History – Page 3 – Judy and Valerie On the Road

Toledo

Toledo is a fascinating place to visit. A completely walled hill top city with windy narrow streets, beautiful stone houses and architecture from various influences. Before the expulsion of 1492 there was a large Jewish population here with ten synagogues. After the Jews departed these were taken over and made into churches. Two have been restored. One is now a museum for Sephardic Jewry and the other is an exquisitely beautiful building with rows of arches. Apart from just wandering around the streets we visited the two old synagogues, the El Greco museum, a tapestry museum and the cathedral. Here are some photos (click on a photo for an enlarged image)

Synagogue

Museum of Sephardic Jewry

El Greco museum

The museum was thought to have been El Greco’s house and some of the rooms have been furnished with furniture from that period in addition there is a large collection of El Greco’s paintings

Tapestry museum

This museum is connected to the cathedral and contains wall coverings and also garments worn by the priests.

Toledo Cathedral

Varkala – Janardanaswamy temple

Near Varkala beach is the 2000 year old Janardanaswamy temple. When foreign tourists visit you have to wait at the bottom of the stairs while the man at the entrance sets off a fire cracker for each visitor, presumably to give warning of our visit.

The walls around the inner sanctum have hundreds of oil holders which are filled each day and the wicks are lit at 6:30.

Jodhpur fort – Mehrangarh

Joshpur fort is one of the largest forts in India and is an imposing edifice and the wall surrounding it is 10k long

It has a very interesting museum containing a variety of artefacts including howdahs (seats for people being carried by elephants), carpets embroidered with gold and silk thread, and paintings containing large amounts of tiny minature detail.

Anokhi museum of hand printing

You may have heard of Anokhi shops where they sell beautiful clothes using traditional Indian fabrics for contemporary designs. Well in Jaipur Anokhi have a very interesting museum of hand printing. It’s housed in a beautifully restored haveli and takes you through different printing techniques. They have a collection of fabrics and also have some people giving demonstrations of techniques. One man was doing block printing whilst another was making the wooden blocks used.

Fatehpur Sikri

Fatehpur Sikri is an ancient fortified city 40km west of Agra built in the 16th century. For a short time it was the capital of the Mughal empire but was abandoned because of lack of water.

It it contains three ‘palaces’, one for each of the three wives of the Emperor Akbar.

Delphi

Today we visited Delphi. Unusually for us we managed to get off early to catch the local bus and be the first at the gates when they opened at 8am and for a short period we pretty much had the whole site to ourselves, which was wonderful. Definitely recommend the early start as it gets hot very quickly and the coach tours arrive. The site is absolutely amazing and the position and views are spectacular.

Wall holding up the temple to Apollo. Each stone has been individually cut to fit exactly with those around it

Looking down on the amphitheater, Apollo’s temple and across the valley

The on-site museum has a fantastic amount of material recovered from the site.

The Sphinx- was seated on the top of a column 12.5 metres high

Miniature bronze figures – episode from the Argonaut’s expedition – very tiny and superb

The Charioteer was covered and hidden as a result of an earthquake and so didn’t get looted but was found pretty much intact during the excavations.

As we travel around I continually realise how little I know about so many things. We’ve just spent a day in Mystras an amazing ruined Byzantine city with a castle perched on top of a hill. Know about the Byzantine empire? Well I didn’t.

A very quick history lesson – whilst the western Roman Empire came to an end in AD476 when the last emperor of Rome was executed, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) continued until AD1204. It started when the Roman emperor Constantine I founded Constantinople (Istanbul) in AD330. The Byzantines made Mystras into their second city and this was maintained into the 15th century even though the knights of the Fourth Crusade and other Franks (any foreigner from NW Europe) had sacked Constantinople and taken over part of the Peloponnese.

The churches in Mystras and throughout this area of the Peloponnese have a very distinctive style and architecture, and internally and are filled with amazing frescos.

We stayed in a nearby campsite called Castle View and walked to the old Mystra site. There are two entrances and I recommend entering at the top ‘Fortress’ entrance as then you walk slowly down. If you entered at the Main entrance you’d have to walk up and would probably run out of legs before getting to the castle. It is a fantastic site and we spent the whole day there wandering around looking at the castle, houses, churches etc

Photos

(if you click on a photo in the gallery it will open in its own page)