Thermopylae

The roads of Greece led me from north to south. Somewhere ahead were Athens and Delphi, and while we raced along the Maliak gulf and approached Thermopylae.

Thermopylae! I can not believe it! Stories from childhood about the tenacity of the Spartans, about Tsar Leonid, who was not afraid to stand up against an obviously stronger enemy ...

We are reconstructing the route - we definitely need to visit these places! It turned out, even rebuilding especially nothing is needed. You just need to move out of the toll road and drive a little ahead.

A few minutes later I saw a monument. He stood on the left side of the road, alone, only trees and stones around.

We approached the monument. There was an inscription on it. This is a line from the epitaph of the ancient Greek poet Simonides of Keos: "Traveler, tell the Spartans about our demise: They are true to their laws, here we are bones".

Such an inscription was left on the first monument, a stone slab, which was established by Leonid's contemporaries at the site of the battle.

Standing at the memorial and looking around I could not believe that it was once difficult to get around the enemy from the flanks. Now here is space, measured if not by tens, then units of kilometers - for sure! And earlier, before the landscape was different. Distance, according to historians - no more than 60 steps. Those. very narrow. On the one hand - rocks, on the other - the sea.

And now there was nobody on the square in front of the monument. Not far away, there was a biker at the road. We exchanged glances with him. I nodded to him and smiled in response to his smile.

It was necessary to look around, what else is there interesting. On the other side of the road there was some strange place. White flat land and grassy bumps on it. We went there. I picked it up with a finger. It was dense. It looks like salt ...

Then it occurred to me that Thermopylae had not been called out so casually. It's from the Greek: θερμός / farm (or thermos) - warm + πύλες / saws - gate = Warm gates. In that place there is a waterfall with hot springs, you can still swim.

Maybe this white earth is related to the sources. After passing about 300 meters along this white field we came to a stream.

If I had come to such a stream somewhere in the industrial zone of my native city, I would have christened such a river as a "shit". Because the smell of hydrogen sulfide was obvious and characteristic. And since in my native city I do not have thermal springs, the origin of such a smell is easily explained with the help of the word "shit".

In Greece, of course, everything is there. There are also thermal springs, because of which Thermopylae are so called and the river, on which we stumbled, flowed just from such a source.

Jumping over the river and going a little further, we found an organized bathhouse. In it, a man of 15-20 people splashed. Slightly further were the buildings of the sanatorium or something like that.

The general view of the bathing room fully corresponds to the concept of "free". Aesthetically, does not cause a desire to climb into the water.

It's probably good to come here in winter, when there's snow around. Climb into such a bath (water temperature 37 degrees) and sit, sipping a glass of a drink, watching the steam fly over the water.

From the organized bath the river runs away, here and there it is quite deep. Apparently, in the spring, spilling over, this river fills the nearby fields and then, when the water falls, the salt remains on the ground.

In these whitish lands hid several motorhomes. Apparently this place is still popular with campers.

And we walked along the warm river and went to spend the night in a small town with an interesting name Kamena Vurla. By the way it is pronounced, it must belong to the city in the Czech Republic, but no - we are in Greece!