If reincarnation were a thing, and you got a choice about how you wanted to come back in your next life, I would seriously consider being a cat who lives in a fish market. I mean, choice #1 would be being a sea otter, floating around all day cracking open oysters on my chest and eating sea urchins. But fish-market cat is a really close second.
I know this because we didn’t get around to going to the fish market on the island of Aegina until the end of the day, when all but a few vendors had left and those who were cleaning up for the day were tossing unsold fish to the cats. I know from having eaten it at least twice that day that that was some nice fish, and those cats were eating the same as I had, but for free!
Aegina is the largest island closest to Athens–about an hour’s ferry ride away. Several folks we met had recommended making a day trip out there, so we did. On the ride out of the harbor, we studied a huge mural on the side of a warehouse commemorating the anniversary of Athens’s victory at the Battle of Salamis–the 2,500th anniversary, that is. It felt a little like that older uncle who goes on at every Thanksgiving dinner about how he was almost drafted into the NFL in high school, but on serious steroids. Once out of the harbor, we enjoyed the views to the west of the isthmus of Corinth and the high, snowy peaks of the Peloponnesian peninsula. Then, we swung south toward Aegina.
The harbor was pretty sleepy on a Monday morning, but we were told it’s nuts on the weekends as cruise ships dock, and many of the wealthier in Athens keep vacation houses on the island. As it was, we felt confident we’d be able to handle a scooter on the quiet island roads, so we rented one and headed out for the day–first down to the picturesque peninsula town of Perdika for lunch at Estiatorio Giobita, one of the many excellent fish restaurants that line the harbor. We enjoyed fresh grilled squid and scorpion fish, which has a nice, juicy white flesh and, owing to its bright red coloration, the saffron-y tang of lobster. For dessert the owners, as is pretty typical, brought us a little sweet on the house–this one some juicy candied oranges with sheep yoghurt.
Nice and full, we scooted our way from Perdika up and across the island to the Temple of Aphaia, an elegant Classical temple to a goddess worshipped only on Aegina who was associated first with an archaic fertility cult and later with the cult of Artemis as the nymph Britomartis, dedicated to the protection of women and children. A couple of interesting features of the temple were the u-shaped grooves in some of the plinths that they ran rope harnesses through to lift and place pieces that needed to sit flush with the blocks on either side; the rope could just be cut and pulled out of the channel when the piece was in place.
Another really interesting find wasn’t visible at the site but was one Birgit made by searching online about what happened to the marbles adorning the tympanon (the triangular space in the architrave on the ends of a classical roof structure). They were taken back to Germany by the Bavarian team that excavated the temple in the late 1800s and displayed at the Glyfotek there: recently, however, a team used UV scanning to reconstruct how the marbles had been painted (almost all marble statues in ancient Greece were vividly colored, not white as we are used to seeing them now): the results are wild!
We’d gotten a bit chilled on the scooter, so we warmed up with some tea at a pretty little cafe by the temple before saddling up for the ride back around the north coast of the island to Aegina harbor. After we handed the scooter in, we shopped in the old agora for pistachios (grown in abundance on the island) and some picnic items for our road trip to Delphi the next day and finished up with fried anchovies (what else?) and roasted peppers in olive oil while the fish-market cats got their supper. Then, it was time to catch the ferry back across the bay.
The Rookery 
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