He was constantly talking on his phone, with a very intense and annoying tone, stopping only for a few seconds, just enough to inform us that we had only thirty minutes before he closes the place.
One more charming guy for my collection of pathetic civil servants that I have to deal with, every now and then!
We entered anyway. The archaeological site of Lerna is one of the most important prehistoric sites in Greece and neither an inelegant building, nor an impolite guard would stop us!
With his phone always hanging from his ear, the guard unlocked the gate of the weird building (obviously he was ready to leave before our arrival) and disappeared (thanks god for that), leaving us to enjoy the ruins in peace!
The concrete structure turned out to be just a cover for the most important finding in the site. "The house of the tiles" was built more than 4.000 years ago and it was named like that due to the large number of clay roof tiles found in its ruins. It had two floors of 300 square meters (3.230 square feet) each.
I'll restrain myself not to overload you with too many details. I have a ton of information just from the informative signs that were displayed all over the place. Instead I only want to impart the awe that overwhelmed me when I realised that I was standing on the ground that was hosting people for thousands and thousands of years!
Even the tools of the archeologists added a touch of continuation in the history of the site!
Getting out of the shade, we were welcomed by the sun that warmed us as we were walking among the rest of the findings and gave me plenty of excuses to play with my shadow :)
The excavations were carried out during the 50s and revealed seven layers of successive habitation over the course of about 5.500 years, from the middle of the 7th, till the 1st millennium BC.
Dizzying numbers, aren't they?
Most of the pottery along with the rest of the findings are exhibited in the archaeological museum of Argos but a couple of big pots that are laying in the ground are quite impressive. Actually this is an archeological site that you can't see much. The small findings are in the museum and the walls of the houses are buried in the ground by the archeologists, after they finished their work there, in order to be preserved for the future generations. But it is the feeling, the vide of the millenniums that past by, that makes this place special and worth visiting!
The taverns at the nearby village were already crowded with people enjoying their Sunday lunch and the guard was in his car warming the engine. It was time to go before he lock us in :)
I'll end the post with a flower that I found as I was walking around the site because...
...why not?
And as someone that we miss in hive used to say, #alwaysaflower is the best way to end a post!
The camera that I used is a Canon EOS 6D mark II with an EF 24-105mm f4L lens attached. I edited the photographs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic
Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.
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