Walking through Mycenean history

This triptych above really looks like a postcard from the 80's :)
Today I am going to take you to Mycenae, a famous archaeological site close to my hometown. Not the greatest photos, all taken by my Xiaomi mobile phone as it was too cold to hold a camera for a long time.

Actually it was the coldest day we had so far, but this didn't stop us from a quick visit there. To be honest, I thought we were going to be on our own, but nope, to my surprise there were a few hundreds of people. What were they thinking? :)

This is a place I have visited so many times as a child, but it's been almost 2 decades since the last time I was there as an adult. And someone would think that nothing really changes at an archaeological site, but the place was burnt by a wild fire a few years ago, so sadly some things change.

We started from the end, visiting this majestic tomb. The dome is astonishing. We are in the late Bronze Age Era, called "Mycenaean", approximately between 1600-1015BC, and the architecture is impressive.

The entrance is also impressive. As you noticed, we were among tourists, mainly from US. They seemed to be just fine under this temperature while we were freezing!

One of my favorite things is imagining how things were made and I think of the moment when this last stone was put on the top :)

This place definitely deserves a visit in spring with all the wild flora blooming, but this cloudy cold weather fit the site perfectly.

Entering the citadel.

The sun looks like full moon and the view is undistracted, a good reason to build an acropolis here :)

And here we go through the main entrance, the Lion Gate.

The two lions arranged symmetrically around a column is the first example of representational monumental sculpture in the European continent. While its significance has been lost to the depths of history, its placement above the main gate of the most powerful citadel of late Bronze Age has led to speculation that it symbolized something important like a family crest of a coat of arms.

_{The Lion Gate}

The good thing about having other people around is that you can use them as a scale. While you just see some stones, the umbrella of the tour guide shows the real size of them.