Pitched fights were what passed for live sport back in the day (well, there was no football) with tourists going battle class.
And as is the way with big entertainment, America led the way.
Well, there was the coming ‘attraction’ of the American Civil War.
No seriously for the Great and Good of the capital the first skirmishes of what they never conceived would last four years were seen as a glorious day out.
And the grand ladies got their picnics out and their maids to take them down to within view of Manassas in Virginia, 32 miles from the capital.
Alas, this was not the derring-do of frontier adventures but bloody carnage and the tourists even had to hot-tail it back to Washington DC when the fighting got too close.
These days they make capital out of the battle with history tourists able to get up close and personal to the likes of Stonewall Jackson.
And interact with guides dressed up as soldiers.
War, this is what it’s good for
The excitement of close-up coverage of a real-life battle caught on and there were spectators too at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Though we can’t imagine that there had ‘come to dedicate a portion of that field’ to the tourists.
And here in Europe at the Franco-Prussian War, following in a rich tradition where tourists, celebrities including Robert Southey among them, visiting battlefields, post-killing.
Thomas Cook got in on the act too promoting travel out to the Boer War.
All of which is still on the tourist map when you’re down there as I was in the Eastern Cape. And some towns don’t look to have changed since then.
Now thankfully, and again we probably have football to thank for this, real-life battles are no longer spectator sports.
In their place though are recreations, and there’s a classic every year in our favourite region of Greece, Attica.
Where the locals have been refighting the pivotal naval Battle of Spetses, or Armata, from the Greek War of Independence in 1822.
The Armata
Of course you know but just a reminder that Spetses was where Captain Andreas Miaoulis and the captains of Spetses, Hydra, and Psara islands fought against the Turkish naval forces.
While Kosmas Barbatsis from Spetses set fire to the enemy flagship, making the Turks retreat.
The climax of the island’s festivities which take place in the second week of September commemorating the battle on the 8th is the burning of a model of the Ottoman flagship.
But, of course, there are fireworks, concerts, plays and church services with the Virgin Mary to the fore with her birthday also on the 8th September.
Helpfully too and my schoolboy Greek is sketchy, and is only useful 2,500 years ago, they have translations from the Greek into English.
And for tourists going battle class, my Greek odyssey was courtesy of Lufthansa… and quite an odyssey it was too.
You see the humble speksboom only stores solar energy to perform photosynthesis at night.
