Into The Tomb

One of Evia’s most ancient monuments, a Bronze Age Mycenaean beehive tomb, is half an hour from our house. It’s outside the village of Katakalos beside a dirt road skirting a valley. 

There are no signs, fences, information boards, just two rusty metal poles on the side of the road.

The Mycenaean civilisation flourished three and a half thousand years ago. It takes its name from the city of Mycenae on the mainland of southern Greece, famous for its king Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the war against Troy and was murdered in the bath by his wife Clytemnestra when he got home.

The Evian tomb is a smaller version of the cavernous one in Mycenae but still the genuine article, a bronze age relic from the age of Odysseus on our doorstep.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark. 

After twenty feet or so it opens up into a stone clad beehive chamber fifteen feet wide and fifteen tall at its apex. It’s shored up with beams inside to stop it falling in. 

A storm of bats fans my face and ruffles my hair. I drop the phone, lens down, and scrabble in the dark and bat guano. Homer sings in the Odyssey about gibbering souls of the dead like bats sped by Hermes into hell. I see what he means as I flee the realm of death into the day. 

I wipe bat shit off my phone on the grass and look over a rumpled landscape of olive orchards to a gleam of sea. People who once stood here might have watched Homer’s Greek fleet cruising up the gulf on its way to Troy. Or imagined it. As I do.