Crete

by Barry Unsworth

  Sometimes the clashes of period are more ironic, more like sly jokes. Outside a store on Halidon Street in Chania is an exact copy in plaster of La Bocca della Verità, the Mouth of Truth, a stone disc with the face of a Roman river god carved on it, set in a wall in the portico of the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome. The Romans used these discs as drainage lids or sluices for regulating the water system of the city, but this particular one was retrieved and placed in the wall of the church, probably sometime in the late Middle Ages. A popular superstition grew up around it, no doubt encouraged by the authorities, as it made the task of intelligence gathering easier. According to the legend, anyone suspected of heresy or conspiracy was obliged to put a hand into the stone mouth. If innocent, nothing happened; if guilty, the hand was bitten off. In short, this was a medieval lie detector.

  This simulacrum, on a busy street in Chania, strikes a note of incongruity almost comic. To convey a sense of remoteness and antiquity, the Cretans use an image that belongs to a time much less remote than the far reaches of their own past—the Romans are of yesterday by comparison. Between pizzeria and car-rental agency, with his abundant tresses and luxuriant beard designed to simulate the flow of water, an expression of open-mouthed consternation on his face, this minor god watches the people and the traffic pass. Above his head there is a slot for coins, and above this the words HAND ANALYZER. Now and again people stop before him, insert a euro, press a button for the desired language, and put their hands into the mouth, palm uppermost. The river god prints out a character analysis. The oracle has been computerized. The analysis will not contain anything to trouble or disturb. People chuckle but in some way perhaps believe it, and the euros clink. Even in such standardized versions of ourselves we cling to the notion of our own uniqueness.

  Chania: La Bocca della Verità

  It is above all in the Archaeological Museum, on the same street, that the layers of history are most apparent. Of course, any museum will have this effect—it is the effect museums aim at. But this particular collection is housed in a building that is in itself an eloquent testimonial to fusions of past and present. This was originally the Church of San Francesco, built by the Venetians, once one of the island’s most imposing churches, now deconsecrated and lacking the soaring bell tower that once symbolized its virility.

  The bronze figurines and terra-cotta sarcophagi and Hellenistic and Roman sculptures and Minoan ceramics are displayed in the chapels and along the sides of the nave. Roman mosaics depicting the pagan loves of Bacchus and Ariadne are laid out on the floor of this Catholic church in the place where the altar once stood and the Eucharist was performed.

  Ariadne too has her place in the myths of Crete. She was a daughter of Minos, and when the hero Theseus came to the island, along with the other youths and maidens sent as tribute from conquered Athens to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, she fell in love with him. After he had killed the monster in the heart of the labyrinth where it lived, he was able to find his way out again by means of a ball of thread Ariadne had given him, one end of which was attached to the entrance. Theseus took her away with him as he had promised, but abandoned her on the Aegean island of Naxos, where she was discovered in tears by the god Bacchus—or Dionysos, as he was called by the Greeks. She became his consort and after her death he set her in the sky as the constellation Corona Borealis.

  The Minotaur was half man, half bull, a strange hybrid creature. There is much about the ancient Cretan bull cult that we don’t know. The huge quantity of clay figurines of bulls on display in the museum is distinctly mysterious. Of small size and crude workmanship, they have been excavated in great heaps in the surrounding region. Perhaps offerings to Poseidon as god of fertility and virile force. Certainly much cheaper to offer than real ones …

  We come upon a showcase with finds from the tomb of one Sossima, who died in childbirth around 300 B.C. Scraps of gold thread from her funeral dress, necklaces for the afterlife, the gold coin that was placed in her mouth to give to the boatman Charon so that he would ferry her across to the Underworld. These remains of an arrested life convey the same sadness as the jar of burned peas in the Minoan house, though ten centuries separate them in time.

  In the small courtyard outside we hear the strains from somewhere nearby of a Brahms symphony. A venerable mulberry tree shades the whole area, planted probably during the Ottoman occupation—the Turks were fond of mulberry trees and planted them all over the island. There is a beautiful Turkish fountain with grooves at the base for ritual washing before entering the mosque. Across from this a stone lion, faceless and eroded but still with mane and haunches and an inscription below, still readable: EVANGELISTA MEUS.

  The Lion of St. Mark, symbol of Venetian power, the Mohammedan ablution grooves, the romantic German music, make for a kind of blended effect, a sense of the merging of times and places that can become addictive for those who spend time on the island.

  Walking westward along Zabeliou Street, following the line of the harbor, one gets the essential feeling of the old city. At the end of Moschon Street is what remains of the Renieri Gate—the Renieri were one of the ruling Venetian families. The line of the arch is still intact, a whole culture of elegance and propriety in a few yards of curving stone. On the lintel above the gate the Renieri coat of arms can still be made out. Not far away is the palazzo the family once owned. This was later the property of a Turkish official who screened off the courtyard and separated it from the street beyond to protect the ladies of his harem from the gaze of passersby. The chapel which formed part of the original palazzo—the only remaining family chapel in Chania—still stands, or at least a narrow section of the facade does, squeezed between buildings on either side, with its rose window and Gothic doorway. The inner courtyard of the palazzo, where the Renieri once took their ease and later the jealously guarded ladies of the harem strolled, has undergone a third metamorphosis. It is now the excellent Sultana Restaurant, where you can enjoy your raki and mezedes and watch the stars come out overhead.

  We might easily have missed this restaurant, which would have been a pity. Near our hotel, we walked past it several times a day and every time the owner tried to lure us in, but for one reason or another we didn’t succumb until we were almost at the end of our stay in Chania. There was a singer and two men with bouzoukis at a corner table, playing quietly together—it seemed they were making the music for themselves rather than as a tourist attraction. Cretan folk songs at first, full of sorrow—or so it sounded to our untutored ears. But then they went on to some of the songs of Theodorakis, which I remembered from my first stay in Athens, forty years ago now. You heard them everywhere in those days, in the streets, in tavernas, from car radios. They were an expression of popular feeling, many of them political in tone, closely associated with the Left. When, some years later, there was a military coup in Greece and the country was taken over by a junta of colonels, one of the first things they did was to ban the music of Theodorakis. For anyone returning to Athens during this period, as I did, the silence in the streets seemed like mourning. When the regime collapsed, the songs came flooding back again. Songs are like legends: Whether old or new, they are difficult to suppress.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CRETAN GORGES and OTHER MATTERS

  Chania is an addictive sort of place with its ancient harbor front, the maze of streets behind, the constant varying of the light as one moves toward or away from the open water, the sense of long-established human presence, almost exuded from its walls. One can spend many days here, closely similar but never quite the same, in a sort of ruminative pottering. It is almost a shock to emerge from the town with its cafés and gift shops and kiosks with foreign newspapers, and find the unyielding Cretan landscape awaiting you.

  Two hours by road—and a very tortuous and vertiginously winding road it is—southward from Chania into the White Mountains, brings you to the gorge of Samaria, which has been a national park since 1962. At eleven miles it is famous as the longe
st gorge in Europe, and it is perhaps the most spectacular on the island—though about this there are differences of opinion; Crete is home to a hundred gorges at least, all with their own distinctive qualities and their own advocates. However, Samaria is certainly the one most popular with visitors. Many thousands of people set off to walk the length of it, a mistake in some cases: It can be a taxing hike, steep in places, stony underfoot, and much of the way exposed to the sun. Broken limbs, heart attacks, cases of exhaustion are not uncommon.

  The route to the gorge takes you past the village of Alikianos, in the heart of the district known as Portokalachoria, “The Orange Villages,” where the best oranges on Crete—and therefore, Cretans would say, the best in the world—are grown. These villages lie in the foothills on the western side of the range, where the mountains descend more gradually, stretching bony knuckles toward the Chania plain. In the valleys formed by the spreads between the knuckles, the orange groves are bunched thickly together, a separate, secret-seeming world of dark green and gleaming gold.

  But one is never far, wherever one goes on Crete, from the island’s turbulent past. It was here at Alikianos, among what are now peaceful orange groves, that what came to be known as the Kandanoleon wedding massacre is believed to have taken place. The uprising against the Venetians headed by George Kandanoleon in 1527 is one of the great stories of Cretan resistance, the usual compound of fact and heroic legend. He had his base at Meskla and at the high point of his fortunes controlled most of western Crete. One day, for reasons which have remained obscure, he called in person at the house of a high Venetian official named Francesco Molino and proposed the marriage of his son Petros with Molino’s daughter. A harebrained proposal on the face of it, in view of the arrogance of the Venetian rulers and their detestation of this rebel chieftain and of the Greek Orthodox faith to which he belonged. However, the proposal was accepted with seeming pleasure. The wedding took place at the Molino house. Kandanoleon was accompanied by several hundred of his followers. Molino had invited fifty guests from Chania. A hundred sheep and oxen were slaughtered for the occasion. The Venetian plied his visitors with wine, and by sunset they were well on the way to being drunk and incapable. Then a rocket was fired, signal for the approach of a force of Venetian cavalry and infantry that had been waiting nearby. The Cretans by this time were too far gone either to resist or flee. They were overpowered, bound hand and foot, and kept captive through the night. At daybreak Molino hanged Kandanoleon and the bridegroom with his own hands. The members of the more prominent families were killed on the spot or marched off in chains to be galley slaves. The remaining captives were hanged in four separate groups in different regions of western Crete. The rebellion was then suppressed with utmost brutality by a man called Cavalli, who was sent from Venice with special powers. One of his initiatives was to offer a pardon to any who made a token submission by exhibiting to the authorities in Chania the head of his father or brother.

  This was the last in the long chain of Cretan revolts against Venetian rule. Whether Kandanoleon was seeking to consolidate his own power base or—more idealistically—trying to bring an end to the suffering of his people are questions unlikely to be answered now. Xan Fielding, to whose account of the massacre I am indebted, inclines to set his action down to philodoxia, a word difficult to translate, a quality between ambition and vainglory, an excessive desire to cut a good figure, always a Greek—and Cretan—failing.

  The ruins of the Molino mansion are still there, overgrown with weeds and long abandoned. On the lintel above the entrance the Latin motto can still be made out: Omnia Mundi Fumus et Umbra (All the Things of the World are Smoke and Shadow), a saying which was to apply with particular force, in the next century, to Venetian dreams of conquest and empire.

  After Alikianos the road to the Samaria Gorge branches eastward and winds steeply up into the mountains. The scenery is stupendous, the sheer drops and precipitous bends amazing and alarming. One passes above the village of Laki, a mesh of white and green, overlooking the valley of the Vrisi. Laki is the birthplace of Micheli Yanneri, another famous Cretan hero and rebel who distinguished himself by his resistance to Turkish occupation in the nineteenth century.

  Something of the wildness of those days still persists here. The intractable spirit that made these mountain people such difficult subjects for a succession of invaders still shows in their attitude to local regulation and control. The road signs have to be changed from time to time—they are used for target practice and get riddled with bullets.

  Life has always been hard in these regions, and the inhabitants are reared in a tradition of independence and endurance. They are people of great spirit and generous hospitality and implacable vindictiveness. They make good friends but extremely bad enemies; injuries are neither forgiven nor forgotten—and the conditions of village life in these remote areas has always bred injuries, real or imagined. Disputes over grazing rights and sheep stealing and insults to womenfolk still go on, as they have for a thousand years at least. Not infrequently they lead to blood feuds, and these are not easy for the authorities to stop, first because the authorities themselves are not greatly trusted and second because fear of revenge keeps people from talking. Feuds of this kind can run through generations and on occasion in the past took the form of pitched battles. Villages were sometimes abandoned altogether as the population sought safety elsewhere. This is not the case now, of course, but deadly feuds still occur. One between two Sfakian families, which broke out in the 1940s, lasted half a century and claimed at least 150 lives before peace was made.

  Last inhabited place before the entrance to the gorge, and last chance of getting anything to eat or drink for several hours, is the village of Omalos, at the center of the plateau which bears the same name. A desolate region this, getting on for four thousand feet above sea level, snowbound in winter, often marshy in spring, especially if the snows melt early. You are in the heart of the White Mountains here, with the high peaks rising all around you.

  A mile or so farther on, at the edge of the plateau, the road ended, and the gorge opened before us. The sun had hardly risen, there were swirls of mist, and it was cold. For those who are set on the walk, it makes sense to arrive in early morning, to allow plenty of time for covering the distance. This means that the journey up is often done in half-light, a blessing for the more nervously inclined, as the hazards of the road are not fully realized. On arrival we found at least a dozen buses already there, with walkers clambering out, beginning the descent in a steady stream, without waiting for the sun to bless their enterprise. One of the many incongruities of mass tourism that Crete presents is that in this unlikely place, among these lonely and majestic mountains, many hundreds of people of all ages and conditions congregate each dawn throughout the summer months. The gorge is closed in winter, but by mid-May buses from all over the island converge here.

  Better to wait for the sun. It should be numbered among the wonders of the world to stand here on this last piece of level ground and see the sun strike through the early mists, irradiate the peaks of Mt. Volakis to the south, and cast a glow on the sheer walls of the amazing chasm that yawns open before you. We stood for some time, full of wonder, I trying not to acknowledge to myself that I was cold, Aira—who has no time for stoical pretenses—openly shivering. Then the last of the mist thinned away and the sun came through—even thus early in the year and thus early in the morning, unmistakably a southern sun with an immediate, caressing warmth. As if this were somehow an invitation, we began our descent to levels the sun would not reach for some hours yet. With appalling abruptness the ground falls away—at our very feet, it seemed—and goes plunging down. You descend three thousand feet in the first hour of walking. Two million years it has taken to make this great slice in the land. Some remote convulsion, a buckling and heaving as the tectonic plates shifted and scraped together, and the first cracks were made. Then the long, infinitely slow process of forcing the edges apart, the acid rainwater, the s
plitting and fragmenting of rock as temperatures changed. Then the mountain torrent that found the cleft and cut it deeper and deeper.

  As we follow the rough stone track down toward the bed of the stream—much shrunken in summer but still running and sounding—with the bare limestone mass of Volakis rising before and the looming bulk of Mt. Pachnes to the east, we progress from rugged isolation to a gentler climate, the result of warmth and shelter lower down and the presence of water. Instead of descending into the apocalyptic pit, we descend to birdsong and flowers. From the vulture to the chaffinch, from the riven pine with its limbs trammeled in rock to the graceful lines and spreading green of the Cretan maple and the vivid flowers of the oleander bushes growing above the stream.

  The gorge of Samaria

  Just before the descent begins to level out there is a small chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, and grouped around it are some of the most splendid cypresses one is ever likely to see. The cypress is the main woodland tree of these western mountains and quintessentially Cretan in its toughness and tenacity and the amazing variety of forms it can take in response to the widely differing climatic conditions on the island. It can root in a crack in the rocks in the driest and most torrid of places; it can stand the whipping of the wind and the scouring of the ice and endure for many hundreds of years. There are cypresses at the tree limit of the White Mountains growing at an altitude of over five thousand feet. They keep low to the ground, rarely exceeding two meters in height, and they live long—some of them are a thousand years old. Those surrounding the chapel have had shelter and water, and they are huge, among the biggest in Europe, with girths it would take six men to embrace. Some of them rise to heights of 160 feet and more. To get a full idea of this, bear in mind that the Colosseum of Rome is not much more than a dozen feet higher.