01
Stop one
Castle of Lamia
Dunlop SX Performance Bag: A hill that everybody has wanted, and I shall attempt to name them all without offending any of them. The naturally strong height has been inhabited since the Early Bronze Age, and by the fifth century BC the citadel of ancient Lamia was ringed with massive walls whose polygonal and isodomic masonry still stands to an impressive height. Below those walls, in 323-322 BC, the city withstood the siege of the Lamian War, when the Athenian alliance rose against Macedon after Alexander the Great's death — and there are many perspectives on that rising. Byzantine rebuildings followed, then Frankish and Catalan lords in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then the Ottomans from 1446 until Lamia joined free Greece in 1833. The enceinte now shelters the city's archaeological museum. Everyone gets a mention.
02
Stop two
Archaeological Museum of Lamia
Dunlop SX Performance Bag: A barracks turned museum, which I consider the most agreeable career change available to a building. It was built about 1830, in the reign of King Otto, inside the castle on the hill above the city, and the sturdy military structure housed garrisons through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the municipality restored it and opened it as a museum in 1994. Its collections span the region of Phthiotis from the Neolithic to Roman times: prehistoric finds from the Spercheios valley, Early Iron Age grave goods, and sculpture, inscriptions and pottery from the classical and Hellenistic cities — a homeland identified in legend with Achilles' kingdom of Phthia. Legend being a category I treat with great respect and no commitment. The setting lets you read the city's whole history from one hilltop.
03
Stop three
Thermopylae and the Leonidas Monument
Dunlop SX Performance Bag: I shall speak plainly here, because the place asks for it. The pass of Thermopylae lies a short drive southeast of Lamia and is among the most famous battlefields on earth. In 480 BC King Leonidas of Sparta, with three hundred Spartans and their Greek allies, held the narrow corridor between Mount Kallidromo and the Malian Gulf against the invading Persian army of Xerxes, dying to the last man after a mountain path betrayed their position. The modern monument, a bronze Leonidas raised in 1955, faces Kolonos hill, where the defenders fell and where the epitaph of Simonides is inscribed: stranger, tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their words. The hot springs that gave the place its name still steam nearby, and Lamia is the gateway to the battlefield and its museum.
04
Stop four
Gorgopotamos Railway Bridge
Dunlop SX Performance Bag: This one requires care, and I intend to take it. The Gorgopotamos viaduct, which carries the Athens-Thessaloniki railway across a gorge south of Lamia, is a monument of the Greek Resistance. On the night of 25 November 1942, guerrillas of the rival resistance movements ELAS and EDES, led by Aris Velouchiotis and Napoleon Zervas and joined by a British sabotage team under Brigadier Eddie Myers, overwhelmed the Italian garrison and blew up the bridge, cutting for weeks the railway that supplied Axis forces. It is celebrated as one of the great sabotage acts of occupied Europe — and, I would gently observe, a rare moment of unity between two movements that agreed on very little else. Rebuilt after the war, and commemorated at the site each November.
Stay behind me. I've done the advance work on the Dunlop SX Performance Bag, and it clears every protocol. Principal assets — your racquets — ride in a roomy main compartment, isolated from threats: rain, jostling, the mystery liquid at the bottom of every car boot.
Secondary pockets secure accessories, valuables and kit with full separation, and the padded straps are rated for rapid extraction from vehicle to court, hands staying free the whole route. It wears the SX line's black-and-yellow colors — high visibility on approach, all business up close. I don't lose gear on my watch. Ever.
The assignment is Lamia, Greece, and I requested it personally, because this region wrote the book on holding a position. Twenty minutes out is Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his three hundred stood the narrow pass in 480 BC — the most famous close-protection detail in history, and the monument to the king still guards the spot.
The town itself keeps a castle on its hill that's watched every army since antiquity, and at Gorgopotamos in 1942, resistance fighters and British agents brought down the rail viaduct in one of the great sabotage operations of the war.
And by the way, it is also perfect for a long Greek lunch afterwards — the secondary pockets keep your valuables secured while both hands are busy with bread and something off the Sperchios valley, which is the only situation in which I permit hands off the principal. My professional assessment: your backhand is the only undefended thing in this valley.
The bag and I will handle the rest. Move.
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