The Stuff of Legend

In the mountains and villages of central Greece, Charlotte Higgins searches for the settings of classical myths and finds modern-day delights along the way.

- Charlotte Higgins

WRITING A BOOK is a long, lonely, indoor job. While I was working on Greek Myths: A New Retelling, which weaves together classical stories from Homer to Apuleius, that sense of isolation was compounded by the pandemic. There was no chance of travel, no escape from the island of my London study. But the landscapes of Greece were a crucial reference point for my book, so I spent more time than was necessary Googling sunlit mountains and tangled coastlines, island harbors and flower-dappled meadows - places that, at the time, I could visit only in my imagination.

With the book finished and out in the world, and the pandemic more or less consigned to history, I needed to visit the country whose literature and visual culture I'd been immersed in for so long. I decided on a late-summer visit to Pelion. Friends had raved about this unspoiled, mountainous peninsula in Greece, which curves like an apostrophe around the Pagasetic Gulf, north of Athens. Pelion is layered in classical myth: its namesake mountain was the land of the centaurs; and the city of Vólos, which stands at the peninsula's head, was ancient Iolcos, from where Jason launched the Argo and his quest to claim the Golden Fleece.

When my partner, Matthew, suggested starting the trip by flying to Thessaloniki and visiting Mount Olympus-the mythical home of the Greek gods, where their gleaming palaces stood among the clouds - I was sold. I should say right now that we didn't climb Olympus - which, at 9,570 feet, is the tallest peak in Greece. Not for me the epic scramble of one of my favorite characters, Psyche, who went in search of her missing husband, Eros, while heavily pregnant, and scaled Olympus in order to tackle her terrifying mother-in-law, the goddess Aphrodite.