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There is a land called Crete …
ringed by the wine-dark sea with rolling whitecaps—
handsome country, fertile, thronged with people
well past counting—boasting ninety cities,
language mixing with language side-by-side …
Central to all their cities is magnificent Cnossos,
the site where Minos ruled and each ninth year
Conferred with almighty Zeus himself.
(Homer, Odyssey 19.195–204)
May 3rd
At JFK we spotted David Reese and his wife, Catherine (Cap) Sease, the scholars who were to lead our trip. My husband, Dick, and I had signed on a Circumnavigation of Crete tour sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America. We would sail aboard a small ship, the Callisto, stopping at ports around the island. A bus would then take us to sites not accessible by boat.
David and Cap have worked together at Kommos, in southern Crete, and separately at many other sites around the Middle East. David is an anthropologist-zoologist who specializes in the analysis of bones and shells; he lectures on the kinds of information to be found in the detritus of human occupation—in the dregs of pots and in human and animal remains. Cap is an archaeological conservator, who would tell us how digs are run and finds preserved.
May 4th
From Athens, we made the short flight to Heraklion, the major city in Crete. A dramatic Venetian fort called Rocca al Mare dominates Heraklion’s harbor, where we caught our first view of the 059Callisto. She had been recently renovated, so her brass rails shone brightly and her rich mahogany woodwork glowed with fresh varnish. Our group of 22 assembled in the ship’s main salon for welcoming champagne, followed by the obligatory safety drill. Later that night, docking lines were cast off and the Callisto set sail east for the port of Aghios Nikolaos.
May 5th
A brisk wind blew as we boarded a bus for Mallia, the first site on our itinerary. Our able Greek guide, Stavroula Stratigi, told us that Mallia was the third-largest Minoan palace in Crete, after those at Knossos and Phaistos. Erected around 1900 B.C., the palace was destroyed several hundred years later in a great catastrophe that leveled so many buildings throughout Crete—putting an end to what archaeologists call the Middle Minoan period (2100–1700 B.C.). Many of the structures—including the palaces at Mallia, Knossos and Phaistos—were then rebuilt on the sites of the old ones. Another catastrophe struck the island around 1450 B.C., again destroying the great Minoan palaces. Some time later (probably toward the end of the 15th century, though the exact date is a subject of controversy) Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland arrived on Crete. The Mycenaeans rebuilt and occupied many of the Minoan palaces.
The Mallia palace was rebuilt after the 1700 B.C. destruction. The royal portion of the palace consisted of many corridors with small rooms. We saw a plaster-lined lustral basin (or bath) and a grand reception hall with multiple doors. In the king’s quarters, excavators found a bronze sword and a stone ax shaped like a leopard. These objects are “now on exhibit in the Heraklion Museum”—a phrase we would come across again and again.
The Mallia palace, like most Middle Minoan palaces, had a rectangular central courtyard. In this courtyard sat a round stone table with small hollow depressions running around its outer perimeter. This sacred table, or kernos, was probably used for offerings of seeds and fruit—possibly at an altar in the middle of the 060courtyard. The entrance to another cult area contained masonry blocks incised with the image of the sacred double-ax.
One of the site’s most striking objects is a huge, well-preserved storage jar, or pithos, decorated with bold rope designs. More of these pithoi—probably used to contain oil, wine or grain—still stand on one side of the courtyard in a special storage area replete with a drainage system that collected spillage.
That afternoon we drove through the Lasithi plateau, high in the Dhikti mountains (above). The hills were splashed with color from yellow buttercups, red poppies and wild orchids just past their bloom. Stavroula Stratigi told us that the plateau has been inhabited at least since 5000 B.C. Lasithi is criss-crossed by remnants of Roman aqueducts and pockmarked with caves—which have made it an ideal hiding place for rebels and resistance fighters in wars against Venetians, Turks and Germans.
May 6th
On to Lato, a city-state founded in the seventh century B.C. As we scrambled up the rocks to the abandoned site, we were again greeted by flowers—bright poppies, blue gentians, daisies and asters. We came upon a deep cistern overgrown with flowering oregano. Ancient Lato was a carefully planned town; it had well-defined rows of shops and residences, as well as strongly fortified walls, towers and gates, all crowned by an administrative area at the summit of the hill. From this high acropolis, we had a magnificent view of the rolling countryside below.
In the afternoon we visited a Byzantine church, Panaghia Kera. Its primitive frescoes, the earliest dating to the late 13th century A.D., depict the life of Saint Anne, the life of the Virgin, themes from the Gospels and the rewards of Heaven and the perils of Hell.
That evening, as the Callisto set sail for Sitia, the wind freshened. During Cap Sease’s lecture, the ship rolled so heavily that her projection screen was tossed from one end of the room to the other. It had to be steadied by helping hands—definitely a slide show.
May 7th
The bus from Sitia took us to Vai, which offers a lovely sheltered beach in a tropical palm grove. We had a festive lunch—snails and barbecued lamb—and then set out for Kato Zakro.
Dick and I had visited the site years ago, when the Greek archaeologist Nicholas Platon was working there. Kato Zakro lies in a low area of southeastern Crete that is often flooded, making it habitable only part of the year. It is a coastal, sandy place, with small natural pools filled with turtles. No wonder the ancient palace was at first missed by early 20th-century British excavators, who assumed that the major Minoan structures would be situated on the heights.
Kato Zakro was the site of the fourth largest center of Minoan civilization, after Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia. Its palace, like the others, was destroyed around 1450 B.C., though it seems to have escaped the pillaging that occurred 061at the other sites.
In the palace, we saw a ceremonial bath lined with plaster. We saw workshops where royal purple dye was extracted from murex shells, and a smelting foundry with remnants of the tin and copper used to produce bronze. Passing between two pillars, we came to the central court, where stone pavements still bore traces of red plaster patterns.
In the palace’s ceremonial complex, archaeologists found a gold bull’s head—which, of course, we were able to see later when we visited the Heraklion Museum. Excavators also found several rhytons (ritual vessels), including a bull’s-head vessel fashioned with pierced nostrils so that sacrificial blood or wine could be poured from the creature’s mouth.
The palace also contained an archive with tablets inscribed with the so-called Linear A script—which has not yet been deciphered. (When Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland arrived on Crete, they may have adapted Linear A to write their own language, ancient Greek; this script, referred to as Linear B, was deciphered in the 1950s by the English architect and linguist Michael Ventris.) Many of the Minoan Linear A tablets were crushed, but 13 have survived relatively intact.
May 9th
Our ship sailed back to Heraklion. The next morning we boarded a bus to the Mesara Plain—and Phaistos.
“From well-situated Phaistos,” writes Homer, “came warriors to join Idomeneus, renowned with the spear, as he gathered the Cretans for the voyage to Troy” (Iliad 2.648). Well-situated Phaistos is exhilarating! It commands a broad view of Mount Ida and the river valley below. Sections of the Early Minoan (third millennium B.C.) settlement survive in the Middle Minoan palace’s west court and in the processional path leading away from it. An imposing portico with a monumental central column and multiple doors leads into a reception room. Near the east courtyard are storerooms, where clay seals and Linear A tablets were discovered. Here also were pottery workrooms, where artisans probably produced the elegant, thin-walled Kamares ware that we later saw on display in the Heraklion Museum.
The famous Phaistos disk was found in the north wing of the palace. Inscribed with a spiral of 062mysterious symbols, this clay disk has inspired scholars, amateurs and crackpots to try their hand at decipherment. No one has succeeded.
In the afternoon, we visited Gortyn, a town mentioned by Homer in his account of Menelaus’s voyage home from the Trojan War. As Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon and the husband of Helen, returns to Greece from Troy, a huge storm forces half of his fleet south toward Crete, where “there’s a sheer cliff / plunging steep to the surf at the farthest edge of Gortyn, / out on the mist-bound sea” (Odyssey 3.331–334).
Gortyn has Hellenistic remains spread out below a high acropolis. Stravroula Stratigi led us to a venerable tree that modern Cretans associate with the legend of Europa, the daughter of the king of Phoenicia. According to the myth, Zeus falls in love with the maiden and then, in the guise of a bull, abducts and rapes her. Europa gives birth to Minos, who later becomes ruler of Crete. Beyond this ancient tree are the remains of a Greek settlement from the fifth century B.C., including traces of an agora, theater and odeon (music hall). On the wall of the odeon is a tightly chiseled Greek inscription—an extensive law code written in boustrophedon (meaning “as the ox ploughs,” a script in which a line reading from left to right is followed by a line reading from right to left, and so on). The text, written in a dialect attributed to the Dorian Greeks, consists of detailed rules covering property, marriage, divorce, adoption, mortgages, crime and the rights of slaves. It is said to be the earliest known codification of law in the European world.
We returned through groves of ancient, gnarled olive trees, passing by the ruins of the basilica of Aghios Titos. Now merely a shell, this seventh-century A.D. church was built to house the remains of Crete’s first bishop, Saint Titus, who died in 105 A.D.
May 10th
The Callisto took us west to Chania, not far from the deep, protected harbor at Souda Bay. Well-preserved Venetian fortifications helped Cretans fend off Turkish invaders for 46 years in the 18th century. During the Second World War, Souda Bay was used to evacuate Allied forces from mainland Greece and to prepare for the Battle of Crete. In 1941, the Cretan resistance, reinforced by British, Australian and New Zealand forces, tried in vain to defend the island against the Nazis.
Chania is the second largest city in Crete. According to legend, it was founded by Cydon, a grandson of King Minos. Thus it was the ancient home of the Cydonians mentioned by Homer. Traces of a Bronze Age settlement have been excavated on the promontory above the harbor.
May 11th
Like Chania, Rethymnon is a fortified port city. It is also a lively university town with many cafés and shops. In the archaeology museum, we saw small sarcophagi called larnakes, decorated with painted images of bulls, birds and humans.
May 12th
On our last full day in Crete we were off to visit the grandest Minoan palace on the island, the royal center of King Minos’s regime.
In 1900 the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans began to excavate the site of Knossos. He employed local labor, used newly developed methods of stratigraphy and kept precise records. Evans devoted many years and much of his personal fortune to the work—which was published as the four-volume The Palace of Minos (1921–1936). It was 063Evans who realized that Knossos was the site of one of the earliest-known Bronze Age European cultures—a people he called the Minoans, after the legendary ruler of Crete.
Walking the site in a dull drizzle was somewhat of a letdown. For the first time, we found the crowds of tourists oppressive. This, my second visit to Knossos, lacked the thrill of the first, but I was again struck by the scale, elegance and sophistication of the palace. The frescoes that had delighted us years ago were almost impossible to see because they have been cordoned off behind plexiglass barriers. Some of Evans’s reconstructions remain, such as the red-painted columns, but in order to distinguish the reconstructions from the original, others have been replaced by white-painted cement. Many people have criticized Evans’s restorations as excessively subjective, as unsubstantiated by evidence, but his reconstructions were inspired and have enhanced the experience of thousands of visitors—helping them to perceive the grandeur and beauty that distinguishes this palace from all others in Crete.
Back in Heraklion, we finally reached the museum. This archaeological museum is a must, and it was good to visit it at the end of our trip, rather than at the beginning. We saw treasures from the sites we had visited. The museum reminded us again of the many influences on the people of Crete, lying as it does in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea—influences from Egypt, Anatolia, the Greek mainland, the Levant. We left the museum with a greater and more intimate understanding of Crete’s long struggle to retain its identity in this handsome, fertile land thronged with people whose “language mix[es] with language,” just as in Homer’s day.
All translations from Homer by Robert Fagles’ Odyssey (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996) and Iliad (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991).
There is a land called Crete …
ringed by the wine-dark sea with rolling whitecaps—
handsome country, fertile, thronged with people
well past counting—boasting ninety cities,
language mixing with language side-by-side …
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