Ancient Pella

On Saturday, the School of Modern Greek organized a day trip to Pella and Edessa. We were blessed with beautiful weather, and – of course – we took lots of photos. (After editing, we ended up with 72, which can all be viewed here.)

In short, the ancient city of Pella is famous as one of the capitals of the ancient Macedonian Empire, and as the birthplace of Alexander the Great. You can get more info here.

It’s located about an hour west of Thessaloniki. We left the University at 8 AM, and it turns out we had the same Greek tour guide as our last trip to Mt Olympus in the fall.

This lady is very nice, but she NEVER stops talking. She is either extremely well read, or very good at making things up.

On the last trip, one of the gems she told us was that Native Americans had actually stolen their war cry “Wo Wo Wo” from the ancient Greeks, under Alexander the Great.

This time, on the bus ride, we passed a tree, and this got her on to a 15-minute talk on how the ancient Greek authors had said that this kind of tree existed on the human colonies on the moon. She concluded this speech by lamenting that science had not yet proved or disproved the ancient Greeks’ assertion that there were human settlements on the moon.

A few minutes later, she was talking about an ancient Cretan settlement near Thessaloniki, and how the men of that city were “so proud of their sex that they wore gold over their sex rather than leather like others.”

It was about at this point (30 minutes into the trip) that Pelagia and I decided to tune her out for the rest of the day.

True to her previous form, when we arrived in Pella, she headed straight for the tiny museum. There, she spent 2.5 hours explaining, literally, every piece in the museum. In the top photo, she’s pointing to the map located at the entrance of the museum. She spent 45 minutes at this map alone.

Meanwhile, Pelagia and I (and others who had been on trips with her before) went out to the actual site and walked around in the beautiful weather and took photos.

The bottom two photos are of the ancient remains of the city. In the bottom photo, Pelagia is standing in the middle of the site.

Next, we headed another 30 minutes west to Edessa.