On Not Finding What You Were Looking For in Foreign Places

Take the door to the Dutch Consulate, but go up four flights.

Take the door to the Dutch Consulate, but go up four flights.

If you are the kind of traveler looking for history, you do not always find the history that you were looking for.

I learned that lesson years ago when M. and I went on a month-long honeymoon in Ireland. Newly Celtophile, I was all excited about seeing Neolithic monuments and Celtic Ogham stones and all that sort of thing — and we did — but I was smacked unexpectedly by the late 18th century.

It was such a powerful emotional experience — maybe reincarnational, I can’t say — with synchronicities that continued months later, that I can still feel it in my bones today.

Spending part of September in a little apartment in the old town of Corfu, an island on the west of Greece, I knew that I was visiting a place with a resiliant culture that has, thanks to its geographic location, experienced a lot of conflict. For instance, during World War II, the town was bombed by the Italians, the Germans, and the Allies at different times. Yet today the streets are full of German and British tourists. And there are great Italian restaurants.

Of course, I went looking for the Classical Pagan stuff, which is there but not emphasized nor extensive. And the Unexpected happened too: not a “reincarnational” whammy experience as in Ireland, but I found myself continually drawn to an era and events that were not really on my mind when I set out on the journey. Once or twice the ground shifted a little under my feet.

As the famous Mississippi novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Except that it would take a platoon of William Faulkners to do justice to Corfu.

More to come on this.

2 thoughts on “On Not Finding What You Were Looking For in Foreign Places

  1. Yes, a lot of truth in this.
    On my one and only trip to Greece, a holiday in Crete, I was expecting lots of ruined classical temples, etc., but was much actually more impressed by the Byzantine churches – tiny little village churches, not mentioned in the guidebooks, with incredible frescoes.

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