This is a photo from earlier in the year when we visited Ancient Corinth and then Acrocorinth, high above the city and the sea. More photos of that later, but we went there on “Clean Monday” (Kathara Deftera in Greek) which fell on March 2nd this year (2020).
It’s been a tradition in Greece for hundreds, if not almost 2,000 years, to fly kites on the first day of Orthodox Lent. Lent is marked with fasting and the ideas of purification and thinking about the sacrifice Jesus Christ made when he went into the desert for 40 days. Flying a kite is symbolic of “getting closer” to God. So wherever you might travel in Greece on Clean Monday, you are likely to see lots of people trying to get a kite to take flight – and the higher up in altitude the kite flyers can start out, the higher the kite will be towards the heavens.
At Acrocorinth, there were a large number of families who had driven up to the old fortress that overlooks the ancient city of Corinth as well as the Gulf Of Corinth, a deep inlet of the Ionian Sea. We watched as many kites barely made it off the ground, some became tangled in overhead wires, and a few managed to fly majestically high above.
The family in the photo above were especially interesting to me as they had found themselves a very nice spot above the parking area, and they also had one of the best looking kites, in my opinion. As they began to prepare their kite for flight, I snapped a few photos and this one turned out to be the best, with the blue sky behind and above them.
As you can see by their clothing, March 2nd was not particularly warm in the Corinth area, and the strong breeze up on the rock upon which Acrocorinth was built, and that reaches a height of 575 metres above sea level, meant most were wearing warm jackets at the very least.
I don’t have a photo of this kite eventually making it into the sky to fly against the strong breeze that was blowing that day, but the family were one of the few that actually got their kite into the air and were able to keep it up for any kind of length of time. Below, is a view from higher up towards the entrance of Acrocorinth, of a couple of kites in the air.
While it was interesting to watch all the kite flyers, I really wanted to spend as much time as possible hiking the rest of the way up to Acrocorinth and exploring inside of it, while seeing the tremendous views from the top.
More on that along with photos another day.
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