Descendants of the Sun | Arachova — Uruk's Streets Are a Greek Ski Town

Si-jin drives Mo-yeon through the capital of Uruk. Stone houses stacked up a slope, laundry across the gaps, a clock tower above the roofline, extras in the street who are not extras anywhere else. The town is Arachova, on the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. The unit filmed here on 5 and 6 October 2015 with local people filling the streets. Twelve kilometres up the road is Delphi; a hundred and sixty kilometres east is Athens. Arachova made its money on wool, cheese and a red wine nobody exports, and then made considerably more of it when Greeks discovered skiing. It is now the country's weekend mountain town, which means the stone lanes the drama used are lined with things a Middle Eastern capital would not have — knitwear shops, tavernas that fill at midnight, a bakery that sells formaella cheese grilled on the counter. Walk up rather than along. The village is built in terraces and the connections between them are stairs cut into the rock, some of them so steep that a house's front door sits level with its neighbour's roof. The clock tower on the outcrop above and the church of Agios Georgios are the two fixed points; everything else you find by climbing wrong and coming back down. No admission, no gate, no marker of any kind saying a Korean crew was here. Uruk was never a country. The stairs are. Arachova 320 04, Boeotia.