The Plain of Marathon

If you watched the movie "300" and "300-Rise of an Empire", you are familiar with the wars of Greece against the Persians. A famous event is the Battle of Marathon taking place on Greek shores 490BC after the Persian King Darios I thought it would be a good idea to invade Greece with numerous infantry and some cavalry landing with ships. However, Miltiades and Themistocles put an end to this plan using  around 10,000 well-armed Athenian hoplites and some 1,000 Plataean support troops to successfully melee attack some 25,000 Persian infantry and drive them out of Greece for about ten years. Herodotus, the "father of history", and Plutarch tell us about this battle. A legend follows: Pheidippides, an Athenian runner, is supposed to have run the 40 km to the city, reporting the Greek victory and dying shortly after due to exhaustion. In 1896, the first modern Olympic Games were installed along with a "Marathon run".

The battle was not without its losses: Around 1,000 Greek soldiers died in the battle, their corpses have been buried in this mound. Creepy to think about maybe? I remember one guy from our study group doing a honorary walk around the mound to pay tribute to the warriors who defended Europe from the invasion from the East.

The Plain of Marathon today looks very simple, just some trees cover it (most of them olive trees), otherwise dry grass. Luckily, we could witness it under a blue sky! There was also a monument remembering the fallen soldiers ... due to technical problems, I could not upload it! Sorry about that ...

In the distance, you see some mountains: The Greek army was in danger of being outflanked, so they took a defensive position between two mountains and later attacked as the Persian bowmen let loose their arrows.

After having visited the museum, we left by bus, passing some green hills that were not as dry as the plain; the contrast with the blue sky was beautiful!

We made our way uphill and finally could look down on the wide blue sea and the islands in the distance ... an amazing view!

As we were on our way to Gla, an old mountain fort, we had to cross the hills. Check out my next post!

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