George Bass and John Prangnell reunite in 2007 to reminisce
Managing Committee Member Emeritus George F. Bass (ASCSA Regular Member 1955-56) recently donated slides from his years as a student to the ASCSA Archives. Here, he shares some memories of his 1956 trip from Andritsaina to the Ionian Sea, an illustrated transcription of which he has also donated to the Archives.
In early 1956 my attention was drawn to a single sentence in the Hachette World Guide to Greece: “The gorge of the Nedha, one of the wildest in Greece, deserves a visit, but this excursion is very difficult.” How could the last, italicized words fail to present a challenge to a 23-year-old student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens?
Determined to visit this “wild” place, I chose Pausanias as my guide, and, in the days before omnipresent Xerox machines, or even electric typewriters, I typed seven single-spaced pages of notes from J.G. Frazer’s translation and commentary to carry with me.
In 2007 I ran across a small, forgotten notebook I carried with me, along with a few postcards I had sent back to my parents in America. About the same time, I heard from my companion on the hike, British sculptor John Prangnell [who was attending the British School on a fellowship], for the first time in half a century! From the notebook, postcards, memory, and several e-mail messages from John, I have managed to reconstruct the chronology of the trip, highlights of which follow.
Notebook entry, April 18, 1956:
“Our train left at 7:00….We took the electric train, except for the last few miles, to Megalopolis. Arrived at 1:45 and after having coffee with some lunch….we caught the bus from the center of the town to Andritsaina. Arrived c. 5:15 P.M. Train ticket to Megalopolis—94 δ. Bus “ “ Andritsaina—16 δ. Dinner—15 δ. Staying in Hotel Bassae (15 δ. a night) as usual.”
Notebook entry, April 19, 1956:
“…Took about 20 colored pictures of [Andritsaina] which is really beautiful. About 3:30 P.M. John and I walked half way to Bassae in order to make the notes on the route….The sky cleared and was bright blue until we started back around 5:30, when low clouds started rolling over the mountains, catching on the peaks as I have seen them do only in Greece….On the way back to Andritsaina we passed a Volkswagen full of young German boys who were trying the road to Bassae….They had just tried the Langada Pass between Kalamata & Sparta & found it blocked by landslides.
I hope that some of my slides turn out, as a more typical, picturesque town is hard to imagine. As usual, one does not see many women on the streets, but wandering through the houses & back paths, one often comes upon them & they are quite pleasant. To BASSAE—”[This part of the trip log records explicit directions from the hotel to Bassae; reproductions of the illustrated directions can be viewed on the ASCSA website.]
Notebook entry, April 20, 1956:
“Left Andritsaina at 7:40 to go to Bassae….At the temple we met the German boys, who had been able to drive half way up and had then camped. They said that many workmen were working on the road…. I walked to the top of Mt. Cotilium, where there is a fertile, natural ‘stadium’ but I do not think that I saw the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite mentioned by Pausanias (one of the German boys had found some drums of columns). At 1:45 we started out again, filling our canteens at the spring which is probably the one mentioned by Pausanias. ….We arrived at Dragogi at 3:15 and went to the church. There a group of women were winding thread around & around the church & then, using a knotted rope for a measure, they were marking off lengths & marking them with a bunch of green herbs…. About [???] we came in sight of the walls of Phigalia and soon found ourselves at an ancient spring with water coming out of 2 holes in the ashlar masonry fountain.”
Alas, at this point [April 21–24] I stopped keeping my log, which was begun mainly to enable me to return to the Temple of Apollo at Bassae without a guide at any time, something I did later and got caught in a snow storm—but that is another story.
Eventually we reached and descended into the gorge, but did not find the cave of Black Demeter mentioned by Pausanias (J. Frazier, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, iv, 406). All in all it was a thrilling, spectacular hike, with stunning scenes.
On the same day that we entered the gorge, we reached its end. The stream continued, but through a flat plain. As we passed fields, following the stream, we were greeted by villagers tending their orchards. They offered us citrons, like huge lemons, which I had not eaten before. We were told to discard the insides and to eat the white, inner part of their thick skins, and it was like eating lemon-flavored apples.
It must have been [April 23] that we visited Bronze Age Pylos. Excavator Carl Blegen and his staff had covered the remains with earth to protect them from winter rains, but it was easy to make out the shape of the famous megaron he had discovered, which I had seen a few months before on one of the American School’s fall trips.
We did finally walk on to the promontory of Methoni, as the last slide on my roll of Kodachrome proves. As John Prangnell wrote on 9 April 2007, “They were happy carefree times. Good to think about and to remember.”
Click on any photo below to start the slideshow.
