I was not prepared. I had read all the guidebooks, talked with people who'd gone there, gobbled down a few practical Greek phrases, dug through the archeological tomes. But nothing had prepared me for the tonic beauty of Crete, for the gnarled ruggedness of its mountains, the quick fertility of its plains, the delft blue and green jade Mediterranean woven to its shores. Above all I was not prepared to find myself sifting, like an archeologist, through layers of accumulated civilization until my original self rested in my hands. But I would have known if I'd listened to Kazantzakis' Zorba, to the Minoan myths: Crete has the power to unveil the marrow of bones.
My friends Don and Ida and I had planned for almost a year to go to Crete to visit the ruins of the Minoans, a culture that had inhabited Crete from at least 6000 BCE to 1400 BCE. We'd became fascinated by the Minoan culture because their worship of the ancient Goddess seemed to allow them to live in a world full of light and life and sacred power. Chaperoned by one carry-on piece of luggage, the Blue Guide, and enough film to keep Fotomat solvent for a year, we left to explore.
We flew into Athens (which has one of the least accommodating international airports I've ever had to wait in), and then from Athens into Heráklion, Crete's capital. At the airport we picked up the Suzuki jeep we'd rented (the only kind of transportation, we found later, that made sense to use on the mountainous island) and found a good hotel facing the bay. Heráklion is not a quaint city, a city that postcards well. It's a city full of fishermen and travel agents and café owners and money changers and taxi drivers and butchers and gift shop entrepreneurs (which sell the filthiest postcards in the world, with naked women, donkeys with hard-ons, and Greek figurines with enormous engorged penises mixed in with sunset views of Santorini and the old Venetian fort protecting Heráklion's bay) and a thousand other incarnations of petit-bourgeois life. Its narrow streets are fringed with the greasy sweet smell of diesel fumes from Yugos, Fiats, Mirabellas, and the ubiquitous motorbikes, whose gun-shot mufflers and mosquito buzz slice the air even at three a.m. Most of the buildings are ugly (except for the old Venetian administration buildings and Orthodox churches, which are merely decrepit), panels of concrete glued together in flat-top arrangements that crawl up the low hill the city surrounds. Heráklion makes no effort, beyond the necessarily exploitative ones, to be a city easy on the foreign eye.
Yet the city does have its charms. At the Plateía Venizélou, which was the center of the old Venetian city and passes for a center of modern Heráklion, stands the Morosini fountain, a gallimaufry of sculptures that once spouted water from Mount Júktas 15 kilometers away. Cafés, souvenir shops, bookstalls, and a few antique stores scatter themselves around the fountain. At night, when the city has its vólta, or evening promenade, the plaza simmers, the gruff voices of Greek men drinking Turkish coffee or ouzo thrumming under the brash shouts of adolescents and the ever-present saw-toothed whine of the motorbikes.
A nice morning's walk can begin at the Venetian fortress guarding Heráklion's bay. As the sun rises the thick battlements take on the yellow power of the ascending light, and its bulk, which seems so stolid and there in the later-day brazenness of the Mediterranean sun, appears to float in the vivid absorbing blue of early morning. Sculptors had carved three Lions of St. Mark on the external walls, and they oversee the fishing boats in the inner harbor preparing for their day. The men unsnarl nets, clean the decks, straighten their ropes, all punctuated with chat and cigarettes; at the end of the dock a man sells oranges from a truck, small sweet globes, it seems, of the sun that now burns hot and clear.
From the harbor we walked through the vaulted arcade of the Arsenals (where the Venetians repaired their ships) and up Odós 25 Avgoústou, where we stopped for breakfast in a small café that had two tables and an owner that seemed as old as the schist found in the mountains. He chattered to us in slippery English as he cooked and, between omelets, delivered small cups of Turkish coffee to various shops and stores along the street.
After walking up Odós 25 Avgoústou to Plateía Venizélou, we headed for the open-air market on Odós 1866 to buy provisions for the day. Fruit, nuts, leather goods, cutlery, clothes, bread, buckets of live snails, pastries -- an abundant barge buoyed on a river of shoppers. We dived into the haggling chatter of owners and buyers, shocked at seeing skinned rabbits slung on hooks with tufts of fur left on their faces and tails, amazed at how cheap pistachios were and momentarily flustered by the sweet juice of a tangerine. Then eating the goods in Greco Park while the sun reached for meridian and the air became incandescent.
But Heráklion did hold one incomparable treasure for us: the Archeological Museum, with its unique display of Minoan artifacts. Within an hour of depositing our luggage and sloughing off the dirt and fatigue of our long journey, we made our way there. Like most things in Heráklion, and indeed in much of Crete, the Museum has few pretensions. It looks like a warehouse, and its displays are minimalist in design: squat glass cases graced by a card with a line or two of description in three languages, the pieces placed on glass shelves without much sense of design or enlightenment.
We had seen the pictures of the snake goddesses and frescoes and double axes, but as our eyes began to see the three dimensions of what we'd only glimpsed in two, we knew that we were not prepared for how much life these pieces still had. The walk from the entrance gate to the first display case had translated meters into millennia, and as we moved from case to case and read our Blue Guide, we could feel the clay that had gone from lump to vase or the brush that had painted the dolphins or the chisel that had carved the seal stones. We became so filled with the spirits of these artisans and the centuries that separated us from them that we could only take in half of what we came to see for fear of drowning and had to come back the next day to finish.
After Heráklion we jumped into our jeep and set off to see the four major palaces built by the Minoans around 1600 BCE. The palaces all share similar ground plans, with wide outside courts (theatral areas) for religious performances, broad approach roads, wide steps leading to spacious porches, extensive magazines for storing food and materials, pillared hallways. But two of the palaces in particular, Knossos just outside Heráklion and Festos sixty kilometers south, give the best picture of how the Minoans blended their lives with the life of the world around them. (The Minoans organized their economic and religious life around the palaces, first built around 2000 BC, rebuilt in 1700 BC after earthquakes.)
Knossos came first. The site was excavated by a Victorian Englishman, Arthur Evans, who in addition to excavating the place and establishing much of what was to become the accepted version of Minoan history, also tried to reconstruct the palace so that we could have a vision of what they must have been like. The word "labyrinth" comes from Crete, and it refers to the palaces the Minoans built. Standing as high as five stories, they were honeycombed with hallways and rooms and staircases and must have housed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The life in the palace was intensely communal and, to all knowledge, harmonious. It had to have been, in order for the huge palaces to be built at all, because no indication exists that the workers were forced to work. (After all, they built the palaces twice within three hundred years.) And, interestingly enough, there were no defensive walls around any of the palaces and presumably no army (none of the frescoes illustrates anything military). So here were hundreds of people living co-operatively, unafraid of attack either from outsiders or from other Minoans, producing pottery and agricultural goods that were shipped all over the world, a people creating intensely beautiful works in service of their religion.
And as if to offset the ponderous intricate stonework needed to build such large structures, the architects inserted light wells everywhere so that even rooms deep in the interior were well-lit and ventilated. The builders extended this feeling for light and lightness to the exterior as well: the broad courtyards and theatral areas create the illusion that the horizon is part of the palace grounds. (This was not just an architectural nicety but a religious necessity: the palaces are oriented toward holy mountains, Júktas at Knossos and Ida at Festos.) The pillars that had held up the stairways or supported canopies were most likely cedar trees, painted red and with the thick end at the top rather than at the bottom; the effect is a graceful downward angle that makes the pillar appear active rather than passive.
Festos, another large palace to the south, faces the twin peaks of Mount Ida to the north, in legend the birthplace of Zeus (who was hidden there by Rhea to save Zeus from being eaten by his father, Kronos), its twin peaks symbolizing both the horns of the bull (a sacred symbol, representing Zeus) and female breasts. To the south is the plain of Mesara, the island's breadbasket (rather, olive basket). Festos sits in the middle. At both Knossos and Festos were large areas reserved for the strange ceremony of bull-jumping, depicted (if not explained) by a number of frescoes and statues. The horns of the bull are used all throughout Minoan painting and architecture (and the earthquakes were referred to as the "the bull in the earth"). Acrobatic men and women would vault over the backs of oncoming bulls, grabbing the horns while facing the bull and doing a backward flip over the head to landing sitting, facing the tail. Both men and women did this (at least it's surmised from the paintings), and there's a suggestion that the bulls were trained to help the acrobats out. (Bulls move their heads from side to side, which wouldn't help the acrobats. They were probably trained to move their heads up and down.) Large crowds would gather to watch this, and on one vase there's a picture of a person being gored by the bull. What's interesting is the equality of the activity -- women were an integral part of the ritual.
Describing how people lived and believed in a time no longer accessible to us carries fairly large liabilities, not the least of which is reading the present back into the past, or replacing ambiguous evidence with wishful thinking. However, looking at the frescoes excavated over the years, some of which are in the Archeological Museum in Heráklion, these pictures seem to show a sensitively and energetically observant people, open to the powerful sacred beauty of the world around them. The best way to see this energy is to compare Minoa with Egypt (with whom they traded) and Mesopotamia.
The Egyptians and Mesopotamians had a concept of religion that stressed immortality and the afterlife, and almost all of their daily actions and rituals were geared to furthering that concept. They built large temples and pyramids that by their very weight, it seemed, would keep the flux of time in check, or at least predictable.
The Minoans seemed to have a very different concept of life. Like the other two, religion, economics, and social life were all intertwined so that the idea of creating wealth detached from worship of the life force or ignoring one's fellows was alien and meaningless, in fact, impossible. Yet they didn't have the ponderousness of the other two civilizations. In Egypt the artists painted static pictures, rote recitations of events and beliefs, and all geared toward solemn worship. The Minoan pictures, frescoes painted on the walls of their houses and palaces, stressed the fecundity of life, its riot of energy, its beauty as an expression of the goddess' presence, the approach sprightly and colorful and local in feel. Where the Egyptians painted magisterial figures, the Minoans painted quail and dolphins and monkeys and lilies and crocuses and young boys boxing and women leaping bulls. Pictures of the Minoans themselves show slender, elegant men and women adorned with jewelry, their hair long and curled.
And while the paintings were always religious in intent, giving life to beliefs and rituals (art for art's sake would not have made any sense to the ancients), they weren't always done according to a pattern book. The artist seems to have had some scope for experimentation within the religious purpose of the painting. While all of their paintings express the power and beauty of the goddess, they also concentrate on those things that gave life its particular meaning and pleasure, almost as if to say (using modern and inappropriate terms) that heaven was on earth, that the source of all being was the world infused with the regenerative power of the goddess, that only in individual things would one find the face of the goddess. The abstract ringed round by the concrete. In fact, no separation between abstract and concrete.
Even with all the tours in several languages swirling around us, it was not hard to find a place to stand quietly and imagine what their life must have been like, to feel how, for them, the natural and the sacred were cognate and inseparable, an idea that we in the last decade of the twentieth century can only grasp with great difficulty since we base our consciousness on cleavage and category. But for a moment, for a succession of breaths taken in the same air that brushed across their drying frescoes and held their prayers, it was possible to feel the restoration of the old union between body and earth, spirit and sun.
(We were also lucky enough to spend a day on Santorini before we left, where we saw another Minoan ruin, the excavated town of Arkrotiri, which, until the 1970s, had been buried under thick meters of ash deposited there by a volcanic eruption 3500 years ago. Again we were lifted out of ourselves, able to walk streets and look into buildings the way the inhabitants must have done. The original excavator found the place by asking local people if they'd observed anything unusual in the area; he dug where they said they'd seen ghosts. We could feel that energy, ancient and vital, emanate from the rocks and sky.)
Yet perhaps all this "feeling" is just archeological sentimentality and a lack of comfort with our society. After all, much of what is "known" about the Minoan culture is nothing more than a collection of reasonable guesses, in part because one of the written scripts they left, Linear A, is as yet undeciphered. Archeologists, art historians, dabblers in antiquities, and just plain interested folks have had to extract their own surmises from the rubble and artifacts left behind, and it's certainly hard to know how right these investigators are, in part because our own cultural needs can fog what we are looking at. Several books, such as Elinor Gadon's The Once and Future Goddess, have built a road back to the neolithic mother goddess, an effort in part fueled by a need to restrain our society's monstrous ability to wound everyone and everything. Because Gadon considers Crete one of the three major prehistorical goddess-worshipping civilizations (and clearly an historical pinnacle), that desire to lift Minoan life out of its own time to make it an antidote to our patriarchal and capitalist age can falsify the Minoans and blind us to our own sources of regeneration.
But several things about Minoan society seem reasonable to believe. There's no evidence of an army or of defensive walls around their cities, and small isolated villages in the interior of the island seemed to have had nothing to fear from marauding bands. Their outposts on other islands came about by the influence of trade and culture, not by invasion. They appeared, as one professor noted, to have directed whatever aggressive tendencies they had into harnessing the world around them to their own benefit. And they did this, even with enormous interruptions from earthquakes, for close to a millennium and a half.
And their surviving art tells the same story of energetic stability. Their frescoes celebrated abundance and regeneration, and their pottery -- swirled with spirals, embroidered with flowers -- infused the practical with humor and grace. However the Minoans actually lived, and to whatever degree worshipping the goddess guided and refined them, what has been unearthed sketches the outline of a culture that looks healthy, vibrant, incorporated.
And even if none of this turns out accurate, to stand in the presence of another vision, ancient and tested, even if it can't be appropriated, is to be awed, refreshed (because awed), and tutored (because awed and refreshed) that the vision of the world locked in our brain case is not the only available world.
* * * * *
However, we didn't spend all our time being Minoan-watchers. After Festos we went to a small resort town on the south coast called Mátala, known for caves carved out in the 13th century by Christian monks who wanted to secret themselves from the world. During World War II, the resistance hid there, as did the hippies in the 1960s. In Mátala a visitor can eat enormous meals for pennies, drink deliciously dry Cretan wine, and look at stars buoyed by waves from the Libyan Sea. A man we met there, a silversmith, took us to a local restaurant to meet his friends, and we ate fried kalimari, sipped Metaxa, and danced to the keen of the lyra and the snap of the bouzouki.
And we drove, in our little Suzuki jeep, up and down mountains. Crete has more mountains than some states we consider mountainous, and they're not little foothills but rise to 8,000 feet and more. The roads are built as switchbacks up the sides, usually unpaved and unguard-railed. Along these roads (and all roads in Crete) are little shrines, sometimes metal boxes, sometimes replicas of churches, put there by families who have lost loved ones in accidents, and it's not unusual to see several shrines crowded on a dangerous curve. And as if to echo these memorials to the dead, people have sown white stucco chapels on the edges of cliffs or narrow shelves of rock, their distance and location reminding the observer of how long and how sharp the struggle is to keep the soul safe.
As we drove through the mountains we would pass through villages so small that they could, indeed, be missed in the blink of an eye. Farmers driving their small two-cylinder tractors would wave to us, and children would run after our jeep practicing their American "Hello, hello!" while we Americans yelled back "Yasou!" Occasionally we would have to slow down in order to pass several men on donkeys, their seamed brown faces shaded by the inevitable black captain's hat, their bodies bouncing on the hard wooden saddles.
It seemed that every turn of the road brought another vista so consummate, like the hard-edged beauty of an obsidian blade, that it had to be photographed right then. (We probably spent as much time jumping in and out of the jeep as we did driving it.) Crete has been eroded, fissured, cleaved, and accordioned by earthquake, volcano, salt wind, and tenacious water, but it has also been carved by humans with their olive groves and grape vines and windmills and fields of fava beans. This ancient mesh of natural and human interventions is so compounded that there are no divisions between the two, only various shadings from one to the other and back again. Standing on the sharp curve of an upgrade looking out over fields and crags, with so much of this area's history incorporated into the history of our bones and minds, it's possible to feel both awed and familiar, both a stranger and the traveler returning home.
And so many other things about Crete: showers without curtains (and with a handheld showerhead); toilets where you throw the toilet paper into a wastebasket; the kindness of everyone we met, especially if we tried our fractured Greek on them; the silty raw taste of Turkish coffee; old men with faces like grape vines arranged in village cafés (women were never in there); restaurant owners taking you into the kitchen to select your food (menus were never used). It was hard to leave, to come back to the normalized and expected. But part of my heart is harbored in Crete; its energy seeps into everyday life and lifts the ordinary just a notch higher, turns it a bit brighter. And also part of my heart is at the palace daubing fresh pigment on wet plaster, lifting the sides of a vase to exquisite thinness, feeling the power of life percolating as the seasons and my spirit change and grow in tandem. For a time it was possible to get outside the sometimes deadening and frightening age in which we live and rediscover the original maps of human life.
(January 1996)