
A Visit to the Site of Plato's Academy - allthebest
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/athens-plato-academy.html
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peterwwillis
If you want a less "modern" visit to an ancient site, visit the ruins of
ancient Sparta, once one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world.

It's a preserved parcel of land on the outskirts of a small city, filled with
ten times more olive trees than actual ruins. Some gypsies camp at the
outskirts; best to keep your distance. The few ruins give you an idea of the
dimensions of the old structures, but what really hit home for me was a tree
that had actually grown into and through one of the walls of the ruins since
they tumbled.

Not far is Mystras, the former seat of Byzantine power in Greece. It's a lot
more impressive because it's newer and better preserved. And a handful of old
nuns, the very last of their order, continues to climb the thousands of stairs
up to the cloister that has been continuously occupied since who-knows-when.

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growlist
One of my favourite visits was to Ani - a massive deserted ruined city in the
middle of nowhere on the Anatolian steppe, we encountered literally only two
other tourists and an utterly bored looking shepherd boy with a few sheep in
several hours walking around, awed by this incredible lost settlement and the
eerie atmosphere of the place, with thousand year old ruins scattered and
decaying uncared for, and the barely audible sound of a bulldozer building a
Russian gun emplacement across the Armenian border about half a mile away.

