The sanctuary has now fallen into great neglect, unlike in the past when it had been held in great honour.
Strabo, 1 AD.
After my mum died, over eight years ago now, her various bits and pieces- the objects left on her bedside table, her desk, by her bathroom sink- were separated out amongst her children. My sisters split the only really precious objects, her jewellery. The rest, which didn't amount to much, was shared out without much thinking. In that vague, irrational aftermath I took everything on offer, including her baggy jumpers and an over-washed, woollen hat. One of the few things I kept which lasted beyond those first few weeks was her favourite mug. She had several mugs but this was the one she used most days. I used it everyday, almost religiously. Not long ago I came home to find the mug broken on the kitchen table. On seeing the broken pieces beside the small note of apology from my housemate I was struck by a terrible hollowness. It was one of the few objects remaining that belonged to my world and hers. As time moves further from the point of her death, these overlapping objects, clothing, furniture, a book, an old letter, get lost or broken. For that moment, leaning against the counter, another distance opened up, one that I felt could not be retraced.
I was faced with the practical matter of what to do with the broken pieces. I didn't want to throw them out. I tried gluing them back together, racing into town almost immediately to buy superglue, but there were a few shards that had been lost and it never went back together, not like it had been, so I stopped before the glue set and shuffled the pieces around again. Without knowing why exactly I decided to keep the biggest piece, about a third of the mug. It had a large part of the face, including a black West Highland Terrier - her favourite dog - with a pink bow (once red), nearly the whole of the handle, and most of the base so it could just about sit upright. I threw away the rest, and kept this piece on my desk. Every so often, during the course of a day, when I was bored or distracted, I would look up and see it, always the first object to catch my eye. In many ways it was even more present as a memory. The complete mug, thinking about it now, may have lost its potency for being so functional even after my mum had died.
About three months later, in March of last year, I went to Greece to visit my sister for Easter. I was sharing a room with her three girls. They had already gone to sleep on the evening I arrived so I went quietly into their room to drop off my bag. As I tip-toed around, Sophie, my sister, told me not to worry, that the girls slept through anything. Just a few weeks before the youngest had rolled over and knocked a lamp, a nightlight, against a blanket which then caught fire, or at least started to smoke. Sophie smelt it and quickly took the blanket outside and put it on top of a plastic Fisher Price kitchenette kept on the balcony where the children mostly played. Sophie added that the kitchenette had been a present from my mum, given to the eldest when she had visited Greece the summer before she died. Sophie said, getting back to her point, that in all this time, through the smoke and the cleaning up of the ashes, the three girls hadn't woken up once. I asked where the kitchenette toy was now - we were standing on the balcony and I couldn't see anything besides the few potted plants, laundry lines and table. In her fretfulness Sophie hadn't made sure that the ashes were fully out. They smouldered on top of the kitchenette. By morning it had melted into a puddle of hardened plastic shot through with the occasional suggestion of different items the girls had collected over the past few years: glasses, cutlery, bowls and plates, odd saucers, a salt cellar; all the pieces they had kept in their kitchenette now reduced to nothing. Sophie showed me the place in the corner of the balcony. There were a few black marks, smudges of charcoal that my sister couldn't wash out. Faint and indistinct as they were they resonated. The memory of the kitchenette wasn't mine yet its very absence linked together the broken mug, the memory of my mum and this visit.
I talked to my sister about my mum's final visit eight years ago. She was already quite far into the chemotherapy, weak, tired and dying. During her short time in Greece, and for a short while after she came back to Ireland, she was happier than she had been for months. There is a picture of her in the mountain village in the Peloponnese where my sister's husband is from, a place she had insisted on visiting even though it was hard to reach and not comfortable or easy for someone suffering cancer. She is wearing her preferred purple bandana and a loose, cotton, cream shirt. She is sitting on a chair by a table with Anna, her grandchild, on her lap. The sky is deep blue and the plastic table and chalky ground brilliant white. It would be understandable if she appeared washed out by all that vibrant light and colour. Instead she sits glowing in the middle of it all, her button brown face smiling without the tired marks of illness or the stretched lines around her eyes and mouth, as though genuinely relieved of something. Before she left Ireland there was a sense, without needing to talk about it, that the cancer was terminal. When she came back so healthy and buoyant there was a renewed belief that something could happen - because something can always happen. It was short-lived: very quickly she declined again and died about six months later. But the visit to Greece had at least given some temporary solace, some fleeting release; possibly the effect of meeting and spending time with her only grandchild, being with her daughter, even the weather. I had never thought of why until now. I had never spoken to my sister about it. It had passed me by until we sat down that night, the night I arrived, and she told me more about her visit, resuscitating old, and new, memories.
When I was fifteen we had gone on a backpacking trip around Greece together, just the two of us. It was the only holiday we took together. I was a teenager, staring blankly out of windows, probably monosyllabic most of the time. But we bonded over our shared love of Greek mythology, our shared excitement on seeing the living remnants of imagined worlds. We went to Mycenae and saw the giant walls built of enormous boulders. My mum told me that Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist who discovered the ancient city, extending the myths he had been told as a child in south Germany, presumed that the giant Cyclops must have built them. We went to Olympia and Pylos and Epidavros, where we missed an evening play in the amphitheatre because we had to catch a bus. She was annoyed at that. We stayed in hotels and had supper together. She let me drink Retsina and I felt like her escort. In the morning we cursed the tzatziki we loved so much for the raw garlic left haunting our mouths. Something I had forgotten, which Sophie reminded me of, though I still have no recollection of it, was hitching a lift on the back of a tractor on our way to the small, sea side town of Kyparissia where we stayed in Hotel Zoe. I remember the wind on the beach there, my mum struggling with the two day old English newspapers, and the empty shells of unfinished buildings.
One of the places she had always wanted to go to was Delphi, to the Oracle. On her final visit before she died she went with my sister, her husband and baby Anna. They went for two days and two nights. As she folded baskets of washing late that night Sophie told me how in those two days mum experienced some kind of revelation. She went there in great pain, though never complained, hardly able to hold Anna, coughing and pained to speak, yet for the 48 hours or so she was in Delphi was completely different, a new person, 'like mum used to be', she said. She was happier, relieved of suffering, the persistent aches and pains, worries and anxieties. What caused this transformation, a temporary one, my sister couldn't say other than to suggest, only half seriously, that Delphi is known, and has long been known, as a place of healing and energy, one of those places of which people remark that there is some kind of spirit, a spirit trapped, they say, since two eagles collided on the slopes of Mount Parnassus making Delphi the navel of the earth, the omphalos. For my mum who was certainly a spiritual person, somebody who believed in 'those sorts of thing' there is no doubt that she went there believing, or at least aware, that something could happen. She was adamant, my sister told me. In the searing heat of June, hordes of tourists plaguing the ancient sites and no shade offered by the amputated buildings, there must have been strong desires that convinced her to make the trip.
The next day I got the bus from Athens to Delphi, about two or three hours. I didn't know what to expect but hoped for something, perhaps like my mum had done. It was a mild spring day, the sun muted by a thin haze. The hills were lit up with a yellow flower called sparta which reminded me a little of gorse. I was nervous and hot. I occupied myself with watching the clouds of dust billow from the cars in front and, when that was exhausted, flicking through an old pamphlet I had picked up while waiting in the bus station. It told me that after a small town, about a hundred miles from Delphi, there was a crossroads up on the right, just dirt tracks. This, the pamphlet announced, was where Oedipus, on his way to the oracle at Delphi, met his mother and father. We sped past and there was no sign to mark it; only a few sheep and a man on a motorbike.
Soon the terrain changed, from soft, rolling hills, to taller, steeper, barer ground. The road began to wind and was covered in orange dust. Out of the haze Mount Parnassus emerged, covered in sheen of white-orange snow, a plume of cloud trailing from its edge. The bus climbed up higher into the mountains. Soon the Gulf of Corinth appeared like a distant lake below. At that height there is very little: a few villages clinging to the steep slopes, shops selling rugs, postcards and chess-boards of Greek mythical characters. The Turks used to call the area Agrafa, or 'the unrecorded'.
As the journey went on the brightness of the cloud that had fallen began to hurt my eyes and my throat went dry. It was not the pollen, which I had gradually got used to, but the early signs of a cold. By the time I stepped off the bus in Delphi I was feeling feverish. I had no booking or any idea of where I was to go. It was getting dark. I went to the nearest hotel and went straight to bed. There was a storm that night. I had left the sliding door to the balcony slightly ajar and spent hours in a strange limbo as the wind came swirling in around the curtain and the rain beat on the glass. Even now, with the melding night I can't be sure it wasn't just febrile delusions. When I woke in the morning I still felt wretched. I went out and had some breakfast, some mountain tea, before walking the kilometre or so to the ruins. I convinced myself that something would happen, hoping that this sickness would bring me closer: I imagined that I had brought this sickness on myself in an unconscious effort to walk each step and touch each marble as she had.
I queued up and paid for my ticket. There weren't many there then; it was still early. The Temple of Apollo, the first marked ruin, is made up of several contained spaces, the foundations of various rooms sunk into the crumbling ground. Some of the pillars still stand impressively at about thirty feet, and eight feet round, the rest were broken stumps, overshadowed by the tall, straight cypress trees that come into every view. Two elderly men pointed at one area in the middle of the Temple, cut deeper into the ground. 'That's where she must have sat', they said, referring, I presumed, to the Oracle, the pythoness, Pythia, inhabiting that place long before Zeus and Apollo. Apollo, the books recount, wasn't able to assert himself without the continuing relevance, in some form, of her mumbled words, the yellow smoke, the masticated laurel leaves, the ancient traditions extending their hold through time. And then I imagined the young Alexander pulling her out of her den, beating her senseless until she told him what he wanted to hear.
The Sacred Way traces up Mount Parnassus, tapering all the while, past numerous treasuries, blocks of stone, tributes once containing precious metals and stones. Every rock seemed engraved in script, indecipherable to me except as a pleasure to graze my hands over, declaring the names and dates of those who had come and found meaning, and were grateful for it. The lushness of the land surprised me. Everywhere was green, succoured by the heavier rainfall and less intense heats in the summer. Tall trees grew, not just shrubs, of sycamore, pine, laurel and olive. The path, tended to and stepped on, bisected abundant wildflowers, poppies, buttercups, orchids, harebells, vetch, cow parsley, thistles, even meadowsweet, with its faint smell of piss evocative of childhood summers. At the highest point, where wreaths of cloud were within touching distance, the stadium still had the starting blocks the athletes used to spring from as they ran naked down the hundred yard track before 5000 onlookers.
I had stopped every so often on my way up to look around, to try to see the site from different angles, to recreate it, to see what it might have been like when my mum was there, how much hotter, how many more people, how far she would have got, whether she managed the steps to the stadium. She would have never managed the climb, could never have seen it. I spent little time lingering there, only enough to hear an Australian woman explain to her young son and daughter the significance of the stadium as she read from a guide book. She tried to enthuse in them that it was the best preserved stadium in Greece - the boy picked up a rock and passed it to his sister telling her it was the best preserved rock in the world.
On the way back down I took a side route marked 'No entrance'. It was better shaded and I thought perhaps my mum might have waited there while my sister climbed to the top to see the stadium.
It was where the maintenance shed was, with tools and equipment for maintaining the paths and the odd patches of cultivated grass. From there I stood and watched the people climbing up like ants. From where I stood I could see a number of groups, each one with a guide. They spoke different languages - I could hear German, French, English and Russian as they passed - translating the stone inscriptions and the architectural features, explaining what had happened, when the different levels were constructed and by whom, pointing out features that might have been passed unnoticed.
Taking a break at the bottom of the ruin was an elderly Chinese woman. I sat on the remains of a pillar parallel to hers so I could not see her directly, only out of the corner of my eye, or when she turned to look in the opposite direction and I could make out her back, her legs, the fact that she had a walking stick, and though her hood was up covering her face, the perspiration trickling down her left cheek and neck. Once she lent against the sycamore behind her and the veins in her hand splayed out like the course of a vast delta. She opened and collapsed an umbrella every time the sun came or went. We sat together for ten minutes or so watching groups of school children pass. I wanted to see her face but she left and I didn't go after her.
Springs bound down from the peaks collecting in a small, stone pool where people were supposed to wash themselves, to purify themselves, before going in to see the Oracle. They are fenced off and dry now. A canopy of flowering wisteria hung down, snaking along the shaded, mossy walls at the back. A bus driver was on a break having a cigarette peering over the fence. There was a little shrine to Mary not far away in what looked to be an old alcove, or break in the rocks. From the springs I crossed the road, busy with the coaches coming up and dropping down, and walked further down the hill, maybe a kilometre or half a kilometre. My mum could never have walked that far but I went on anyway this time.
By the grounds of the Gymnasium is the Tholos, a sanctuary of Athena Proneia. It was perfectly 'ruined', as though it had been built to have that effect. All around it, contributing to the sense of artificiality, were waist high flowers, wild mustard, wild rocket, mallow and dandelion, and the constant buzz of cicadas and brightly coloured butterflies in their meandering flights. Even though I knew she hadn't been there, I felt she would have liked it, something about being on the margins, tucked away under the road, and its perfect symmetry, like the burial tombs she visited at Carrowkeel.
I went back up and got lost for a while trying to find the entrance to the museum; a very impressive, newish building. The heat of the day had picked up and my head was still pounding and my throat dry; it was a relief to get in to the air conditioning and on to the cool, marble floors. At the entrance children hovered over a miniature model of what Delphi would have looked like. In that perfect Lilliputian world the strain of recreating any semblance of a living place from the ruined stone and unconnected foundations outside was happily resolved.
Most of the tourists were French (the men who discovered Delphi in 1893 were part of the French Archaeological School) so my experience, like the buzzing of the cicadas in the sanctuary of Athena, was drowned in a flood of French exclamation and whispering. I tried to pick out phrases but soon lost interest and just let myself be led blindly around the exhibits, window displays and cabinets. The exhibits were supposed to be arranged in chronological order, starting with bronze swords, shields, simple pottery bowls and cups, lapus lazuli, bronze and gold necklaces, votive offerings recovered from the treasuries sacked by Sulla and the Celts, the most valuable treasures long since scattered.
We were forced to look closely at some of the smaller exhibits. The dim light made textures more evident, such as the lines on the tiny coccoli, coiling out from a central depression, growing fainter and fainter but never quite disappearing. There were some wonderful little stamps which I had already seen in the archaeological museum in Athens. Made of agate, sardonyx or amethyst, the size and smoothness of sea-washed pebbles, they were inscribed with very delicate images of lions, griffins, cranes, a man ploughing. One that caught my eye was of a young woman offering lilies at an altar. This image, like all the rest, was only perceptible when pressed on a sheet of illuminated white paper. Examining the stamps themselves it was impossible to tell what the grooves on their underside depicted. It must have been exciting for the French archaeologists knowing that each time they found a well-shaped stone they might see a new image reflected, as though from photos or scraps of film.
I spent a long time in the gloom admiring two Kouri, or statues of Greek men, described as the brothers Kleobis and Argos. These two men, in the absence of oxen, had pulled their mother's cart to the Sanctuary of Hera. Not long after, the story goes, the two brothers returned to the temple. As they crossed the threshold they fell into a deep sleep which they never woke from. They died preserved at the height of their admiration and glory; a miracle considered by all to be the perfect gift. Perhaps that was what Hadrian and Domitian had in mind when they went about restoring Delphi. They poured money into extended seating for the amphitheatre and stadium, new statues along the Sacred Way, repairs to the temple. Inscribed on a stone in the museum, a stone, the curator tells us, that had been taken from an older monument in a different, less significant part of the site, are the words: 'The emperor Caesar Domitianus, son of the divine Vespasian, Augustus Germanicus, chief priest, three times holder of tribunician power, father of the fatherland, hailed imperator seven times, consul ten times, designated consul eleven times repaired the Temple of Apollo at his own expense, 84AD'. I couldn't help thinking about a sign I had seen earlier. It was hanging by a life-sized bull made out of silver plates. These plates were held in place by silver or bronze nails so the whole beast was more like an armoured vehicle, with gilded horns, ears, forehead and hooves. The sign read 'Although hundreds of fragments of metal sheets have been restored, it was not possible to render either the original plasticity or the volume of the statue.'
I was pushed into rooms, deflecting and rebounding like a ball in a pinball machine, lost amidst fragments of fragments; fragments of bone, ceramic, ivory, bronze, silver shed, broken, decimated, scattered, passed through the digestive tracts of the earth, dug up and re - calibrated behind glass cases, appearing at first as entire from the self -fulfilling texts, the tour guides authoritative explanations, the restorative glue, all the time wondering where my mum had gone, what she'd seen, what she'd made of it all. At last, in the final exhibition room, I came across a ghostly representation of eight fragments floating in mid air, connected by an imagined drawing placed on the wall behind.
I had come to Delphi urgent to experience something concrete and found this image, an image that evoked nothing but a pathetic sense of vertigo. None of it was cohering in my mind, nor would it, because it had never been, not for her, a series of events, a broken mug, a smudge of charcoal, a tortured journey. As I stumbled out of the museum the hope of fulfilling some journey, of retracing my mum's footsteps, disappeared into the bright, grey sky.
Walking back up the hill to the hotel several coaches swept past. At the windows were the many faces looking out on the ruins strewn about The mountains, I complement her and her mother remains the same meaning to think again about how unpredictable the resonant period is new, she can be seen there was less it.
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