Crete (11 page)

The light is so extraordinary—one keeps coming back to that. It is soft and radiant yet at the same time relentlessly clear. Cretans on the whole, like their compatriots on the mainland, have not been much given to folktales of the darker sort, those featuring threatened children and ambiguous adults liable to change masks. The light here is too clear and bold for such a tradition to develop. You need the more diffused light and more enveloping shadow of northern latitudes for that. There is in Crete, of course, as all over Greece, a prevalent belief in the evil eye, and this is certainly an ambiguous matter, because anyone can have it and exercise it without in the least being aware, conscious of nothing but goodwill. On the other hand, there are those believed to possess this power and to use it malignantly and in secret. At least until recently—and perhaps still today—it was not uncommon for the village priest to be called in to expel demonic presences and purify the house. Blue beads are often used as talismans, worn about the person or hung up in a car, to ward off evil influences of this kind. Sometimes, when people have misfortunes not easy to explain in the natural course of events, they carry out tests to try to determine whether the evil eye is at work. Once I was present at such a test. It consisted of adding drops of olive oil to a glass of water: If the oil floated, which of course it should normally do, all was well; if it mingled with the water, demons were at work. This time, to everyone's relief, the oil conformed to the laws of its nature and floated. On another occasion I was suspected of having the evil eye myself. I was giving a hand with harvesting the grapes in the vineyard of some neighbors. It started to rain in the middle of the morning and went on for two or three hours—a very unusual event for the time of year. Grapes should never be harvested wet; the skins break too easily and there is danger of mold. I was the newcomer, the stranger. It was obvious that I had brought bad luck, and behind bad luck is always the possibility of the evil eye. I was asked, politely but with unmistakable firmness, not to offer my services the next day. And sure enough, the next day it didn't rain.

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.