A Day on Crete!

This from some time ago…vamping while I do a serious rewrite of our novel. Appreciate your kind indulgence…

Earbud from my shortwave radio tucked in, in the middle of the night it has been lovely hearing the waves of unfamiliar languages wash over me…the singsongs of Thailand, Burma, India turned to the guttural of the Middle East…

But when I hear Greek, my heart skips. My late husband Gene and I studied Greek when we thought we would be living in Greece in 1959, and I can still understand a word now and again.

In 2014, Bill and I took a cruise around the world, a dream of travel come true.

Especially since reading Mary Renault’s, The King Must Die, I’d wanted to see the palace of Minos at Knossos. It was one of our visits!

When we pulled into the port of Crete, from our cabin’s balcony I could see signs in the village, here and there I actually could figure out their meaning. Thrilling.

Our day’s tour guide was a woman in her fifties who spoke English one syllable at a time. She was friendly and learned—until to my amazement, after giving us a number of facts about Crete and the Minoan civilization—four thousand years old!—she suddenly turned to how difficult life was for Greeks these days…how much the people were suffering…how they did not understand why the world was against them…how their enemies (she actually used that word) were hateful. Whoops. I’m afraid I was generally unaware how severe was Greece’s economic crisis, that suffering was indeed widespread. Ach, the cliché is true: travel is broadening…you’re expecting a day with divine hero Theseus and you also get hapless politician Samaras…

In my mind most impressive from the guide’s background talk on Bronze Age Minoans was that they had no enemies…there was no war…not a single weapon was found on the site. It has long been clear to me that man is by nature warlike. So it was extraordinary that these people lived free of aggression. In harmony.

Is there anywhere on this beautiful planet today that people live in harmony? If you know of a place, please let me know…

I take it back about Minoan weapons: one form of weapon was found, double-headed axes were used to slay a sacred bull for religious ceremony…

Seems bloodlust—needing to sacrifice something/somebody—is deep down in our human nature…

Now on Crete in 2014, after an hour’s drive north along the hilly coast passing small villages and larger resorts (the thriving town of Malia, said the guide,was a favorite of young Brits), we arrived in the city of Heraklion, birthplace of El Greco and Nikos Kazantzakis.

Sir Arthur Evans, primo English archaeologist, was the man who worked forty years retrieving the city from the earth. To begin, before he could dig, he had to purchase the site from Crete! Part of the work he did—to strong criticism afterward—was reconstruct parts of the palace. If you look on Wiki, you’ll see some of Sir Arthur’s handiwork.

At first, I was disappointed in the palace. On all sides all I could see was low stone walls outlining rooms…I was looking for the labyrinth that Theseus found his way out of with a thread from the Minotaur’s daughter, Ariadne. But gradually as we walked through the spaces, peered into reconstructions of the queen’s bath—by the way, the guide at Masada, showing us the Roman baths, told us proudly the Romans invented bathing. Not at all…there was a handsome standing bathtub to prove the Minoans bathed first—with a fresco of diving dolphins on the walls…gentle free-spirited dolphins were the Minoans’ symbol of happiness.

Across a small valley from the palace the hillside was various shades of green, a patchwork of twentieth century agriculture. The air was warm not hot, and a gentle breeze made it all so peaceful…I’d love to believe climate change hasn’t reached the  Aegean… climate can’t have changed too much in 4,000 years…can it?

Up and down stone steps past storage rooms with gigantic clay pots (some holding hundreds of liters of liquid), we came to a theater carved in the limestone where, it is believed, Minoans watched performances of singing and dancing.

Behind the theater was a small road made of stone blocks, regarded as among—if not the very–oldest in Europe.

Time to return to the ship…but before boarding, we dashed off to the village to see what we could see. We found a woman on the quai with a cart selling Cretan thyme honey, I was thrilled, bought a huge tinful. Found some crinkled cotton scarves in a shop…but then we had to rush back as we were pulling anchor at 4:00.

A singular day in a lifetime…

And I’m back to having fun deciphering Greek on my nighttime radio.