It is confession time. I made a mistake a couple of years ago and only realized it this week.

I’m not sure whether to blame inattention on my part, or poor signage on the Acropolis. Maybe a bit of both. Turns out that my 2019 post on the Theatre of Dionysos had pictures of the wrong theatre.

I guess it depends on whether you look left or right when you are coming down the southern side of the Acropolis as to whether you see the Theare of Dionysos (which seems more archeological dig than theatre) or the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. When I visited Athens I only saw a sign for the theatre and didn’t realize the pictures I was posting were of something else.

Today I am taking the opportunity to get it right.

The Theatre of Dionysos isn’t as well preserved as the Odeon, but it is a few hundered years older. Bigger too. In its original form it held about 17,000 people.

These days we have many halls that hold that many people – but we also have electric amplification. Imagine sitting at the back of a 17,000 seat open-air ampitheatre and being able to hear what was being said in a play on stage. That is impressive.

Maybe audiences back then were more inclined to keep silent during a performance. Certainly no-one was on their phone while the actors were speaking.

This pandemic period of reduced travel does have some benefits after all. I would never have noticed the mistake if I hadn’t been looking through old travel photos and dreaming of sunny climes. You do that when a couple of days of -25 Celsius temperatures give way to a blizzard that dumps 40 cm of snow on you.

I must admit though, much as I enjoy travel, it feels so nice to be exeriencinga Canadian winter after four years in Germany.