Crete

CHAPTER ONE
:
Caves of Zeus and Houses of Christ

CHAPTER TWO
:
Old is New in Chania

CHAPTER THREE
:
Cretan Gorges and Other Matters

CHAPTER FOUR
:
The Mutable Fortress

CHAPTER FIVE
:
Within the Labyrinth

CHAPTER SIX
:
Peace Amid the Clamor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

We decided to go in early May. We packed swimming things, but didn't much expect to swim. The sea is too cold at this time of year, for all but the most hardy. A Cretan rarely ventures into the water before July. The sun of May is hot, though, and needs to be treated with respect. My wife, Aira, and I intended to do a lot of walking—Crete is one of the best places for walking that I know of—so sun hats and dark glasses and fairly stout footwear came high on the list of priorities.

The sky looked soft as we came down, but there was nothing soft about the land. One sees the bare bones, boulder-strewn fields with cleared areas, a reddish brown in color, almost terra-cotta, and the distant range of the Lefka Ori, White Mountains, their crests covered with snow. Landing, we were enfolded in the special blend of ancient past and slightly ramshackle present that seems a particular property of the island.

For the Greeks of a later time, Crete was the most venerable and ancient place imaginable. It was where everything began. The first herders of sheep were Cretan, the first beekeepers and honeymakers, the first archers and hunters. These last were the mythical Kouretes, sons of Earth, who attended on the infant Zeus. Since everything began here, it was also the birthplace of Zeus, the father god of the Greeks.

The legend has it that he was born in a cave near the present village of Psychro, high in the Dikte mountains on the southern edge of the Lasithi plateau in eastern Crete. His mother, Rhea, came here to give birth to him in secret, so as to save him from her husband, Kronos, ruler of Heaven, who, having been told that a son of his would supplant him, routinely devoured all his offspring. Rhea presented him with a stone instead, and in his cannibal haste he swallowed it without looking too closely. She then repaired to Crete and had the baby, leaving it in the care of the Kouretes, who in addition to their other achievements were the inventors of the armed dance, clashing their bronze weapons against their shields to drown out the baby's cries and so prevent Kronos from discovering the trick that had been played on him and eating this one too.

For the kind of writer I am, stories like this make a strong appeal. I often use the past, sometimes the remote past, as a setting for my fiction. It's a matter of temperament, I suppose, but I find this distant focus liberating, clearing away contemporary clutter and accidental associations that might undermine my story, and allowing me to make comparisons with what I see as the realities of the present. So it's a sort of fusion, an interaction of past and present. This is probably one of the reasons why I have always liked Crete, the quintessential land of such fusions.

The exploration of this remote cavern in the mountainside, conducted in the first spring of the twentieth century by D. G. Hogarth, then director of the British School in Athens, had for both of us, when we read about it at home before leaving, all the drama and romance of early archaeology on Crete, carried out by men and women endowed in equal measure with classical learning and a passionate spirit of inquiry. There were no roads, only rough tracks through the mountain passes. The workmen and their equipment—stonehammers, mining bars, charges of gunpowder—had to be transported on mule back. Leonard Cottrell quotes from Hogarth's own account in the issue of the
Monthly Review,
which appeared in the following year. He describes his first sight of the cave, with its “abysmal chasm” on the left-hand side: “The rock at first breaks down sheer, but as the light grows dim, takes an outward slope, and so falls steeply still for two hundred feet into an inky darkness. Having groped thus far, stand and burn a powerful flashlight. An icy pool spreads from your feet about the bases of stalactite columns on into the heart of the hill.”

The upper-right-hand chamber had already been broken into and robbed several times over, but the lower, deeper one had never been explored. The blast charges soon cleared away the scattered boulders that had blocked entry to generations of would-be plunderers. The labor force, increased now by the recruitment of female family members—Hogarth believed that the presence of women would make the men work better—began to dig, descending steeply day by day into the darkness of the cavern until only the dots of light made by their candles could be seen in the distance.

Now comes the miraculous discovery. One of the workers, as he was setting his candle in the narrow crack of a stalactite column, caught sight of a shine of metal—there was a blade wedged there. When drawn out it proved to be a bronze knife of Mycenaean design. There was no way it could have got there by accident: Someone, in the remote past, had brought it as an offering to some god or gods.

Encouraged by this, the party began to search among the crevices of these immeasurably ancient limestone columns that gleamed with moisture in the light of their candles. In the days that followed they found many hundreds of objects: knives, belt clasps, pins, rings, miniature double-headed axes, wedged in slits in the stalactites, brought down by devotees into these awesome depths some four thousand years before. Hogarth had no doubt that he had come upon the original birthplace of Zeus. “Among holy caverns of the world,” he wrote, “that of Psychro, in virtue of its lower halls, must stand alone.”

I suspect that what might have been harder for Hogarth to imagine than those long-ago worshipers was the impact that late-twentieth-century mass tourism was to have on these sacred grottos, hitherto undisturbed for millennia. The birthplace of Zeus has struck the popular fancy. Buses run from points all over the north of the island, from Chania to Agios Nikolaos, following the coast road, turning inland at Neapoli, toiling up the winding road to the Lasithi Plateau. Vociferous and sometimes importunate guides wait at the foot of the trail that leads up to the cave. There are numbers more at the entrance, armed with flashlights and a great deal of Cretan inventiveness and storytelling verve. They can distinguish among the stalactites the niche where the baby Zeus was bathed and the hollow where his cradle was laid. In spite of all this, in spite of the confusion of flashlights and the echoes of conflicting commentaries, when you are in the depths of the cave and look back toward the hazy nimbus of light above you, a certain awe descends. This patch of sky is what the newborn Zeus, destined to be father of gods and men, first opened his eyes upon.

Numerous others, however, argue that the true birthplace of Zeus is the Idaian Cave, on the edge of the Nidhi Plateau below the summit of Mount Ida, modern Psiloritis, which at 8,058 feet is the highest point on Crete and capped with snow for most of the year. The name means “the forest,” pointing to the fact that these slopes were once thickly wooded. The Idaian Cave has a long history as a cult place, going back to Bronze Age Crete and lasting into Roman times. According to tradition the philosopher Pythagoras visited the cave and offered a funeral sacrifice to Zeus there.

I am a great believer in the power of the imagination, especially when tuned to the past. But it can falter sometimes, and mine falters when I try to picture Pythagoras as a flesh and blood person standing in a cave, praying. He is nothing but an abstract principle for me and a source of frustration into the bargain. We met while I was still in short trousers (boys wore short trousers in those days), when I was required by the geometry teacher to prove Pythagoras's theorem concerning right-angle triangles, something I never succeeded in doing throughout my school days.

At five thousand feet above sea level, the setting is spectacular, but the cave itself is shallow and rather mediocre as Cretan caves go, lacking the dramatic cavernous depths of its rival. The issue has not been settled yet at the academic level—the arguments are erudite but inconclusive. I would be quite content to leave them in that state forever and suspend judgment, but Aira, always anxious to solve problems before passing on, was glad to hear that a sort of practical solution has been reached, at least in the eyes of the Tourist Board and the respective local populations. On the basis that two excursions are better business than one, it has been established that the Diktaian Cave is where the god was born and the Idaian Cave where he passed his infancy, suckled by wild animals.

Dark, underground places, the limestone spine of Crete is riddled with them, associated from earliest times with orgiastic practices and worship of the divinities of earth. And here already the Cretans demonstrate their difference. For the Greeks of the mainland, Zeus was a sky god. He ruled from the zones of the upper air, he was the thunderer, the cloud gatherer. What was he doing skulking in caves? But the Cretans are extremely tenacious in argument and greatly gifted in the art of having the last word. Since they saw Zeus as a fertility god, who died with the dying year and was reborn with spring, since they already had his birthplace, why not claim his tomb as well? This they proceeded to do, establishing it on the highest summit of Mount Juktas, south of Knossos, rousing great fury among those who believed the god to be immortal. Among these was the sixth-century
B.C.
poet and miracle priest, Epimenides, himself a half-legendary character, a fragment of whose invective has survived, translated by Rendel Harris and quoted by Costis Davaras in his book on Cretan antiquities:

I intoned this to Aira as we stood among the spring flowers looking up at the fabled summit, and she suffered my pomposity with her usual good grace. Epimenides was a Cretan himself, which lends added force to his words. St. Paul the Apostle refers to this verdict seven hundred years later, in his Epistle to Titus, by tradition first bishop of Crete. This judgment of them by a prophet of their own is true and well founded, the Apostle says, and goes on, “Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.”

But the shopkeeper in Chania with whom Aira and I stopped to chat while he was standing in his doorway enjoying the morning sun saw matters quite differently. He invited us inside, offered us coffee, showed us with a mixture of pride and guile around the shelves of hand-painted ceramics. Some had designs drawn from classical mythology, and prompted by this, he gave us his own version of the Zeus story. The Greeks of Athens had stolen the god, changed him out of all recognition, and made him their own. And this was because in the wars between Crete and Athens, temporarily and with the help of traitors, the latter had been victorious. What better way of marking a victory than by taking over the gods of the defeated? The Minoan palaces of Knossos and Festos had been devastated by fire at just that time; what more could be needed by way of proof?

I watched his face as he talked. Clearly these events were as real to him as if they had happened the day before yesterday. Cretans love stories. Their island has been inhabited for eight thousand years at least, time for a lot of stories, time for that long process of creative embroidery in which myth and legend and history intermingle, interweave, become inextricable.

Not surprising that disputes among scholars and archaeologists should concern caves. There are over two thousand of them on the island. The four great massifs that spring from the sea with astounding suddenness to form the mountainous core of Crete are all composed of limestone. The acid content in rainwater dissolves it, makes tiny furrows and hollows in the surface, in which the water gathers. Over vast spans of time, sinkholes develop, the limestone becomes riddled with fissures and crevices, and the constant sculpting by the water carves out caverns below the surface, underground chambers, some simple, some complex, with galleries at different levels, sometimes reaching into the heart of the mountains. Stalactites form, the water gathers into streams and pools. In these lightless tunnels and caverns and labyrinthine watercourses three billion years of life on our planet have produced a huge variety of crawling, swimming creatures, blind and colorless, perfectly at home.

Caves and rock shelters are intimately bound up with Crete's history from very earliest times. They formed the first shrines and cult centers, provided refuges from pirates, hideouts for bandits and revolutionaries in the uprisings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for partisans during the Second World War. They were sometimes the scenes of terrible atrocities carried out against the rebellious local population. Xan Fielding, visiting one such cave in the 1950s near the village of Vaphes in the eastern part of the White Mountains, saw a plaque set in the rock face commemorating the 150 men, women, and children of the village who had taken refuge in the cave and were put to death by suffocation in August 1821 on the orders of two Turkish pashas, Resit and Osman. The story goes that their presence in the cave was betrayed to the Turks by the crying of a child.

We had already decided to start by visiting some caves. It's an excellent way of getting to know Crete, since they are found everywhere, and there is invariably something of interest to see on the way. And Chania, on the northwest coast, probably the oldest and certainly the most attractive city on the island, is a good place to start from.

We took the road westward from Chania to Kolimbari at the base of the Rodopos peninsula, and then turned south toward Episkopi, along the valley of the Spiliakos River. It was a relief to get off this coastal road, especially the stretch nearest Chania. Running alongside the sea, with only the narrowest of strips dividing it from the shore, it has been subject to drastic tourist development on either side, a more or less continuous ribbon of hotels, vacation apartment houses, beach cafés, supermarkets, and souvenir shops, jumbled together in a way that we found chaotic and oppressive.

In compensation, the tourist-clogged road served to make the hills inland, once reached, all the more serene and lovely. The road follows the valley through groves of wonderfully luxuriant olive trees. You see these best in May, when the trees are a mass of yellow flower rifled by bees, or in late autumn, when the fruit darkens. The foliage is a denser green, and the branches have a more spreading habit than those of the western Mediterranean; it is altogether a more lordly tree, clothing the hillsides right up to the crests. The oil from these olives, any Cretan will tell you, is like no other anywhere else on Earth. There is something about olives that seems to bring out regional chauvinism. At home in Umbria we have our own olive trees and make our own oil—which naturally we consider to be the best anywhere to be found. The Tuscans think exactly the same about theirs, as do the people of Apulia. In fact, a lot depends on habitual taste and methods of cultivation. The best oil comes from freshly handpicked olives. If the nets are kept spread under the trees for several days and the olives gathered from the ground, which is the practice in southern Italy, the oil will be more acid. At least, that's the view we take in Umbria.