Submitted by Marissa Pereira on the 2024 Winter ENGL program in Athens, Greece…
This week I visited the Palamidi Fortress in Nafplio, Greece! We took a bus to Nafplio and hiked up over 1,000 stairs to get to this fortress on the top of a hill. This fortress was built by the Venetians when they occupied Nafplio in the nineteenth century. We learned about the fortress and how the name Palamidi comes from the Homeric hero “Palamidis” who was a part of the Trojan War, but was not able to return home. In the Biblical and Classical Literature class that I am taking in Athens, we read the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer. The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War, with Achilles as the main character who is in an internal battle of whether to help the Greeks win the war. The Odyssey is a continuation of this story that focuses on Odysseus’s journey home from Troy after the Trojan War. Visiting the Palamidi Fortress brought these stories to life because we were able to visually see evidence of the influence that Homer’s books had on Greece. (Submitted on January 28, 2024)