Crete

by Barry Unsworth

  Violence and the fear of it are still in evidence, however; it is the single unifying factor in the ruins of this once mighty and prosperous city that has seen so many tenants. All those who came here, having established their power, lived in fear of having that power taken from them and sought in one way or another to guard against attack. The remains of German machine-gun emplacements lie not far from a Turkish fort—or what is left of it—looking out over Souda Bay, and over another fortress lower down with its cannon still in place, and, still lower, over the island fortresses which guard the approaches to this superb natural anchorage, surely one of the finest in the world. Below the German redoubts and the Turkish bastions, Greek naval vessels, guns mounted, pass to and fro.

  The city itself was named to commemorate a kind of battle—or so the legend goes. Somewhere among the nearby mountains the Muses challenged the Sirens to a musical contest, and the Sirens lost. In their mortification they stripped off their wings and flung themselves down from the cliffs into the bay, where they were transformed into islands. Another case of Cretan myth stealing: The island of the Sirens, which Odysseus passed on his journey home to Ithaka, is held by everyone else to have been Anthemoessa, off the Italian coast. The Muses, left in the possession of the field, decked themselves in the feathers to celebrate their victory. The literal translation of “Aptera” is “Wingless” or “Featherless,” and there was a temple to Artemis in the city, the remains of which are still there, where the goddess was worshiped as Aptera, “Wingless Artemis.”

  Aptera does not go back so very far as human societies are counted in Crete. When the Dorian Greeks with their iron weapons and warrior cult came down from the north and began to colonize the island, the Bronze Age civilization they replaced had already gone through two thousand years of achievement and decline. But these ruins have everything that can make a Cretan classical site fascinating to visit. Lying on an upland plain, well above sea level, it gives superb views of the high mountains to the south and the great sweep of Souda Bay, with Chania in the distance and the heights of the Akrotiri peninsula jutting out to the north. Recent excavations have revealed, among the tangles of ancient stone and spreading scrub, Doric columns lying where the cataclysm of the earthquake left them, the vestigial walls of a Roman street, the ruins of a Byzantine church, brick-vaulted underground cisterns, dark water still standing in one, and no sound but pigeons’ wings.

  One can wander at will here, sea on one side, mountain on the other. In spring and early summer the whole area is spread with wildflowers—hollyhock, rockroses, great clusters of dark blue vetch—and alive with the linnets and stonechats and pipits that are the present tenants. For lovers of old stones like us, the wilderness that is left after the fall of ancient cities—which is not like any other kind of wilderness—this place could hardly be better. In those addicted, the attention becomes in a curious way impartial, evenly distributed but without loss of sharpness: The eroded basins of a Roman bathhouse, and the extraordinary vividness of the poppies that blaze in the sun among them, have the same interest and the same age.

  Aptera: a Roman cistern

  We searched for traces of fresco painting on the patches of plaster still remaining on the ruinous walls of the Byzantine monastery dedicated to St. John the Theologian. There seemed to be an orangey or ochreous streak here and there, some configuration that might indicate human likeness, human intention. Inveterate, this habit of seeking our own image everywhere. But it is time and decay that have made these marks; they have beauty but no design—or none that we could recognize.

  Rethymnon, capital of the province of the same name, is the next town of any size eastward on the road that runs practically the whole length of the island from Kissamou to Sitia, linking all the coastal areas. The principal cities and most of the beach resorts are situated on this north coast.

  It’s a good road, a lot of it of recent construction, well marked and well surfaced, easily the best road on the island. All the same, we drove warily along it. On Cretan roads the incongruous and unexpected—elements generally present—require a high level of alertness. Someone might be dragging a handcart loaded with oranges, or crossing the road with buckets in a quest for water. Bypass roads are almost nonexistent, and you shift abruptly from the speed and freedom of the open road to a seaside street with shops and bars and parked cars and people in beach dress wandering about, then out again, just as abruptly, with ranks of mountains on one side and the glittering reaches of the Aegean on the other. Also slightly unnerving is the general use of the hard shoulder as a second lane. There should be two lanes, really, on either side, to cope with the volume of traffic, which increases dramatically in the summer. Perhaps the money was lacking for such a large-scale project; the cliffs come down sheer in many places, and there is not much space between them and the shore. However that may be, the hard shoulder, which is narrow when there is one at all, and sometimes strewn with broken stones or the debris of ancient picnics, and which we are conditioned to think of as for emergency use only, is generally regarded by Cretans—who totally lack this conditioning—as an extra lane. Drivers wanting to overtake will sound their horns to make you get over, and they will quickly become angry if you fail to do so.

  Cretan driving habits have a quality all their own, which must be seen to be appreciated. It is not self-righteous or unmannerly or neurotically impatient. There is a sort of proud carelessness about it, lordly and dangerous. The quality is best summed up by the Greek word palikari, which has no real equivalent in English. The palikari is the hero, the freedom fighter, the patriot. He goes back centuries to the days of Turkish occupation, when he took to the mountains and became an outlaw and fought a guerilla war against the oppressor in which no quarter was shown on either side. You see him in innumerable old pictures, with tasseled cap and fearsome mustachios, breech-loading musket by his side and curving, double-bladed yataghan at his belt.

  Village education in Crete hasn’t changed so very much since those days. The palikari is a hero still, and a model of behavior, to schoolboy and adult alike. I remember once sitting outside a café in a quiet square when an open sports car of antique design came very fast around the corner and pulled up with extreme suddenness, narrowly missing a war memorial and an ancient woman in black. Out of it stepped a young man who strode into the café without a backward glance. “There goes a palikari,” one of the men at a nearby table said, and there was a note of unmistakable admiration in his voice.

  The last stretch of road, after it rejoins the coast at the base of the Drapanon peninsula, is spectacular, with the great expanse of the Almirou Bay on your left and the heights of Psiloritis rising before you. The cliffs descend in places very steeply, often to the verge of the road, and where the rock is split or heavily eroded, it shows a warm, reddish color that glows in the sun. On the outskirts of Rethymnon, as on the outskirts of all towns of any size in Crete, there are huge roadside posters advertising cigarettes—a rare sight these days, at least in Western Europe.

  Rethymnon is guarded by a Venetian fortress massive in its proportions—it is generally considered the largest the Venetians built anywhere, a response to the increasing frequency of Saracen pirate raids, one by Khair ed-Din Barbarossa in 1538, another by Dragut Rais in 1540, and two by Uluch Ali—an Italian renegade of notable savagery—in 1567 and 1571. The last of these was very destructive; large areas of the town were burned to the ground.

  The Venetians succeeded to a large extent in suppressing piracy, but despite the fort’s vast size and formidable defenses, Rethymnon fell to the Turks in 1646 after the briefest of sieges. The invaders did not obligingly expose their ships to the Venetian cannon, but attacked from the west and south, bombarding the garrison into submission. Seeing these towering battlements, so costly in men and money and materials, and in the end so unavailing, I was reminded of another empire and another wall, one built by forced labor on the orders of the Roman emperor Hadrian, running from coast to coast across the north
of England, constructed to keep out the Picts. The Roman legionaries, used to a warmer climate, must have shivered in those bitter winds, looking always north toward the lands of the accustomed enemy. But the real threat, which no one had envisaged, and against which the wall was useless, came from the south, from the Saxon tribes that would come by sea….

  Here in Rethymnon, in the vast open space enclosed by the fortress walls, among the remains of the Venetian barracks and storehouses and cisterns and powder magazines, grow flamboyant red and yellow poppies, and wild oats bleached by the sun, and clumps of white marguerites. Cretan dittany (Dictamnus creticus) grows in cracks in the walls. A medicinal infusion of very ancient fame is made from this herb, mentioned by Pliny and Aristotle and Theophrastus, who wrote the first systematic treatise on botany. A plant so celebrated for its healing properties naturally accumulates stories around it. In The Aeneid Virgil relates how the hero Aeneas, when suffering from an arrow wound, was healed by means of this wonderful herb, which his mother Aphrodite brought him from Crete. In antiquity, when the Cretan wild goat, or kri-kri, was common all over the island, it was believed that they could cure themselves of the arrow wounds inflicted by hunters with a poultice they knew how to make from this plant. This phenomenal sagacity, however, did not prevent the kri-kri from being hunted almost to extinction; today it is found in a wild state only in the gorge of Samaria and the surrounding country.

  There is a mosque in the enclosure of the fortress walls, dating from the days of Turkish rule. It was a church before this and a church again after, as Christian and Muslim took their turns in dominating the island. It was the Turks who added the dome, which is beautifully proportioned, and the delicately carved mihrab or prayer niche, set in the qiblah, the wall that indicates to the faithful the direction of Mecca, to which they turn when they pray. And it was the Turks who organized the interior space into that of a square, a simple enclosure of four walls, in vestigial memory of Mohammed’s private house in Medina, where the earliest followers of Islam gathered to pray.

  The dome and parts of the windows have been restored in recent years, but this time—finally—not to mark conquest or demonstrate religious supremacy, but because the building is beautiful and can be put to good use. On this particular day we found a busy scene going on inside, with people on ladders, and pieces of plywood cut into various shapes, and all manner of boxes and bundles lying around. A group of artists from Athens were preparing an exhibition of their work. One of them paused to explain it to us. I was relieved that she was able to do this in English. My Greek was once reasonably fluent, good enough at least to argue with taxi drivers or hold my own in discussions about the cost of living and the shortcomings of the Athens government—two principal topics of conversation then and now. But that was half a lifetime ago.

  The group was called Touch. They made sculptures, ceramics, mobiles. They had been invited to use this building, which gave them more space than they usually had and so allowed them to show larger and more ambitious works. The woman who was telling me this was clearly exhilarated at the prospect. She was worried about the wind from the sea—they would have to keep the doors closed on that side. But it was a marvelous place for an exhibition. She gestured: the circular space, the clear sea light that came through the windows spaced at intervals all around, the noble proportions of the dome. Very cheering, this enthusiasm, and moving too: Elements that for centuries made this a place of worship for mutually exclusive and hostile faiths now eminently qualify it for devotion of another kind, nondenominational, multiracial, all-inclusive.

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WITHIN the LABYRINTH

  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. Thi
s 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.