Greece Photography Tours

Greece photography tours are small-group trips, each led by a host, through mainland Greece and the islands. They suit people who travel in order to take pictures. The places described run from Mount Pentelicus, Lake Marathon and Plaka Bridge to Mount Ithome. Kastri Lighthouse, the Haliacmon river, Doiran Lake, the dragon houses of Euboea and Strongyli Megistis follow. Further pages: a Meteora tour from Athens, Greece island hopping tours and a Santorini day trip from Athens. Wider choices appear under Greece tours.

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What are Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours carry a name built from Greek. Photography joins Greek roots for light and for drawing, so together they mean drawing with light. The trips themselves run in small groups under a host, across mainland Greece and its islands.

In the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid each wrote about a camera obscura. That Latin name means dark chamber. Much later came Anthemius of Tralles, a Byzantine mathematician of the 6th century CE. He tried a version of the device in his experiments. Byzantine describes the eastern Roman state and its culture.

The astronomer John Herschel is among those credited with coining the word photography, in 1839. Astronomy is the science of stars, planets and space. In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce had made the earliest photograph from nature that still survives. A photograph from nature records a real scene rather than a drawing or a copy.

Greece photography tours fit the genre of travel photography. That genre can show the scenery, people, customs, culture and past of a place. A genre is a type or style of creative work. Today, travel photographers also lead photo-tours, drawing on their knowledge of travel locations. A photo-tour is a trip planned around taking pictures.

• Landscape: Landscape photography records the outdoor spaces of the world, from vast scenes to tiny details.
• Built features: On Greece photography tours, buildings, roads and bridges can count as landscape in artistic settings.
• Early names: Francis Bedford, Maxime Du Camp and Francis Frith were among the early travel photographers.

Greece photography tours use a term with a set meaning. A photographic society in the United States has defined the travel photo. Such an image carries the mood of a time and a place. It shows a land, its people or a culture as they are.

Where does Mount Pentelicus stand for Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours share the region of Attica with Mount Pentelicus. The mountain rises northeast of Athens and southwest of the town of Marathon. The highest point is Pyrgari, a peak that reaches 1,109 metres above sea level.

In the setting of Greece photography tours, forest covers about 60 or 70% of Mount Pentelicus. It can be seen across the greater part of the Attica basin, in both north and south Athens. Houses ring its lower slopes, and the districts of Vrilissia, Penteli, Ekali and Dionysos lie on its foothills.

In ancient times the mountain also carried the names Brilessos and Brilettos. The nearby suburb of Vrilissia takes its name from those old forms. The mountain holds a monastery in its middle part, north-east of the city centre. Each monk takes religious vows and joins a shared community life.

Stone cut here is known as Pentelic marble. Its make-up is calcitic, with quartz present as an accessory mineral. Calcitic means formed mainly of calcite, a common mineral in limestone and marble. An accessory mineral is a minor ingredient of a rock. Greece photography tours are trips through a land whose marble was later exported to Rome.

• Fire: A blaze in early July 1995 burned three quarters of the slopes of the mountain.
• Old road: The ancient road from the quarry to the Acropolis runs downhill along the natural lie of the land.
• Quarry: The law protects the ancient quarry, and its stone now serves only the Acropolis restoration.

For Greece photography tours, Pentelic marble falls into 3 units, told apart by carbon and oxygen isotope values. An isotope is one form of a chemical element. Experts have used such values to trace the Elgin Marbles to Unit 3 of the stone.

What links Lake Marathon with Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours belong to a country where Lake Marathon is a man-made reservoir near Marathon. A reservoir holds stored water for public use. Marathon Dam formed it where the Charadros and Varnavas torrents meet. A torrent is a fast mountain stream.

For Greece photography tours, the lake served as the main water supply for Athens from 1931. It kept that role until 1959. Water from Lake Yliki became available that year, and the Mornos Reservoir followed in 1981. The dam was built for a fast-growing Athens after large numbers of refugees arrived from Asia Minor.

At the height of its spillway, Lake Marathon covers 2.45 square kilometres. A spillway is a channel that lets extra water escape past a dam. The lake reaches a greatest depth of 54 m. It gathers water from a drainage basin of 118 square kilometres. A drainage basin is all the land that feeds one body of water.

Marathon Dam is a concrete gravity dam, which holds back water by its own weight. Its outer cladding is white Pentelic marble, the same marble used on the Parthenon. Cladding is a facing layer laid over a structure. Greece photography tours unfold in a country where work on this dam lasted from 1926 to 1929.

• Height: The dam rises 54 m from its foundation to the top of its crest.
• Width: It measures 28 m wide at the base and narrows to 4.5 m at the crest.
• Crest: The crest runs for 285 m and sits 227 m above sea level.

For Greece photography tours, the lake basin gets 580 mm of rain each year on average. A millimetre, written mm, is one thousandth of a metre. At its fullest, the reservoir can hold 41,000,000 cubic metres of water.

How does Plaka Bridge fit into Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours unfold in a country whose Plaka Bridge is a 19th-century stone bridge with one arch. It spans the Arachthos River on the border of the Arta and Ioannina prefectures. A prefecture was a regional unit of Greek government.

For Greece photography tours, its arch spans 40 metres in width and rises 17.61 m in height. No other one-arch bridge in Greece or the Balkans is larger. The Balkans are the peninsula of south-east Europe that includes Greece. Two smaller side arches, each 6 metres wide, once stood at either end of it.

Builders tried twice before, in 1860 and 1863, and each time the bridge fell during construction. The 1863 attempt fell on the same day as its opening ceremony. Local builder Kostas Bekas, from the nearby village of Pramanta, finished the bridge in 1866. Its builder worked on the orders of Abdulaziz, the Ottoman sultan, or ruler.

Greece photography tours run through a country where this bridge once marked a national border. From 1881 to 1912, it divided the Kingdom of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. A customs building raised beside it at that time still survives. Customs officers check goods carried across a border into a country.

• River sports: Rafting and canoeing trips on the Arachthos River set off from the bridge.
• Collapse: A flash flood washed away the central section of the bridge on 1 February 2015.
• Rebuilding: Restoration work, with support from Athens’ National Technical University, finished in the summer of 2020.

Greece photography tours run in a country where Plaka Bridge came through Second World War bombing. Its damage was slight. Local people repaired the bridge with cement in 1943. Cement is a powder that sets hard when mixed with water.

Which old names does Mount Ithome give Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours belong to a nation where Messenia has twin peaks. Mount Ithome is the northern one and rises to about 800 metres. Its earlier name, used before Greek independence, was Vurcano, spelled in a long list of ways.

For Greece photography tours, the second peak is Mount Eva, at 700 metres. The two peaks are linked by a narrow ridge of 0.80 kilometres. A ridge is a long, narrow crest of high ground. Kalamata, a city on the Gulf of Messenia, lies 25 kilometres to the south. Gulf means a wide arm of the sea.

For Greece photography tours, an early record of the name Bulcano is a list of fiefs from 1364. A fief was land held from a lord in return for service. The list covered the Principality of Achaia, a medieval state in southern Greece. The Archaeological Museum of Messenia places the name Vourkano in the 10th century.

The flat summit was in all likelihood the site of the Homeric village of Ithome. Homeric describes places named in the epic poems of Homer. A Bronze Age temple of Zeus Ithomatas once stood up there. By the early 14th century it had been rebuilt as a church and monastery. The builders reused the same stone.

• Old Monastery: In the 17th century the monastery of Panagia Voulkanou closed, apart from a caretaker.
• New monastery: A newer monastery was built lower down, on the east slope of Mount Eva.
• Library: The new monastery holds a noted library of ancient manuscripts, or hand-written books.

Greece photography tours belong to a land where the Ithomaea was once an annual festival at Ithome. It honoured Zeus Ithomatas, the Zeus of Ithome. At first, the festival centred on a musical contest. Festivals mark special dates with public gatherings and celebration.

Why is Kastri Lighthouse a landmark for Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours run in a nation where Kastri Lighthouse marks the approaches to Othonoi. The light is active and dates from the 19th century. Its other name is the Lighthouse of Othonoi. Approaches are the waters leading in to a coast.

For Greece photography tours, the lighthouse dates from 1872. It stands on Cape Kastri, the northeastern tip of Othonoi. Capes are headlands, high ground pushing out into the water. A road runs from the site to Ammos, the chief settlement of the island. Settlement here means an inhabited village.

Its light gives one white flash every ten seconds. The flash comes from a lantern room on top of a 13-metre tower. A lantern room is the glass chamber that holds the lamp. The masonry tower rises above the seaward side of a one-storey keeper’s house. Masonry is building work of stone or brick.

For Greece photography tours, the lamp stands 103 m above sea level, a figure called its focal height. Its beam can be seen up to 18 nautical miles away. Sailors and pilots measure distance at sea in nautical miles. The Hellenic Navy Hydrographic Service maintains and runs the light, as it does other Greek lighthouses.

• Wartime gap: The light stayed dark from 1941 until 1954 after damage in the Second World War.
• Kerosene era: A restored kerosene beacon then served the station until electrification in 1985.
• Island: Othonoi, the island it serves, is the northernmost island of the Ionian archipelago.

For Greece photography tours, Othonoi counts as the westernmost point of Greece. It is also the largest of the Diapontian Islands, with more residents than any other in the group. That group is a cluster of small Ionian islands and islets.

What does the Haliacmon river add to Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours run through a nation whose longest river, the Haliacmon, flows entirely on Greek soil. It runs for 297 km through the region of Macedonia. Its drainage basin, the land that feeds it, covers 8,813 square kilometres.

Its Latin name joins two Ancient Greek words: salt or sea, and anvil. An anvil is the heavy iron block a smith hammers metal on. In Greek myth, the river was the home of a god also named Haliacmon. He was one of the river gods, sons of Oceanus and Tethys.

An ancient tradition held that the Haliacmon’s water turned sheep white. The Roman author Pliny the Elder recorded the belief. Ottoman Turks called the river Ince-Karasu, meaning narrow-black water. That name is still used in Turkey. For Greece photography tours, the river also has a Slavic name, Bistritsa, meaning clear.

The river lacked a permanent bed across its lowlands until the mid-1950s. A diversion dam, built to turn water aside, then rose near Aghia Varvara. Before then it flooded and formed wide marshes. A marsh is wet, low land where reeds grow. Its course bends in a broad curve around the Vourinos mountains.

• Fish: The Haliacmon holds 33 kinds of fish, and about 30 of them are native to it.
• Rare fish: One fish found in the river, the mavrotsironi, lives nowhere else in the world.
• Birds: For Greece photography tours, observers have counted 215 kinds of birds around the river.

Greece photography tours run in a land where Julius Caesar named the Haliacmon as a border. In his account, the river formed the line between Macedon and Thessaly. Macedon was an ancient kingdom of the north. Thessaly lies to the south of it.

How is Doiran Lake split between two countries, for Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours belong to one of the two countries sharing Doiran Lake, the other being North Macedonia. Its total area is 43.1 square kilometres. Of that area, 15.8 square kilometres lie in Greece and 27.3 square kilometres in North Macedonia.

The lake has a rounded shape and a greatest depth of 10 m. It runs 8.9 km from north to south and measures 7.1 km at its widest. Those sizes make it the third largest lake lying partly in North Macedonia. A kilometre, written km, equals one thousand metres.

For Greece photography tours, Nov Dojran lies to the west of the lake. The village of Mouries lies to the east. Mount Belasica, also called Beles, rises to the north. The Greek town of Doirani stands to the south. The Doirani River drains the lake and flows on into the Vardar.

For Greece photography tours, the First World War brought the Macedonian front to Doiran Lake. A front is the line where opposing armies face each other. Battles took place on its southern shore in 1916, 1917 and 1918. Greek and British war cemeteries share a hill just south of the lake with a battle monument.

• Reeds: The shallow lake is eutrophic, rich in nutrients, with wide beds of Phragmites reeds.
• Bird areas: North Macedonia’s part supports pygmy cormorants, Dalmatian pelicans and ferruginous ducks.
• Greek side: The Greek part of the lake is a separate Important Bird Area of its own.

For Greece photography tours, heavy farm use of Doiran’s water once nearly drained the lake. Both countries then acted to refill it and hold its level steady. Years of heavy, frequent rain that followed also helped restore the water.

Which riddle do the dragon houses of Euboea set for Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours run through a land whose island of Euboea holds the dragon houses. These are about twenty large, ruined buildings across southern Euboea. Their Greek name is Drakospita, and another name is Draga. The word drakospita means dragon houses.

For Greece photography tours, the dragon houses were built from massive stone blocks without mortar. Mortar is a paste of lime or cement that binds stones together. Large stone slabs formed their roofs. The best preserved and best known stands on Mount Ochi, north of the town of Karystos.

In local folklore, dragons are not only reptile monsters. They are also beings with superhuman powers. Folklore means the old tales and beliefs of a people. A reptile is a cold-blooded animal such as a snake or lizard. No accepted theory exists about who built the houses. Nor is there any agreed date for their building.

For Greece photography tours, the first account came from John Hawkins, an 18th-century British geologist. He was also a traveller and writer. A geologist studies rocks and the history of the earth. The first detailed account after Hawkins followed in 1842. It came from the German archaeologist H.N. Ulrichs.

• Other sites: Notable dragon houses also stand at Palli-Lakka and at Kapsala in the south.
• French scholar: Jules Girard, a French classical scholar, wrote a description of the Ochi dragon house.
• Palli-Lakka: Girard also wrote further descriptions of the three dragon houses at Palli-Lakka.

Greece photography tours belong to the land where Karl Reber tracked down every reported dragon house. Reber, a Swiss archaeologist, published his report on them in 2010. Classical texts, the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, contain no known mention of the houses.

Why does Strongyli Megistis stand out for Greece photography tours?

Greece photography tours belong to a nation whose easternmost territory is the islet of Strongyli Megistis. Islets are tiny islands. It also goes by the shorter names Strongyli and Ypsili. The islet is Greek and lies in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The islet measures about 1.5 kilometres long and up to 700 metres wide. Its whole area comes to roughly 0.9 square kilometres. The land is fairly flat, under a cover of macchia. Macchia is a thick growth of low, evergreen shrubs. For Greece photography tours, the islet forms part of the Municipality of Megisti.

The 2021 census recorded just one inhabitant on the islet. A census means an official headcount of residents. The islet also has a lighthouse, the easternmost building anywhere in Greece. Easternmost means farther east than any other. Lighthouses carry strong lamps that warn ships and help them steer.

Greece photography tours happen in a country where Strongyli once held a tower in a chain of watchtowers. Rhodians built that dense network during the Hellenistic period. Its towers helped watch over the sea lanes and the shore. The Hellenistic period is the age of Greek culture after Alexander the Great.

• Pine Island: In Turkish, the islet is called Cam Adasi, which means Pine Island.
• Lighthouse Island: Another Turkish name for it, Fener Adasi, means Lighthouse Island.
• Cableway: A cargo aerial cableway carries army loads from the landing area to the island outpost.

For Greece photography tours, Strongyli sits about four kilometres south-east of the island of Kastellorizo. Kastellorizo itself lies in the Levantine Sea, the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Levantine comes from the Levant, an old name for the lands of the eastern Mediterranean.

What do travellers ask about Greece photography tours, and what are the answers?

The Greece photography tours questions turn to a bridge in Epirus, two mountains and a lake. The Papastathis Bridge crosses the Arachthos near Ioannina. Mount Ossa rises in Thessaly, while Falakro stands in the Drama regional unit. Lake Polyfyto lies in the Kozani regional unit.

Before Greece photography tours, what is the Papastathis Bridge?

The Papastathis Bridge is a bridge with four arches. Agapios, the abbot of Viliza Monastery, built it in 1746. Abbot is the title of the monk who leads a monastery. Villagers from the area raised the rest of the money. Legend says a man and a rooster cry there on nights of flood.

For Greece photography tours, why does Mount Ossa have two names?

Mount Ossa is 1,978 metres high. Its other name, Kissavos, comes from the Serbian word kiša, meaning wet weather or rain. That name came into use in the 11th century. The Ancient Greek name Ossa was used before then. It came back into use in the 20th century.

Ahead of Greece photography tours, what is Lake Polyfyto?

Lake Polyfyto ranks among the largest man-made lakes in Greece. It was created in 1974 when the Polyfyto Dam was built across the Haliacmon, also written Aliakmon. Its surface covers 74 square kilometres. Two bridges cross the lake: the Servia High Bridge at Neraida and a smaller one near Rymnio.

What does the name Falakro mean, for Greece photography tours?

In English, Falakro Oros means Bald mountain. Bulgarian and Turkish call it Bozdag, or Grey mountain. Profitis Ilias, its top summit, climbs to 2,232 metres. A low northern offshoot of the mountain crosses into Bulgaria. There, on the border, the wooded peak of Chiplakbair reaches 1,090 metres.

Featured photo: Lutravidra, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.