AA-2026-7973CC
On the image
A man in pressed slacks and sunglasses stands beside a woman shading herself under a wide straw hat, both of them positioned on three-thousand-year-old paving as if waiting for a bus. She holds her hat brim with the specific gesture of someone who has just realized the Greek sun does not negotiate, a discovery every postwar tourist to the Peloponnese seems to make independently and at the same volume of surprise.
Behind them a small knot of visitors in bright 1950s cottons — coral dress, white shirts — clusters near the stone enclosures, doing what tourists at Bronze Age citadels have always done: standing near something important and waiting to feel something. The dry stacked walls, built without mortar by people who left no explanatory plaque, will outlast every outfit in this photograph by several more millennia.
Someone in the group carries a shoulder bag suited for a boulevard, not a hillside, which tells you package tourism to Greece's ancient sites had already worked out its wardrobe long before it worked out its footwear.
Visually related — by likeness
American Tourists at Mycenae's Cyclopean Walls, Greece, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-7973CC. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-tourists-at-mycenae-s-cyclopean-walls-greece-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20267973CC,
title = {American Tourists at Mycenae's Cyclopean Walls, Greece, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-7973CC},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-tourists-at-mycenae-s-cyclopean-walls-greece-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - American Tourists at Mycenae's Cyclopean Walls, Greece, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-7973CC UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-tourists-at-mycenae-s-cyclopean-walls-greece-1950s ER -
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