Word: chryse
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some 3,100 years ago, the Aegean island of Chryse (pronounced Cry-see) soared rocketlike into brief prominence in the Mediterranean world. According to Homer's Iliad, what made the mighty Achilles sulk in his tent before Troy was the aftermath of a quarrel over the daughter of Chryses, high priest of the tiny island's temple of Apollo. Another famed Greek warrior, the archer Philoctetes, never got beyond Chryse; stopping off there on his way to Troy, Philoctetes was fatally bitten by a viper loosed on him, according to legend, by a local nymph whose advances...
Last summer, intrigued by the legend of Chryse, a skindiving Italian nobleman, the Marquis Piero Nicola Gargallo, set out to find the vanished island. A serious amateur archaeologist, Gargallo, 32, centered his search in the area favored by traditional archaeological opinion-near the Dardanelles, on the ancient Greek invasion route to Troy. For tips on the island's precise location, he reread the pertinent passages in Homer and other ancients. Then, studying a detailed British navy map, he came upon a sunken land mass known as Kharos Bank, a 10-sq.-mi. area near the island of Lemnos, mentioned...
Last week, from his Roman apartment, tall, balding Piero Gargallo was laying plans for another full-scale expedition to Chryse and its surroundings. Says he excitedly: "The entire Aegean and Mediterranean are one vast undersea museum...