Tickets Anywhere’s Bryony Hordern and her husband had always dreamed of visiting the cities and countries that once fed the imaginations of their childhoods. The homes of ancient heroes, the haunts of mythic creatures, the cradles of western civilisation, the birthplaces of world religions, the sites of golden antiquity. A 12-night cruise around the eastern Mediterranean took them back into the depths of our collective history. Here they recount their story.
We flew to Athens in late May when we knew that the temperatures, hovering in the mid-70s, would be pleasurable rather than oppressive. From the airport, we were whisked to the resplendent King George Palace hotel in the heart of the city. Regally luxurious, the rooms were adorned with upholstery fabrics in raw silk, satin-fringed drapes and greyveined marble bathrooms. In the morning, we took breakfast on the rooftop of the hotel, overlooking the wonder of the Parthenon, that flowering in carved, fluted, iconographic stone of the power of classical Athens, capping the Acropolis, itself an exuberant testimony to the magnitude of the achievements of ancient Greek artistic and religious culture, in eternal homage to the goddess Athena.
