The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Sir Arthur Evans was less flamboyant but no less a dreamer. He had been in the island already, hunting for seals with pictographic markings, and in some curious way he was able to predict that when Knossos was cleared and assessed, they would find specimens of Minoan writing. Was it premonition? Or had the disposition of the seals he found given him a clue? He was more plodding than imaginative – though he wrote an excellent travel book about Yugoslavia when a young man. Looking backwards it seems that everything lay at hand, ready for him – a whole civilization which pushed back the old frontiers of prehistory. Cautiously he waited until he could buy the whole site and deal with it carefully, at leisure.

  So the great adventure began. Evans’s findings were carefully checked against the typology of objects already unearthed in Egypt and Asia Minor. Egypt was especially helpful, for the desert is an admirable conserver of everything, even papyrus, and the history of this ancient land is more smoothly continuous, less tempestuous than that of the Greek isles where invasions, wars and shattering earthquakes have erupted so often. Egypt was the touchstone; with its help Evans began his, at first, vague and hesitant back-dating of Minoan history. Even today, when the time-chart (still open to correction according to findings) pushes the history of the place back to 3000 BC, one can feel how momentous the discovery was – and also how difficult and unsure the intellectual act of trying to sort and assign all these fragments. What would be the impressions of a Minoan archaeologist, picking over a heap of mud in a London devastated by an atomic attack – a heap which yields him objects as disparate as a teddy bear, a Father Christmas, a Rembrandt, (was England full of monkeys, and at what epoch?), an Iron Cross, an income tax return … and so on? How would he sort them out historically and assign a purpose to them? Were the English believers in a bear totem? And was Father Christmas a sort of Zeus? The margin of possible error is disquieting, and should put us a little on our guard against the ‘certain certainties’ that T. S. Eliot refers to.

  However chilling the time-chart is to those who hate dates, the thing is well worth a glance. For, in fact, it records the slow emergence of cultural man – with so many failures and collapses, not all of his own manufacture – from a cave-lurker of Neolithic times to a warrior, a priest or an architect, capable of abstract thought and the use of a tool which did duty as an extension of his arm. Completely different animals, one might say. Here is the chart in all its grimness.

  NEOLITHIC 4000–3000

  EARLY MINOAN I 3000–2800

  EARLY MINOAN II 2800 –2500

  EARLY MINOAN III 2500 –2200

  MIDDLE MINOAN I 2200 –2000

  MIDDLE MINOAN II 2000–1750

  MIDDLE MINOAN III 1750 –1580

  LATE MINOAN I 1580–1475

  LATE MINOAN II 1475 –1400

  LATE MINOAN III 1400–1200

  SUBMINOAN 1200–1000

  What all this proved was that the first centre of high civilization in the Aegean area, with great cities and sumptuous palaces, highly developed art, extended trade, writing, and the use of seal stones, was here in Crete. From the end of the third millennium BC, a distinctive civilization came into being which gradually spread its influence over the whole complex of island and mainland states. During the late Bronze Age (c. 1600– c. 1100) this civilization contributed a kind of cultural uniformity to the Mediterranean scene, which was characterized by the interlinking of cities and the exchange of goods and artworks. The gradual sway exercised by the kingdom of Minos made his capital Knossos one of the great cities of the world, and Crete the most powerful island, enjoying a pre-eminent central position in the Aegean with links to the north and to the south.

  Yet history cannot be side-stepped – what goes up must come down. Gradually the thalassocratia of Minos degenerated, lost its absolute sway, and finally surrendered its supremacy to the more powerful mainland states. About 1400 BC, the centre of political power shifted to Mycenae. Evans dates it from the destruction of what he has called ‘The Last Palace’; subsequent palaces were never to equal this one in size and splendour, and after it was destroyed all new buildings were small and meaner. This is partly because Knossos had also been the administrative centre of a highly complex and developed system of military government on the Spartan pattern. The great inscription found at Gortyna makes no bones about the slave culture it defines and delimits; citizens are divided into full citizens, serfs, and slaves. In 1400 BC all the palaces in Crete were destroyed simultaneously which makes it reasonable to surmise that enemy action rather than an earthquake was the cause. This is not Evans’s view, however; we will discuss that later. Whatever the cause, the land was over-run, and Mycenae took over the political and commercial contacts with Egypt and the Middle East that had once been the prerogative of the Cretans.

  Of course, it is not possible to simplify, since so many unknown factors pop up at every turn of the road. It is perhaps wiser simply to tread the quiet precincts of Knossos and catch a glimpse of Mount Juktas centred between the so-called ‘Horns of Consecration’. The question of Evans’s restoration will inevitably arise; I personally find it insipid and in poor taste. But then Evans was trying to illustrate the relative position of things, and this purpose is fulfilled. The treasures in the little museum, however, are a better guide to the spiritual temper of these faraway Minoan people, who sometimes make one think of China and sometimes of Polynesia. Bright, fresh and pristine are the little faces from the frescoes or from vase decorations. Candour and a smiling self-possession seem to be the characteristics of these people, but of course they guard their secrets very well. The snake goddess with her snake cult is an example; was it a cult? Snakes that are not venomous (which is true of those on Crete) are easy to play with. The Provençal couleuvres – grass-snakes sometimes two metres long – provide the same sort of fun without developing into a cult. At every harvest time the newspaper has pictures of people snake-teasing; but they let them go without harming them. And the snakes in the garrigues of the Midi are positively cheeky. The situation may well have been similar in ancient Crete, with no question of snake-playing being a religious rite.

  If the Minotaur, the labyrinth, and the double axe are symbols, they are harder to interpret. Is it fair to suppose that the Minotaur symbolizes some great event – perhaps the arrival of men from far away – who brought with them a terrifying and puissant animal which had never been seen before: a bull? (Imagine the terror of seeing one’s first bull!) And then a bull-culture, bull-obsession displaced whatever had been the native pastoral cults? It is not too far-fetched if one remembers the superstitious horror combined with delight that our grandfathers felt on sight of the first devil-car, and recognizes to what a degree the invention of the petrol-engine has changed and is gradually strangling our whole culture. This is an obsession if ever there was one; and soon the tourist organizations of all Mediterranean countries will be forced to print and issue a map of all the marvellous beaches ruined by oil slicks.

  To return to the labyrinth; is it relevant that the famous double axe was called labrys, and that the name of the labyrinth was derived from it? Earlier folklorists, such as J. C. Lawson, were perfectly content to see the double axe as a sort of nuclear sceptre wielded by Zeus who, as top god, had the right to inflict top punishments. It represented the lightning which is such a feature of the Greek winter, a winter which specializes in extraordinary electrical storms of almost tropical intensity; trees are stripped with a single ripping noise like torn calico, balls of electricity roll about along the ground. Both in Corfu and Rhodes, and once in Kalymnos, I left the house open during a storm, and these violent balls of haze rolled softly through it and out into the garden again. The peasants fear these storms very much, not only because one could get struck by a lightning flash, but also because sometimes they turn to hailstorms, with huge chunks of ice capable of wounding a mule and knocking you senseless. Zeus, in modern belief, has given place to the word for god, but is a sort of personified god they think of, for
when it suddenly thunders, a peasant will say, ‘God thunders, god lightning-flashes.’ Indeed he is not very far from Zeus, the modern peasant’s god. Well, in earlier days the double axe seemed to explain itself along these lines. More sophisticated, and perhaps more penetrating, is the observation of a recent archaeologist (Jacquetta Hawkes): ‘Its shape, the double triangle, was widely used as a sign for women, and the shaft sunk through the central perforation affords an effective piece of sexual imagery.’

  The subject is still bedevilled by controversy. I write these lines in an attempt to present a more or less coherent picture of the issues raised by the discovery of Knossos.

  An anecdote which is pleasing, beguiling, and perhaps instructive, concerns the marriage of Schliemann, who in mid-career suddenly felt the need for a wife by his side. He had nobody particular in mind but, with his heartfelt passion for Greece, felt that the ideal would be a Greek wife. He pondered the matter, examined all the statues in the museums, and finally announced that he would offer his hand in marriage to the first girl who could recite the Iliad entire, without a single fault. He was taking a chance, but the whole of this noble German’s life had been built upon such chances – right from the day when he heard a drunken miller in a grog shop recite some lines of Homer, and felt the strange stirring in the breast which comes only to those who have heard the voice of their vocation speak. Now all Athens was in a ferment, for the Greeks love lotteries, competitions and challenges. The Iliad went out of print; everywhere was heard the humming of voices as the girls of Athens started to learn their lines. Many were pipped at the post, many were faulted on a caesura or thrown by a rough breathing, as that queer microdot above an initial vowel is called. The list grew shorter, until at last Schliemann’s future bride appeared on the scene, to recite the whole poem at one go, perhaps even without drawing breath! She was not only word-perfect; she was one of the most beautiful girls in Athens! His luck had held firm.

  Though he was getting on in years, Schliemann was regarded as a great catch; his fame was world-wide, and in Greece he had become almost as much an adopted national hero as Byron. It is understandable – he was restoring to the Greeks the true historic image of themselves as descendants of the ancients; a role that had been denied them for centuries. Suddenly, here was the truth – the real Agamemnon, so to speak, and not just a dramatic figment of the imagination. The wedding struck a sympathetic spark in every Greek breast. Schliemann had given the lie to the otiose Professor Fallermayer who, in his celebrated essay, ‘stoutly maintained that the modern inhabitants of Greece have practically no claim to the name of Hellenes, but come of a stock Slavonic in the main, though crossbred with the offscourings of many peoples’. According to him the facts of the case could not be slighted. From the middle of the sixth century onwards, successive hordes of Slavonic invaders swept over Greece, driving the local populations into the more remote corners of the land. Slav supremacy lasted until the end of the tenth century but, already in the middle of the eighth, the great pest of 746 had caused such depredation that the historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus says categorically ‘the whole country had become Slavonic and was occupied by foreigners’. J. C. Lawson, in his admirable essay on the modern folklore and ancient religious beliefs of the Greeks, counter-attacks strongly as follows:

  In the islands of the Aegean and the promontory of Maina, into which the Slavs never penetrated, the ancient Hellenic physical types are far commoner than in the rest of the Peloponnesus or in northern Greece. Not a little of the charm of Tinos or Skyros or Mykonos lies in the fact that the grand and impassive beauty of the earlier Greek sculpture may be seen in the living figures and faces of men and women. If anyone would see in the flesh the burly black-bearded type idealized in a Heracles he need but go south to the Peloponnesus … where he will find not merely an occasional example but a whole tribe of swarthy warriors.

  You will find many an echo of this observation in the villages of Crete, even though you are briefly passing through; and if you have the time and patience to attend a Greek wedding or a Greek funeral with its terrifying keening, you will have no doubt that these people are the descendants of the ancients who have kept their ethos and their spiritual salt intact because of the purity and intricacy of their native tongue.

  Even if your time is limited, if you use it properly, the impressions you gather should fall into place and permit you to see beyond the tragic ‘modernization’ of the towns with its ugliness. A traveller of modest means and limited to a few days in the island should go to Heracleion and find a modest perch in a small hotel. He will find that Knossos is a longish walk, but five miles or so is nothing if one is curious to gather one’s own impressions. There is of course a bus, nowadays there are taxis galore. The distance of Phaestos need not daunt him either, for there is an early-morning bus there from Heracleion and a late-evening bus back. It is about twenty miles away on the southern shoulder, but it has the added attraction that the journey there will make you pass through a magnificent section of the Cretan countryside. Of the two sites it is, for me, the most evocative in its brooding stillness, in the light airs from the sea which cradle it, and from the shadows of high cloud which roll across it. It is uncomfortably full of suggestive mysteries, which produce a feeling that the guide book with its careful, factual approach does not suggest. To camp out here in a fierce thunderstorm, and to awake frozen in a dense dew which has condensed on your blankets like a sheet of mercury is the sort of experience which every camper will relish, but the swift tinges of rheumatism that follow from damp clothes is no joke. By the road among the olives, a peasant has lit a fire with olive trimmings; he jovially welcomes you and helps dry your kit, plying you the while with gasps of tsikudi and slabs of brown crust. When you are ready to set off you offer him money; he looks shocked and aggrieved, and puts your hand away as if it held a sword. The quiet ruins rest on your tired shoulder-blades as you march in the deep dust – you feel the weight of a message from the past which you have not been able to decipher. The experience is dense and exciting, but you would be at a loss to say why or in what manner. Phaestos! It is one of those places which mark you.

  To revert for a moment to the vexing question of the labyrinth, it is important to make a distinction between a man-made maze and a labyrinth constructed by nature; and the natural geological labyrinth situated near Gortyna has for long been a candidate for the honour of being the original lair of the Minotaur. Sceptics have declared that it is simply an abandoned quarry with a few corridors but, while I have not completely explored it myself – for lack of an Ariadne and a ball of thread – I think it is more suggestive than that.

  The most succinct and accurate description of this singular geological formation comes from the pen of that energetic and endearing Victorian divine, the Reverend Tozer, whose detailed, factual travel books enjoyed a great appeal during the last century. He says:

  Our host, Captain George, undertook to be our guide and accordingly next morning we started in his company and, fording the stream close under the Acropolis of Gortyna, ascended the hills towards the north-west and in an hour’s time reached the place … It is entered by an aperture of no great size in the mountainside, where the rocks are of clayey limestone, forming horizontal layers; and inside we found what looks almost like a flat roof, while chambers and passages run off from the entrance in various directions … We were furnished each with a taper and descended by a passage on both sides of which the fallen stones had been piled up; the roof above us varied from four to sixteen feet in height. Winding about, we came to an upright stone, the work of a modern Ariadne, set there to show the way, for at intervals other passages branched off the main one, and anyone who entered without a light would be hopelessly lost. Captain George described to us how for three years during the late war (1867–9) the Christian inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, to the number of five hundred, and he among them, had lived there as their predecessors had done during the former insurrection, to escape t
he Turks who had burned their homes and carried off their flocks and herds …

  I can vouch for the accuracy of his description and also for the fact that the place is known as ‘The Labyrinth’ in the local speech. To the best of my knowledge the whole of it has never been explored, though the villagers thereabouts claim that the internal network of corridors spans an area of some ten square kilometres. One must, as always, subtract a bit of peasant exaggeration, but nevertheless the place is impressive – in places like a series of small cathedrals – and so well ventilated that I am not sure one could not trace the corridors with smoke, which always follows the direction of the air. Once again, however, there is disagreement among scholars about the true history of the place. Of course the whole surface of these volcanic islands from Sicily to Cyprus is simply a cap of metamorphic limestone, punctured everywhere by successive volcanic explosions, and pock-marked like an old piecrust. It is not the only cave system in a Greek island – I know of a dozen. But there seems to be nothing of the same size, in such tantalizing juxtaposition with a historic reference – nor anything as worthy as a Minotaur’s haunt. (The limestone crust over most Greek islands certainly accounts for the way that sound carries over great distances; the whole place is like a drum, responsive to every snatch of noise.)