At five in the morning, every morning, a delightful cacophony of everyone’s phones alarms fills the air of the apartment. Reluctantly, bodies shamble upwards about 20 minutes after the phones are silenced. Quickly picking outfits for the day they rush towards the door in order to make it to the bus, which should be arriving in about another 10 minutes. Once upon the bus, some sit while an unlucky few stand all the way to the dig site located 20ish minutes away.
At the site, a quick breakfast is eaten and after a climb to the Acropolis, work finally begins. Some work in a mysterious possible pirate tower, others in an early Byzantine baptistry dubbed Hobbiton for its unusual excavation team, I work in an early Christian apsidal church or chapel which is divided in the middle by a later non-contemporary wall. Four people work on this site and, as of now, most of the wall locations are visible and slowly more of the floors are uncovered every day.
A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were thrown in the apsidal church for it to reach its current state. Countless buckets of dirt and rocks have been removed and scores of hellish prickly bushes with their stumps had to be cut down. Furthermore, nature itself fought back with a donkey-bee nest and ant hives being uncovered and properly taken care of. But still, we continue to dig to find more of the secrets this place has kept for the centuries its been hidden.
My most recent contribution to this mystery-solving has been the creation of what is now called the “diggy-hole”, a trench unearthing sections of the northern walls of unit A (one of the halves), and soon unit B (the other half) is also to be exposed by “diggy-hole 2, electric boogaloo”. Trench life is not particularly glorious with its tight spaces, not much pottery is uncovered ether, but a lot of bright blue glass shards are everywhere along the walls. After the digging is done, at 1 in the afternoon, we have lunch and then go home. There, we can start thinking and obsessing about what could be laying one more trowel swipe away, until the next day comes around and we get to repeat everything again.