The lizard isn’t what we had for dinner - it’s a hook to get Bill’s attention so he’ll let us know what this great lizard is that we saw at the old fortress.
In the morning, we visited the old city and the new fortress together, and then split up for a couple hours. Rachael took our clothes to a laundromat, and I took my lazy butt to a cafe restaurant n to he Liston to enjoy an omelet and a beer, catch up on the journal, and watch folks scurrying in from a sudden cloudburst. Good division of labor!
After lunch we had thoughts of going back to the beach again, but it felt less urgent today and instead we holed up in our room for a few hours, sitting out the hottest hours of the day. Then we walked to the old fortress, and stayed there for about two hours, until time to seek out dinner.
The old fortress is a remarkable bit of real estate - sprawled around a small islet immediately eastof the old city, it has many different avenues to explore. It’s origins go back to Byzantine times, but its ‘modern’ look comes from the Venetians who built the major fortifications in the late 15th century to defend the town from Turkish invasion; and from the British occupation in the 1th century. Here’s an informative overview article discussing both the old and new fortresses.
The old fortress is on a small island, joins to the old town by this bridge.
This is another wing of the British barracks, and now the home of the music department of Ionian University. It was delightful to walk past the open windows, with the sounds of Beethoven and scale exercises filling the air.
Here’s what Rachael is taking a picture of - me, taking a photo of the unmarked, unfenced sheer 50 foot drop off at the end of a path. Europe is so different from us n this way - they trust you to keep your eyes open and watch your step.
This is quite a large lizard (which Bill informs me is just another stellagama, like the one we saw in Naxos three weeks ago). He blends in well, and we probably wouldn’t seen him if first he hadn’t raced along the top of a wall and jumped nearly a foot to this spot.
There’s more or less an open air armaments museum at the old fortress, with an array of cannons and mortars aimed to the sea. I’m unclear whether they were all placed her originally or not.
For dinner, we went to Piperitsa, a restaurant on a small square in the old city that caught our attention earlier. It was an outstanding place to indulge ourselves in our last dinnner in Greece: watching the swifts endlessly streaking across the sky, folks strolling through the plaza, and serenaded by passing street musicians, and enjoying a delicious serving of crispy sea bass in orange sauce. It couldn’t have been any better.
Rachael tries to capture the swifts, but they won’t stand still for it. I have never seen more swifts anywhere than here - they fill the sky constantly, dawn to dusk.
