Citidel!

You know how I said in my last post, that Greek rulers liked to have their citadel on the highest mountain they could build it on.  Well the guy who lived in the one I saw yesterday, the Acrocorinth citidel, must have really liked being able to see everything in a 5 mile radius. His citadel wraps around a mountain 2000 feet up and on almost every side over the wall it's a 50 foot drop. In times of war the people from the near by villages could retreat to the safety of the citadel. It was built in 2000 B.C. then was taken over by the Romans, followed by the Byzantine Christians. Then it was taken over by the Turks, followed by the Franks, the Turks again, the Venetians, the Turks yet again, then lastly the Greeks . Each conqueror added something unique to the citadel resulting in a lot of different building styles.

When we were trekking up to the top I forgot the water so I had to go all the way down then, up to the top again. At the top we were all prepared to take a bunch of pictures of the view but we were so high up we were in a cloud. That must have been a really annoying problem living there. On cloudy days their visibility must have been only 5 feet in front of them. The reason it was up so high is that so someone could always see the the land between the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf. Its a lot like Sechelt, B.C. where the isthmas is only 1.3 km wide. From the citidel it's only about 10 km in between the gulfs and if they wanted to get to the Gulf of Corinth from the Saronic Gulf they would had to go all the way around the Penopolese Peninsunla.

Back when the citidel was still active many great leaders tried to cut a canal across the ithsmas. For example, Julius Caesar tried, Nero tried, and Caigula tried but only in the 1800s it was made possible. They had to cut a six km long line through solid rock and make it wide enough so that big ships could pass through at ease. They did successfully complete the canal but the problem that kept recurring was that the sides kept caving in. Today it isn't as useful as it was made for the canal isn't big enough for modern day super cargo ships and just used for tourism.