lost in time

On an epic, sun-soaked journey across southern Greece's Peloponnese, Antonia Quirke revels in her connection to the history and myths that swirl around its rugged shores

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iam looking for the gates to Hades, but have overshot the turn. Somewhere below is the cave from which Heracles dragged the fearsome three-headed dog Cerberus into daylight so bright its slobber formed yellow flowers of aconite. Instead, I find a beach of pale rock and water that's glass-calm to the horizon. Beneath its surface are hundreds of curled little fish with flanks of tarnished silver.

I'm in mountainous Southern Greece, midway through an epic road trip across the Peloponnese, the four-tentacled peninsula connected to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth and surrounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, and the Aegean to the east. This storied peninsula contains traces of classical, Venetian, Byzantine, and Turkish rule. Modern European history springs from the Peloponnese. It is home to Sparta and Olympia, names that sound so like myths of antiquity you might forget they're actual places. There are towns such as Kardamyli, so lovely that Agamemnon offered it to sulky Achilles to lure him out of bed to fight the Trojan War. In deepest Mani, the longest of the peninsula's tentacles-one of the last wild parts of Europe, a place that turned back even the Ottomans-the cliffs and gorges seem to be made of shadows, and empty stone villages rupture the sky like mausoleums.