Early modern travelers
In 1765 The Englishman Richard Chandler visited Kalaureia on his Grand Tour. In his Travels in Asia Minor and Greece II, London 1817, he describes how he rode his donkey to the sanctuary of Poseidon and there saw great activity. Stone masons were cutting the ancient blocks into smaller pieces to be carried on donkeys to the ships awaiting them in the harbor for further transport to Hydra, where a large monastery was being built. Chandler’s is an eye-witness account of early modern recycling of ancient building material.
Chandler was not the first traveler to visit Poros and the ancient site. In 1676 George Wheler, another Englishman, had already done so and twelve years later a Swedish woman, Anna Åkerhielm, was on a ship in the Poros harbor. She probably did not visit the sanctuary, but she knew about it and was familiar with the fact that the orator Demosthenes, in 322 BC, took poison there. Although she was an educated woman she may have learnt about the orator from George Wheler, whom she had read. She was a companion to the wife of Otto Wilhelm von Königsmarck, who was in charge of the land troops under Francesco Morosini in Venice’s war against the Ottoman Empire from 1686 to 1688.
These examples serve to show how early modern travelers were well aware of the antiquities, even though they did not always visit them themselves. They had read the ancient authors and went in search of the ancient monuments. There are many examples, though, of how they had no qualms copying each other’s descriptions and even each other’s illustrations of places they had never visited.
The named travelers had many followers especially from England, France and Germany. A few of them are particularly interesting on the subject of the Poseidon Sanctuary. William Gell saw remains of the inner part of the temple, the cella, and the pavement of the temple to Poseidon, and Edward Dodwell, who traveled in Greece between 1801 and 1806, makes remarks not only on the temple but also comments on other monuments. He saw blocks of a circular structure, which he suggested came from the Demosthenes’ monument. There can be no doubt about these travelers having been to the site.
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