mahendra’s greece

In October 2020, a ruptured muscle fibre in my left thigh left me recovering. I searched for a place that was close enough to avoid flying long-distance to Asia or America during the Covid days, but also combined abundant natural beauty – spectacular mountains and delightful beaches – with a rich cultural heritage. I decided to go to Greece to the area of Mt Olympus and to the monasteries of Meteora. It left me hungry for more.

The following spring, I returned to Greece for six weeks, this time to the southern part of the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese. I started to explore the nearby Mani peninsula. I came back many more times—each time further expanding my view on the evolution of human culture in Greece. The more I saw, the more I understood that the story of Greece is outstanding. 5000 years of human history have been preserved in countless ancient buildings, artefacts, written documents, and oral tradition—like nowhere else in the world. Scientists from around the world have done amazing work to reconstruct life as it was then. For me, the impressions from the single sites are added to each other to form a larger picture, growing slowly like a huge puzzle. The backbone of this larger picture is the following timeline, which serves as an introduction and reference for the visited sites shown in the photo stories below the timeline.