We kept to the track, gradually climbing, following the curving line of the hillside, with the shimmering expanse of the water below, coming eventually to the narrow tip of the promontory. Here, fitting end to such a walk, lest there should be danger of beauty saturation, a huge fence barred the way, sixteen feet high at least, surmounted by six rows of barbed wire and an enormous circular sign that read: STOP. Only the military can make their meaning as crystal clear as this. From here, if you could get through, you would find yourself looking out toward the Sporades, with Turkey, the traditional foe, beyond.
The track continued around the headland, leading to the road that runs south again toward the village of Vrouhas. But we wanted those views again and so retraced our steps. Coming from this side we noticed what we had missed before: At roughly the halfway mark was a cave above the track, the entrance walled very carefully with close-fitting stones to a height of about five feet. The wall blocked the entrance completely—there was no way in without climbing over it. Inside was a flat area, just enough space for a man to stretch out.
Caves are always a mystery. Who had laid stone on stone to build this wall, now peacefully colonized by purple campanula growing along its base? Fugitive, hermit, guerilla? Xan Fielding, who had more firsthand experience of Cretan caves than most, having fought in the White Mountains with the Resistance during the years of German occupation, relates a story that perfectly illustrates the Cretan desire to appropriate the past, to be the source of things, to blend myth and history into a possession as real and solid as the stones of their island.
While Fielding was sheltering in a cave near Souyia in 1942, a local man told him that the cave he was inhabiting was the very one in which the Cyclops Polyphemus once lived and kept his flocks. The Cyclops were a savage race of one-eyed giants who lived by tending sheep. Homer tells the story of how Odysseus and his companions, returning from Troy, took shelter in the cave of Polyphemus, who, finding them there, began systematically to eat them. He had already devoured six when they disabled him by driving a fire-hardened stake into his single eye while he lay sleeping. The blinded giant pushed aside the huge stone that blocked the entrance and kept his sheep penned in the cave. He tried to fumble for his enemies as they went through, but they clung to the fleecy undersides of the sheep and so got free. Once embarked again, Odysseus could not resist taunting his outwitted enemy. The enraged Polyphemus cast down great rocks in the direction of the voice, almost succeeding in crushing Odysseus’s ship. The giant’s prayers for vengeance to his father Poseidon roused the sea god’s wrath against Odysseus and cost the hero ten years of troubles and dangers before he could return to his native Ithaka and his faithful Queen Penelope.
It happened here, Fielding’s Cretan friend insisted, this was the cave. And to prove it he pointed out two rocks in the sea below. Those were the stones that the stricken monster hurled down. The commonly accepted view, which sets the scene off the Sicilian coast near Catania, was quite mistaken. The story belonged to Crete and it had been stolen from her.
This stubborn sense of possession is not surprising when one considers Crete’s history. Foreign masters, alien religions, these were the Cretans’ familiar circumstances for many hundreds of years, and the refusal to submit, the frequent uprisings, cost the people untold bloodshed and suffering. In these circumstances, whatever can serve to maintain the spirit and sense of identity must be seized upon and asserted. In Cretan folk song, and especially the rizitika, the mountain songs that began to appear in the eighteenth century during the darkest days of the Turkish occupation, two themes occur again and again: the beauty of the island and the indomitable spirit of its people. This is entirely to be expected. If you are called upon to suffer in defense of something, whether a land or ideal—and in this case it was both—it is natural to stress the desirability of what you are defending and the courage needed to defend it.
There have been other by-products of occupation. The Cretans, like the Greeks generally, have always been characterized by an inability to combine together and present a common front. Never was that saying of Terence truer of any people: “So many men, so many opinions: each a law unto himself.” The spirit of resistance, even to a common enemy, and the harshness of the struggle, instead of uniting the people, seems to have led to that fierce kind of individualism and independence that lays stress on narrowly local loyalties.
Then there is what seems to many foreign observers the strongly materialistic view of life that most Cretans take. If you see a group of men in earnest conversation in a bar, they are quite likely to be talking about the cost of living. Any vague and unfounded rumor of a bread shortage on the way can result in panic buying and hoarding on a large scale. This is not the kind of consumerism that characterizes more prosperous societies in the West; it is more like a fear of want, of being left unprotected. Generalizations are dangerous, we all know that, but it doesn’t seem too fanciful to set this down, at least to a considerable extent, to the insecurities of countless former generations still working in the psyche of the people.
These were the thoughts set in train by that meticulously walled cave that we saw on our way back to Plaka. We never succeeded in finding out anything more about this, either because those we asked didn’t know, or because my Greek was not really up to it….
Principal town on the Bay of Mirabello, and capital of the province of Lasithi, is Agios Nikolaos, which has a cosmopolitan feel, reflected in the bars and restaurants and in the general style of life—it probably has the highest concentration of resident expatriates anywhere in Crete. The setting is striking: The town is built on a small peninsula around a lake of darkly shining water, described as bottomless in the tourist literature and even on street signs. Certainly it is very deep—seventy-five feet, I was told, at the deepest point. The lake has an outlet to the sea and so forms an inner harbor. Some of the lakeside restaurants are excellent, more sophisticated and offering a wider choice than is general on the island, with very good pasta dishes on the menu and imaginative salads and specialties like grilled swordfish or zucchini flowers fried in an egg batter, accompanied by the light, dry Cretan wines, so much pleasanter—to my taste, at least—than the resinated wine called retsina, common on the Greek mainland. Cretan red wines have always been well thought of by visitors and inhabitants alike, but the white have improved very considerably in the last ten years or so, especially those from the region of Sitia.
The town beaches can scarcely be called beaches at all, but we found a good one at Almiros, just a little over a mile to the south. Farther around the bay, in the area of Kalo Chorio, they get better and better. My own favorite is Istro, which has pleasant tavernas and some excellent sandy beaches; in places they have even spared the trees lying back from the shore. From here, I think better than anywhere else on the island, you can enjoy the combined beach and sight-seeing holiday that brings so many people to Crete. For those who like walking, tracks in the hills behind afford splendid views over the bay. Knossos is not far away, perhaps an hour by road. Nearer at hand is Gournia, another Minoan palace site, spectacularly situated on a saddle between two peaks, from where it once controlled the isthmus between the north and south coasts, no more than twelve miles at this narrowest point.
The Church of Panagia Kira near the village of Kritsa, a little way inland from Istro, is one of the loveliest of Byzantine churches and one of the oldest, with the most complete set of frescoes to be found on Crete, painted at different times in the island’s history and thus affording a unique opportunity to trace the developing styles of Cretan fresco painting through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among a number of paintings of outstanding quality and interest is a tremendous Last Supper in the center, and in the southern aisle vivid scenes of Christ’s Second Coming, including representations of the Day of Judgment and the Punishment of the Damned. On the northwestern pillar is a portrayal of St. Francis of Assisi—a very rare instance of a Western saint in an Orthodox church, perhaps the result
of Venetian influence. Crete is well endowed with churches, many of them beautifully situated and full of interest; but if obliged to choose among them, to single out one which best exemplifies the atmosphere and the spirit of devotion of medieval Byzantium, I would favor the Panagia Kira.
The Church of Panagia Kira, near Kritsa
The days were running out now, they had gone quickly. We had started wondering—always a sign that a trip is coming to an end—how things were at home, whether our vines and olives were prospering, whether there had been enough rain. We would have the grass to cut and the aphids to deal with and the vegetable garden to clear of weeds. We would have to secure the forgiveness of our five cats for having stayed away so long….
There was still so much left to see. We decided to continue south across the neck of the isthmus to Ierapetra, which is the largest town on the south coast, the hottest and driest town on the island, and the southernmost town in Europe. But our desire to go there didn’t stem so much from statistics, though these do in a way affect one’s attitude to places. We had talked ourselves into a valedictory mood, and it seemed somehow fitting to end our trip in the region where the last descendents of the Minoan people, whose history of power and decline had so absorbed us as we went from room to room in the Iraklion museum, met their end. They are known as Eteocretans, or “true Cretans,” people of the original, pre-Greek stock. They had been driven to this remote eastern region of the island, where they preserved themselves for some centuries in their fortified city of Presos, still clinging to their language and traditional mode of life. They were finally defeated in 146 B.C. by the Dorians of Ierapetra. Those who were not killed or sold into the slavery were scattered and ceased to be a separate component of the population. Their city was razed to the ground. Thus ended what has been called the thousand-year twilight of Minoan civilizations.
Of ancient Presos little remains now—it was never rebuilt. Present-day Ierapetra is a prosperous town with a handsome waterfront and a very good beach. May was advanced, we were about to return to landlocked Umbria, so we ventured in for a swim. The water was chilly, but—as people say when they are glad to get out again—invigorating.
By this time we were both feeling hungry, but we wanted to have our lunch somewhere quiet—Ierapetra seemed too busy and townish. We got into the car again and headed westward. The road keeps close to the coast for seven or eight miles, then turns sharply inland. Just below where this change of direction occurs is the village of Mirtos, an altogether captivating seaside resort with the tremendous advantage of being at the end of a turnoff from the main road, which passes well above it, so there is a blessed absence of traffic, creating an air of leisure and tranquility that is increasingly rare in Cretan coastal resorts. There was a long, curving shingle beach and a promenade running close to the water, lined with bars and tavernas. The houses were whitewashed and scrupulously clean and neat. There were no very old-looking buildings anywhere in evidence, also unusual but not surprising in view of what we had read of the wartime history of the village: Mirtos was destroyed by the Germans in 1943 in reprisal for resistance activities. The job was done thoroughly; it seems they hardly left one stone on top of another. But Mirtos, unlike the last refuge of the Eteocretans, was rebuilt.
Tastes differ, in places as in most other things; and as we know, it is useless to argue about them. Often enough it is what the place stands for as much as what it is in itself that draws our regard or rouses our affection. I took to Mirtos immediately, not only because it is peaceful and pretty—there are still quite a lot of places on the island that fit this description—but because it has been terribly mistreated in the past, and yet has restored and renewed itself. And so it comes to represent what I feel about the history and the spirit of Crete as a whole.
At Mirtos, sitting at an outside table of the Votsalo tavern, with the sea just below and a warm breeze wafting over from Africa, glasses of the excellent Greek Mythos beer at our elbows and the resident cats showing great interest in our mutton chops, we had to start thinking about getting back to Iraklion and then home to Italy. The trip had been a success for both of us, in slightly different ways. For Aira, seeing the island for the first time and adding it to her list of places to see again. And for me, seeing it again and finding it essentially as I remembered. To leave them always with regret is the gift some places—not so many—make us. It’s the gift life itself makes us, if we are lucky.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leonard Cottrell
The Bull of Minos (London, 1953)
Costis Davaras
Guide to Cretan Antiquities (Athens, 1976)
Xan Fielding
The Stronghold (London, 1953)
Mihalis G. Andrianakis
The Holy Patriarchal Monastery of Agia Triada (Chania, 1994)
Nikos Psilakis
Byzantine Churches and Monasteries of Crete (Iraklion, 1994)
Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody
The Making of the Cretan Landscape (Manchester University Press, 1996)
Adam Hopkins
Crete: Its Past, Present & People (London, 1977)
John Fisher and Geoff Garvey
The Rough Guide: Crete (Fourth Edition, London, 1998)
Michael Llewellyn Smith
The Great Island (London, 1965)
Theocharis E. Detorakis
History of Crete (Iraklion, 1994)
Sonia Greger
Letters from Lasithi 1984–1993 (Gorgona Books, 1993)
Joan Evans
Time and Chance (London, 1943)
Beryl Darby
Spinalonga: The Leper Island (Athens, 2001)
J. D. S. Pendlebury
A Handbook to the Palace of Minos at Knossos (London, 1932)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger; his next novel, Morality Play, was a Booker nominee and a bestseller both in the United States and in Great Britain. His other novels include Pascali’s Island, After Hannibal, The Hide, Losing Nelson, and The Songs of the Kings. He lives in Umbria, Italy, with his wife, Aira.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales
OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal
W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn
WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands
DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom
GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University
A. M. HOMES Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Island: Martinique
FRANCINE PROSE Sicilian Odyssey
SUSANNA MOORE I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i
LOUISE ERDRICH Book and Islands in Ojibwe Country
KATHRYN HARRISON The Road to Santiago
ARIEL DORFMAN Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North
UPCOMING AUTHORS
HOWARD NORMAN on Nova Scotia
ANNA QUINDLEN on London
ROBERT HUGHES on Barcelona
JAMAICA KINCAID on Nepal
DIANE JOHNSON on Paris
PETER CAREY on Japan
GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine
JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS
Featuring works by some of the world’s most prominent and highly regarded literary figures, National Geographic Directions captures the spirit of travel and of place for which National Geographic is renowned, bringing fresh perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing.
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