Crete (7 page)

This use of former mosques by the Cretans of today is an encouraging sign that the animosities of the past are fading. Crete achieved full independence from Turkish suzerainty only in 1913. When the formal declaration of union with Greece was read out in Chania in November of that year, in the presence of King Constantine and his prime minister, Venizelos, there was a great outburst of public rejoicing. The Greek flag was raised where the Turkish flag had flown, and on the same spot a marble plaque was set up, commemorating the long years of Cretan sufferings at the hands of the invader.

Bitterness takes time to heal. Some years ago I spent a few days on the small island of Simi in the eastern Aegean, one of the group known as the Dodecanese, close to the Turkish coast. I was there to watch the filming of one of my novels—I was curious to see how they would do it, never having witnessed the process before. It is a historical novel, set in the year 1908, at a time when these islands were still under Turkish occupation. In the interests of authenticity it was necessary for the Greek film extras to wear the uniform of Turkish soldiers and for the Turkish flag to be briefly flown and for one or two sentry boxes to be painted red and white, the Turkish colors. These simple requirements caused an immense amount of trouble. The extras needed much persuasion—and probably a higher rate of pay—before they would put on the uniforms. Despite the fact that state permission had been obtained in advance, the local authorities strongly objected to the Turkish colors being shown anywhere on the island, and it took a great deal of diplomacy to soothe their ruffled sensibilities. Almost a century had passed since these islands were united with Greece, but in the minds of those people on Simi it had happened only yesterday.

I didn't mind so very much; in fact, I was more amused than anything else by these squabbles. After all, it wasn't my money. What bothered me rather more was that no one but the director seemed to have read the novel, and production assistants kept asking me who I was and what I was doing there. I did, however, though very briefly, experience a surge of authorial power on Simi, something that happens rarely. On the island of my novel there were little horse-drawn traps waiting at the quay side to take foreign visitors to the hotel. But the snag about this was that on Simi there were no horses. No point in horses on a rocky little island like that. So horses had to be brought by ship from the mainland. When I saw those horses standing in a line, harnessed to their carriages, I must confess to a feeling that approached omnipotence. All that trouble and expense just for a few lines, less than a paragraph …

On this day of our visit to Rethymnon, in the Nerandzes Mosque in the Old Town, a concert of classical music is in progress. By contrast there is the Karen Pasha mosque near Platia Iroon, its courtyard weedy and littered, its gates barred, its domes and arches crumbling and ruinous, without even a name anywhere now to identify it for the passerby. Standing out, with some Ottoman echo of Cretan indestructibility, a beautiful Muslim gravestone with a design of foliage and flowers.

The Karen Pasha mosque

Rethymnon is a great town to wander about and get lost in, a fascinating promiscuous jumble of architectural styles, Venetian and Ottoman and Greek coexisting side by side, carved wooden balconies and stair rails, bricked-in arches, stone fountains tucked away in odd corners, arabesques over a gateway, the Corinthian capitals of some neoclassical mansion converted to multiple occupation. Clues to the past and the present, a lesson in architecture and history at one and the same time. Sooner or later, to restore your sense of direction, you will emerge to a sight of the sea again, a glinting, slightly ruffled cobalt expanse on this summer day, capable of all manner of violence, notoriously treacherous, the source of all the doubtful benefits and certain troubles that have gone to make up the island's history from remotest times.

 

Eastward again to Iraklion, official capital of Crete since 1971. After the attractive harbor towns of Chania and Rethymnon, which are easy to explore on foot and still retain vestiges of a traditional way of life, most of Iraklion is sprawling and featureless. The city suffered extensive damage from bombing raids during the Second World War, and the postwar reconstruction was carried out in haste, without much planning and without much care for style.

Despite its present prosperity—this is the wealthiest region of the island—Iraklion has an unmistakable look of lost function, of a city somehow sidetracked, traduced by history. This is a sad condition and one difficult to demonstrate by example, but it is summed up by the vast Venetian harbor and the great fort that guards its entrance. A fleet of Venetian war galleys could have anchored here once, under those protecting cannon. Walls and fortifications are still in place. But the harbor cannot accommodate modern vessels. Even the ferryboats plying to the mainland—the main traffic by sea—have to dock at the massive, and massively ugly, concrete wharves nearby. The arsenals and shipyards the Venetians built are lost in a sea of traffic.

Iraklion: the Venetian fortress

The city's history, and that of Crete as a whole, is written in its successive names. The original village was named after Herakles, the mythical Greek hero and strongman. In the ninth century the invading Arabs built a fortified town here, which they called Khandak, the Arabic word for the kind of large moat that formed part of the town's defenses. This became Chandrax for the Byzantines, who expelled the Arabs in 961, and Candia for the Venetians, who took over the island in 1204. The original name was not restored until early in the twentieth century, after the last of the Turkish occupying troops had been sent packing. It was as Candia that the city enjoyed its greatest power and prestige becoming one of the great cities of Europe, an important trading post and outfitting center for the Crusades. And it was virtually impregnable. Whatever the shortcomings of the Venetians, they knew how to build forts: Even when the Turks controlled the rest of the island, they took another twenty-one years to conquer this last bulwark of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean—probably the longest sustained siege of any city in recorded history.

We lost some time on an unsuccessful quest for a reasonably good bookshop. It seems somehow significant, somehow typical, that a city this size, with something like 100,000 inhabitants, capital of the island, didn't have one. Crete does not abound in them anyway, but there are better ones at both Chania and Rethymnon. Put out by this failure, I tried gloomily to remember when, if ever, I saw a Cretan reading a book. I was brought to regret these unkind thoughts when the bookshop where I had asked for a book obtained it for me in three days and phoned to tell me it had arrived.

The Church of St. Titus, at 25 Avgoustou Street, near Kalergon Square, sums up in its architectural history the ebb and flow of power on the island. Titus was a disciple of St. Paul the Apostle, who appointed him first bishop of Crete. His church in Iraklion was founded by the Byzantines, taken over and rebuilt by the Venetians, turned into a mosque by the Turks, restored by them after the earthquake of 1856, renovated by the Orthodox Church after the Turks had departed, reconsecrated in 1925.

Quite a checkered career. But through all these vicissitudes, we discovered one object that has survived in its pristine state, and that is Titus's skull, which has been preserved as an object of devotion—the rest of his body was never recovered. True, the skull has traveled about a good deal. Until the early Middle Ages it was kept in the ancient basilica at Gortyn, also dedicated to the saint; then it was moved to Iraklion; then—out of fear of the invading Turks—transferred to Venice and kept there for some centuries. Finally, in 1966, it was restored to the capital and reposes in a reliquary in this quiet church, free from further threats and alarms, or so one hopes.

Iraklion: The Church of St. Titus

We found other things too that have escaped mutilation. The Christians pulled down the minaret and surmounted the dome with a cross, but in the small courtyard in front of the church the unpretentious Ottoman fountain still keeps its place, with its exquisitely carved stone, its channel for the washing of feet, and outlets for running water—always running water for the Muslim lustration. The fountain is beautiful, and it has survived by virtue of its modest dimensions—there is a lot to be said for keeping low to the ground.

The churches of Crete can be a guide to the labyrinth of history even when they have long ceased to be buildings at all. The Monastery of San Francesco exists no longer, but it was once the most imposing Catholic foundation on the island, built by the Venetians in the first century of their rule. Now Iraklion's Archaeological Museum covers the site. But it has not vanished altogether. While it was still being used as a mosque, the severe earthquake of 1856 brought most of it down, but Turkish troops rescued the door frame and built it into their barracks, for reasons not clear, perhaps in the hope of Allah's blessing, though it was a Christian door frame originally, having been donated to the church in 1410 by Pope Alexander V, a Cretan named Petros Philargos, who, according to some sources, had previously been a monk at the monastery. There were no less than three popes at that time and considerable doubt as to who was St. Peter's legitimate heir. Alexander died after only ten months in office, a mysterious death—many believed he had been poisoned by his successor. The barracks crumbled away in their turn, but the door survived: It now serves as northern entrance to the law court on Dikeossinis Street and must have witnessed the passage of a good many malefactors. Five hundred years and a mystery or two, all in the span of a door frame.

The Church of Agia Ekaterini on the square of the same name, which we arrived at going westward down Kalokerinou toward the Chania Gate, has been put to a use which—like the former mosque inside the fortress walls in Rethymnon and the former Church of San Francesco in Chania, now a museum—makes very good sense indeed. Formally a celebrated monastic academy and art school, it is now a museum of religious art, housing a collection of Cretan icons it would be difficult to match elsewhere, in particular several by Michalis Damaskinos, a contemporary of El Greco, also Cretan, less famous than him but a very considerable artist, one of the first Cretan painters to introduce elements of Renaissance humanism into the severely formal tradition of Byzantine icon and fresco painting.

Agia Pelagia, a few miles west of Iraklion, is where a lot of people choose to stay who want to combine a beach holiday with trips to Knossos and various other Minoan sites in the vicinity of the city. The phrase “a lot of people” seems like an understatement in view of the multitudes that descend on the region at the onset of summer. The headland above the village is more or less entirely staked out by huge hotel complexes, places where you can easily get lost—it might take you a quarter of an hour to walk through the beautiful gardens from your chalet or villa or bungalow to the nearest place where you can get a cup of coffee, or find someone to tell you where a cup of coffee is to be got.

This is the exclusive, expensive face of tourism in Crete. The other face can be found below, in the continuous string of bars, discos, tavernas that front the narrow strip of beach and extend inland to a wilderness of car-rental agencies, fast-food eating places, supermarkets, and a jumble of apartment houses and small hotels and half-finished building projects. The roads designed to link these places haven't had time yet to catch up. They too are often half finished, sometimes hardly started, sometimes ending in piles of rubble or vacant lots. The pace of development outstrips the maps, however up-to-date these may appear to be. What looks blessedly empty on the map turns out to be in full spate of building. There is a point, not easily measurable but nonetheless real, when the influx of visitors and the changes of structure needed to accommodate them passes from sustainable to destructive. And it is a point of no return. The anthropologist Sonia Greger, writing in 1993, already sounded a warning note:

The larger, more expensive hotels overlooking the bay also cause damage to local communities, in this case by virtually depriving them of their own land. Extensive areas of the promontory, including large stretches of the shoreline, are closed off. By Greek law everyone has the right of access to the shore, regarded as common land. This is an excellent principle, but it is not applied in practice. The hotels have imposing gates and entrance driveways, and security guards to keep an eye on who comes and goes. Unless you are a guest or very good at bluffing, you are unlikely to get through. This means that a local inhabitant who once swam from these beaches, or kept a small boat for fishing, or walked on the cliffs and enjoyed the splendid views across the bay, and who was accustomed to regard these things as his birthright, has been—as the result of a stroke of the pen in some remote office—entirely dispossessed.

Such vast hotels are in any case founded on a wrong concept of what a hotel should be. “Megalux” is the effect aimed at. The “mega” is present in the hundreds of detached bungalows, in the acres of gardens, the vast, marble-appointed reception areas. But the “lux” part is lacking. The capital outlay has been enormous, the need to recoup very urgent. Package tours are the quick way to do this. For these hotels the ideal visitor is not a private person but a unit, a number, part of a package. A spirit of suspicion prevails. The guest must furnish himself with a card that has his category on it; without this he is lost, unable to reply satisfactorily to the hotel staff who are constantly asking him who and what he is. In one hotel with a five-star deluxe rating, one of the most expensive on the island, outside a breakfast room with seating for a thousand people, so large that one can hardly see across it, there is a notice in various languages requesting the guests not to walk away with the knives and spoons. The women who work as cleaners are routinely searched at the gatehouse before being allowed to leave.

At the entrance to the dining room an impeccably dinner-jacketed headwaiter, having glanced at our card, murmured that in our case meals were extra. We found out that—just as in the case of people who want to avoid being mugged on the street—you must look as if you know where you are going. As we wandered bemused among clumps of tamarisk and orange groves and volleyball pitches and Olympic-size pools and palatial conference rooms, a security guard in the dress of a Cretan bandit, festooned with weapons, emerged from the shrubbery and asked to see the card proving we were bona fide guests.

Lying just a few miles south of Iraklion, the magnet that draws so many people to this region of Crete is Knossos, indisputably one of the greatest prehistoric sites in the world. This is where the Labyrinth, which has exercised the Western imagination for millennia, is said to have been, though its real nature is still disputed. Some maintain that it derives from the Minoan habit of agglutinative building, adding rooms to already existing rooms till their houses and palaces came to resemble mazes—in that case, perhaps the palace of Knossos, which in its heyday had more than a thousand rooms on five floors, was itself the labyrinth.

Others argue that the name derives from religious practice.
Labrys
in Lydian means “doubled-headed ax,” which was an object of cult worship among the Minoans. So
labyrinthos
might mean “the place of the sacred ax.” Costis Davaras mentions the belief held by some that the real place of the labyrinth was not Knossos at all, but the cave at Skotino, some miles east of Iraklion. As already noted, it is difficult to pursue any line of inquiry regarding Crete, or take any route, without coming across a cave before long. This is one of the most impressive on the island, 530 feet deep, with a main chamber like the nave of a cathedral and winding galleries.