Greece Skies 2005: Naxos [Sky Watch Friday]

I finally get to actually begin posting photos from our trip to Greece in 2005. Two firsts here: these images were shot with my first digital camera, a relatively simple KODAK model Z1015. And, this trip was our first with an organized tour group, as we had always preferred to be on our own. However, sometimes it makes sense to join a tour and do things that might otherwise been inconvenient. So, we signed up to travel with a German group, Studiosis, which was restricted to a small number of islands. My wife speaks fluent German [she grew up in Braunschweig], and I could understand /speak the language enough to get by. After assembling in Athens, we all took a ferry to Naxos. Our first glimpse of the port of Matthiassos Village is below.

Through some snafu, there were no porters to help transfer our luggage from the ship to the hotel. I remember a long, hot and sweaty trek through the streets. But, once situated, we were ready to head out to see the iconic gate of the Apollo Temple, which we could see from our hotel [below].

This walk was decidedly easier than the earlier one with our luggage. The marble gate [dating back to ca. 600 BC] is all that remains of the temple [Top].  The middle image shows the route we took to reach the gate. The bottom image was taken as sunset approached.

We remained on Naxos for four nights, using it as our base pf operations to explore Naxos itself, as well as several other islands. The last two images were shot on Naxos. I don’t remember anything about the towers below [except that the one on the left is solid marble], nor where we were in this rugged landscape.

One of the islands that we did on a day trip was Delos. It is renowned for its history/ruins. The row of iconic lions is grand, but, theyare not the originals. Those are safely housed in a museum, which I did not know that until much later.