North Bend graduate Kathryn McFarland is exploring college life with a European twist.

McFarland, who graduated from Mount Si High School in 2007, is currently studying at Franklin College in Switzerland. She regularly checks in with the Valley Record to share her travels and experience in Europe. This season, McFarland reflects on her journeys in the ancient land of Greece.

Layers of history

“This semester, I had the opportunity to travel to Greece for two weeks. This trip’s focus was on Greek culture, which includes their history from the bronze age to modern Greece. We began our visit in Athens, the capital. Now before I go on, I ask you to reflect on what you know of Greek history.

I’m guessing that you thought of ancient Greece, the Olympian gods, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and perhaps that the Olympics started in 776 BC, and that Greece is the birthplace of democracy. That’s all that I could imagine, as well, before this trip, but as we learned, there is so much more to Greek history — it is just overlooked because ancient Greece is the cornerstone of Greece’s national identity today.

In the 19th century, the Greeks had a shift of consciousness, and the way that they looked at their past changed. These views were actually influenced by the West. The United States poured money into restoring and rebuilding ancient Greek ruins. All other periods in Greece were overshadowed, there was only room for ancient Greek culture, and signs indicating ruins were put up only for those from that period.

Actually, as you can see specifically in Athens, there are five layers of Greek history. The first was, of course, ancient Greece, followed by the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and finally the modern Greek state.

While walking through Athens you can see mosques from the Ottoman Empire; however, they are left as ruins. One mosque we saw is now being used as a Greek pottery museum. I found this very interesting, this manufactured idea that nothing else is important but ancient Greece, and that this mentality actually exists. Of course, before I learned this, and saw the ruins from other periods of time, I also only thought of ancient Greece, and knew nothing about the other layers of time.

Next, we took an overnight ferry to the island of Crete. Here we visited the palace at Knossos, which was a part of ancient Minoan culture in the bronze age. Wooden columns were what I found most interesting at this site. The Minoan columns were actually inverted, or upside down, and on a cement base that held the wooden columns above a moat, which was used to collect water which they would later scoop out, so that the columns would not rot. Never before had I heard of wooden columns, and I’m not sure if any other civilization made them, too.

We then moved on to my favorite place of the trip, the island of Santorini. For those of you who have seen the movie series “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” parts of it were filmed on this island. Santorini is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and its history is a line of invasions, occupations and liberations. In fact, our tour guide’s generation — she was in her 40s — was the first to experience peace.

I find Santorini interesting for many reasons. First of all, these islands are a continuation of the European Alps. The peaks are what are seen above water, and one of the small islands is an active volcano.

Santorini has no maritime tradition. Its main revenue used to be exporting pumice stones. Today, however, it lives on tourism. There are actually eight times more beds for tourists than for the 13,000 people who live there. Most of the people who live there only reside on Santorini for six months out of the year, during tourist season, and then live the other six months on the mainland and hold other professions there.

While thinking of Greek islands, you may think of the beautiful architecture, the whitewash with blue trim. Is it a coincidence that all the buildings are decorated this way? Actually, it’s not. During World War II, Santorini had a problem with fleas because of poverty, and the government ordered the people to whitewash their houses. This is because whitewash has limestone in it, which would get rid of the fleas. The blue trim represents two ideas. The first is that of wealth. You can’t find this blue on Santorini, it comes from Egypt, and by having this paint, it showed the wealth of the Greeks. Second of all, blue is a color of luck, warding against the evil eye. This comes from the fact that the Greeks believed that the gods choose to live in the blue sky, thus blue must be lucky.

There is one more thing we can learn about the Greeks from their architecture. It is very closed. They have small windows and doors with shutters. This says that for the Greeks, life is outdoors. They only go home to be alone.

As a part of an assignment, I had to interview a Greek. One question I asked with an interesting answer was, “How did you learn English?” My subject’s response was, “I don’t have an answer. Everybody knows English. We learn in school, we watch TV, from songs.” It is true that most Greeks spoke at least a little English, and this is also true for many people around the world, as English is today’s lingua franca. But still, why everyone? Tourism is a possible answer; however, I found most tourists were German. While watching TV, I did notice that many English shows or movies weren’t dubbed, but subtitled. This might have something to do with it.

In our last half of the trip, we visited many famous cities, including Delphi, Olympia, Mycenae, and Corinth. At each place, we saw more ancient Greek ruins and learned more about different parts of Greek history. My favorite place was Olympia, where I could really sense “Grecian grandeur,” especially in Zeus’s temple, where the columns, although knocked over, were absolutely huge! It was really amazing to visit this ancient site of the beginning of the Olympics.

The Olympics were founded in 776 BC with Pelops’ famous chariot race. Pelops challenged King Oenomaus to a chariot race for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Many had competed before him, and died in the attempt to win. Pelops, however, allegedly made a pact with Poseidon, who is not only the god of the sea but also of horses, won the race, and also King Oenomaus’s daughter, Hippodamia, in marriage. Pelops then began the Olympic Games to celebrate his victory.

We did our own Olympic games. I participated in the stade, which was the very first official Olympic game, a race of 110 meters. Maybe they’ll let me compete in Vancouver in 2010!

This was an amazing trip, and I learned a lot about different parts of Greek culture, history and myth. I hope that someday you all get a chance to visit these places, and when you do, you also look at the other periods of Greek history that are more hidden, but just as interesting.