Classics Tour of Greece and Crete

For the first two weeks of the July holidays, twelve boys from Forms IV and V went on the third Sydney Grammar School Classics Tour, visiting mainland Greece and Crete. Dr Allen and I accompanied them.

During those two weeks, we visited eleven archaeological sites and eight museums. We started at the Parthenon on the Acropolis in the centre of Athens and the museum that houses some of the treasures from that site. We saw the ruins of Mycenae, once ruled by King Agamemnon, and nearby his monumental underground tomb, a beehive shaped chamber over ten metres high. We visited Olympia, the site of the first Olympic Games, and Delphi with its Temple of Apollo that sat at the very centre of the Greek world. And we explored King Minos’ palace at Knossos in Crete — a complex and labyrinthine administrative centre, whose complexity may have given rise to the stories of the maze that housed the Minotaur.

Despite the packed schedule, there was plenty of time for relaxation. We went swimming about half a dozen times — at Cape Sounion, in the Gulf of Corinth and the Sea of Crete, and in the Libyan Sea at Matala, where Zeus in the form of a white bull brought Europa to land on the beach; centuries later, the stories of its hippie colonies will be immortalised in Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue. We visited the Commonwealth War Cemetery at Souda Bay, where 1,564 Commonwealth servicemen, mostly New Zealand and Australian soldiers from World War II, are buried and commemorated, including one Old Sydneian.

Dr Allen is already planning the next Classics Tour for 2026. It will be open to pupils in Forms IV and V who study Greek or Latin or History, or those interested in the stories of the ancient world. Photo credit: Harry Thomson from Form V

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