“Cruising the Dodecanese” is Peter Sommer Travels’ last scheduled cruise in Greece in 2017. This year, to give an impression of the experience, we are providing a diary of sorts on our blog. Rather than describing every day in detail (you can check our itineraries on www.petersommer.com for that), every day we will pick one image we took that day, accompanied by some explanations and thoughts.
Well, here we are. Our 2017 "Peter Sommer Travels: Cruising the Dodecanese" has come to its conclusion. Our guests have either left to go on their various ways to the various corners of the world that they live in (the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States), or they have stayed on in Rhodes to enjoy a bit more of Greece. Maria and myself have gone on to Athens, to welcome guests on our next trip: "Exploring Athens", an in-depth approach to one of the most important cities in history.
We look back on a profound experience, a day-to-day adventure confronting us, as the story-tellers, and our guests, as confronting our guests, our audience, with so many ideas, concepts, facts, impressions, monuments and moments that were shared, discussed, enjoyed, questioned, interpreted and so on. We hope all this was taken in by our guests and we hope it will be remembered by them. We visited a dozen islands in two weeks and we showed our guests something different on each and we told them so many stories about so many things, so many people, so many events and so many ideas.
My choice of image is, perhaps, a little random. It is a bronze griffin head that once decorated a large bronze tripod - a three-legged cauldron - in the sanctuary of Hera on the island of Samos. It is now on display in the museum at Vathy. Such griffins are standard objects in Greek sanctuaries in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and they always belong to tripods, which were common votive gifts (presents dedicated to a god or goddess) and also common prizes (items given to those who won contests - usually athletic ones - at religious festivals). We don't actually know quite what these griffins mean - they are absent from Greek mythology - but we tend to think they avert evil.
And that's why this griffin is here: we wish our departing guests all the best, we hope they will come back to join us on other tours, and we hope that their futures are full of good things and devoid of bad ones.
To see the griffin and have it explained in detail, and also to explore the Dodecanese with us and to enjoy them to the full, you should join us on "Peter Sommer Travels: Cruising the Dodecanese" next year!
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