During the autumn and winter of 2013/ 14 I travelled in Israel and Greece.  Here are a few pictures from Israel.

The first is the exterior of the Shrine of the Book, the repository in which the Dead Sea Scrolls are being pieced together and preserved.  

The second and third pictures are of the Western Wall of the Temple.  

The fourth and fifth were taken just outside my room at Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea.  

The horses in the sixth picture are on the wall of the roof terrace of my hotel in Haifa.

Here's the hotel - it's chock full of art objects.

In Greece

Athens today scarcely resembles the city s it was in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.  But I guess that everyone has a mental picture of the great buildings on and below the Parthenon; lasting expressions of empire and culture.  

By contrast, here's a view of the present day site of ancient Sparta.  

    

Ancient Sparta was a collection of villages centered on this site yet Sparta was as great a power in the land as Athens.  However the Spartans did not erect great buildings to glorify their polis; their renown was won on the battlefield.  from 431 to 404 BC Sparta and Athens slugged it out in the Peloponnesian War, a conflict won by Sparta, though without Persian money this would not have been possible. 

Near Sparta January 2014

More homely affairs:

Christmas Eve in Agios Nikolaos in the Mani - a village not to be confused with other, often bigger, ANs elsewhere in Greece. 

Christmas Day in my friends house a couple of kilometers outside the village.

For me the most important element of ancient Greece is Delphi.  a good online guide can be found here:

http://www.ancient-greece.org/history/delphi.html