Introduction

Since traveling with my parents for the first time to Greece as a child, I was deeply fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea, its sceneries and its mythology. Much later, I started exploring the history of this grand intersection of cultures, peoples, and histories. This project will attempt to document topics related to history, mythology, and art without a fixed scope; my aim is principally to learn by writing it down and to share it with anyone who may be interested. Associated with this site, an Instagram account will share analogous and digital photography, as well as artwork from travels around the Mediterranean, along with its sibling, the mighty Black Sea, so feared by the ancient world.

The Mediterranean sea of course lacks physical tides, but has seen many tides of different peoples and cultures who have appeared and mixed upon it’s shores over the millennia, hence the choice of title, from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, through the arrival of German tribes, people from the far-away steppes, the Arab conquests and so on, each adding another layer of history leading to the world we are so lucky to observe today. This project is meant as a journey through time and space with the hope of exploring this rich tapestry.

In closure of this introduction, I cite here the wonderful poem Ithaka (the home island of Odysseus, to which he toils for 10 years to return), by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy:

“As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. “

Copyright Credit: C. P. Cavafy, “The City” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.

Source: C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1975)