The rituals of the cult were not led by priests but by priestesses, not surprisingly in a religion that made the Great Mother the chief deity in its Pantheon. They are easily recognized on Cretan wall paintings by their typical dress: they wear bras that leave the breasts uncovered, long skirts of leather or ankle-length dresses, and tiaras on their heads. Priests make their appearance late and their role (with the obvious exception of the king—the High Priest of the Sacred Bull) seems to have been minor.
So the religion of the Minoans is an enigmatic thicket of questions. We cannot find out to what extent it was the original creation of the Cretan spirit and to what extent it was subject to the influences of other religions. We may speculate that connections existed between the Egyptian Apis and Minos, between Asiatic fertility cults and the Great Mother of the Cretans, but the nature of the connections is unclear.
Diodorus, a Greek historian of the age of Julius Caesar, writes: “The Cretans say that tribute offered to the gods, sacrifices, initiations, mysteries, are all an invention of the inhabitants of Crete, and that other peoples borrowed from them.” This sentence, written more than a dozen centuries after the fall of Minoan culture, is worth reflecting on.
The Greeks owe much to the Minoans. It was there that the legend of Zeus was born, the god who ruled over Olympus for long centuries. And it is very likely that the cult of Demeter, her bestiary, agrarian liturgy, and sacred games arrived on the Greek continent straight from the land of Minos.
VI
Later there were terrible earthquakes and floods7, and a horrendous day and night came…
PLATO, TIMAEUS
Halfway between Thera and Thirasia8 a flame suddenly rose from the sea and raged for four days, so that the sea around it burned and boiled.
STRABO, GEOGRAPHY
IN THE MIDDLE OF the little Venizelou Square there is the Venetian well of Morosini surrounded by restaurants and cafés—favored spots for evening get-togethers. It was here I usually had dinner and pondered the catastrophe. For nothing encourages brooding on the end of the world so much as a pleasant August night, a sky full of peaceful stars and the surrounding bustle of people at dinner. The cataclysm must have come suddenly—as in Milosz’s poem—without warning or signs from on high.
I have noticed (and I find it a little disturbing) that when I think about the history of a remote civilization I am more interested in the question of what caused its demise than in any matter concerning its life, splendor, or might. This is probably (I say to justify my fascination with catastrophe) because the factors involved in the phenomenon of growth can be explained rationally: a favorable geographical location, social equilibrium, the wisdom of monarchs and politicians. But there is a mysterious element of fate in the disappearance of states and peoples from the map of the world, and the natural tendency of the mind is to look for the one cause, the original sin of civilization, the decisive moment when the god raised his hand over the oblivious and arrogant people to throw a thunderbolt.
Scholars generally agree as to the approximate date of the collapse of Minoan culture, but they are less in agreement on its causes. Some think that an internal revolution brought an end to Minoan power—a risky thesis insofar as we know almost nothing about ancient Cretan society. Others see the cause of the disaster in an Achaian invasion. The most probable theory, however, seems the one that explains the disappearance of this civilization by a great seismic catastrophe, combined with flood and fire.
This happened all at once. At that moment a ship was sailing into the port with its sails furled, a farmer was turning his plow, a mother was cradling a child, Minos was discussing a convoluted commercial treatise with his advisors, and a palace servant was climbing a mast to hang up a flower wreath in preparation for the approaching holiday. Then it happened.
At the time of the excavations Evans found evident traces of destruction caused by an earthquake. Several palace rooms were “bombarded” with large blocks of stone, which a seismic force shifted from a distant part of the palace. The discover of Knossos himself experienced a series of shocks there on June 26, 1926, which was not without influence on his later assumptions and conclusions. For a long time people have tried to determine the approximate scale of the catastrophe and the direction from which death came.
A hundred kilometers to the north of Crete is the island Santorini, also called Thira or Thera. In ancient times it bore the name Kalliste, or Beautiful, though even now it is not among the gloomier islands in the Cycladic archipelago. Its size is modest, the surface measuring about 75 square kilometers, and its shape is oddly that of an inverted letter C with its bulbous side turned to the east. From a bird’s-eye view it looks like the jaw of an antedeluvian monster thrown into the sea. Two kilometers west of Thera lie two smaller islands. Thirasia and Aspronisia. This little archipelago has a very clear round outline and it isn’t hard to guess that it constitutes the edges of an old volcano. The geological structure also points to this. Volcanic rocks of a blue-black color rise from the sea like an unscaleable wall. The island’s moonlike landscape changes only in the eastern part—into a green garden of southern trees and vines.
The activity of the volcano on Santorini is well known because of the accounts by the Greek geographer Strabo, who with epic power described a violent eruption in 198 B.C. The reach of the catastrophe extended to the Cyclades, Euboia, Phoenicia, and Syria, and two thirds of the city of Sidon were destroyed. “A singed island rose up amid the flames […] as if someone were fishing it out with tongs.” This island exists to this day. It is called Palea Kameni, or Old Burnt Island. Chronicles also record powerful tectonic shocks toward the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, which resulted in the creation of new islands.
Thera makes a fascinating study for geologists and seismologists, but it was not expected to bring new and truly revelatory materials to archaeologists. On the island there is a copper and volcanic rock mine. In one of its openings the Greek scholar Angelos Galanopoulos in the 1950s stumbled upon traces of a stone building, remains of human bones, and pieces of petrified wood. The alarm was sounded and archaeologists began systematic research. Settlements of stone houses were discovered, an array of objects, even well-preserved frescoes. One of them—it was given the title The Coming of Spring—portrays red flowers and a stylized bird in flight, with its beak open. This fresco has been in the Athens archaeological museum for a few years and on the basis of a simple analysis of technique, line, and use of color one easily concludes that it belongs to the sphere of Minoan culture. The analysis of organic remains found in the excavated buildings on Thera, performed in an American laboratory using the carbon dating method, permits scientists to date them to the beginning of the fifteen century B.C.
But what does this have to do with the Palace of Minos on Crete? We reply: perhaps everything. Not only have we discovered a Minoan presence beyond Crete, but it is very probable that Thera was the epicenter of a powerful earthquake which put an end to Minoan civilization. It was from there, according to well-founded assumptions, that the destruction came.
It may seem paradoxical that the conditions for archaeological work are much more favorable on Thera than on Crete. Minos’s Palace was covered with a thin layer of earth and for that reason the remains dug up (especially the paintings) were in an advanced state of decay. Lava and volcanic ash have a preservative quality, so to speak, witness the splendid state of Pompeii. “If the wishes of archaeologists could come true,” the finder of Ur Leonard Woolley good-naturedly writes, “all ancient cities would be strewn with ash by some volcano.” Digging on the island of Thera, you do have to penetrate a thirty-meter layer of volcanic matter, but the revelatory booty of archaeologists transforms our knowledge about Mediterranean civilization. Enthusiasts of this find go so far in their hopes as to claim that it was here, not in Knossos, that the capital and center of Minoan power was situated. These hazardous hypotheses will remain linked to the legend of submerged Atlantis—abo
ut which more in a moment.
But could a volcano erupting on a small island cause such frightening devastation? We must remember that not only Knossos was hit by the catastrophe but Phaestos too, and Hagia Triada, Tylissos, Amnisos, Mallia, Pseira, Gournia, Palaikastro, and Zakro—all of Crete. In the course of a single day the Homeric island of a hundred cities became a desolate ruin.
Seismologists and geologists say that it was entirely possible. Before the eruption Thera was—they say—three times as big as it is now. It had a volcanic hill 1500 meters high. The catastrophe itself—they think—took a course similar to the explosion of the Krakatau in 1883.
This explosion is described in detail in scientific papers as well as in the daily newspapers of our great-grandfathers. Layers of volcanic ash spewed into the atmosphere sunk Java and Sumatra in an impenetrable night that lasted 48 hours. At the site of the whirlpool a wave rose to forty meters and washed 265 villages from the face of the earth. 36000 people lost their lives. A rain of ash fell at a distance of 2500 kilometers from the site of the explosion.
A catastrophe like this may paralyze the imagination of authors who write on nuclear war. In any case, seismologists claim the volcanic explosion on the island of Thera was four times as strong. The mushroom cloud and flames were seen at a distance of hundreds of kilometers. Bloody rains fell for weeks. Ash was carried as far away as Central Africa and the perimeters of Europe. The thirty-meter wave hit the coast of Crete about a quarter of an hour after the volcano exploded. The force of the explosion many times exceeded that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is therefore not strange that the memory of the cataclysm was passed on from generation to generation. We find it in legends, sacred texts, the writings of ancient authors. It appears in the Greek myth about the flood of Deukalion. In an Egyptian papyrus from the 18th dynasty we read of “a long night, thunder and floods, and days when the sun in the heavens was pale as the moon […] One could not leave one’s house, violent storms raged for nine days. Oh, may the roar of the earth at last fall silent!”
And finally, the Bible itself. Scholars contend that the ten plagues of Egypt described in the books of Moses correspond rather closely with the phenomena accompanying a great volcanic explosion: the sudden change of day to night, thunder and hail, a rain of fire, epidemics, water the color of blood. The wise Moses took advantage of this unleashing of the elements and led his people out of the Pharaoh’s country. The miraculous crossing of the Red Sea—according to Galanopoulos—was possible due to the waves of the tsunami, which move at a speed of hundreds of kilometers an hour. Considering that the rise of the waters at the time of the volcanic eruption on Thera attained a dizzying height of dozens of meters at the center of the vortex, this could have caused the movement of water mass at reservoirs hundreds of kilometers from the site of the catastrophe.
The finds on Thera had such large reverberations that they gave rise to a new theory in Atlantology. True, many take the seekers of Atlantis for mild-mannered maniacs, and Atlantology itself for a dubious science, since for so many centuries it has been unable to find the object of its study. But taking into account that we live in an era of realized fantasies, it is worth devoting a moment of our time to this question as well.
Plato is to blame for everything. In two dialogues written toward the end of his life he tells a “very strange story, but true in every respect” about a drowned continent; a story one of the seven sages, Solon, was said to have heard from Egyptian priests.
The Timaeus and Critias belong to the most enigmatic of the Athenian philosopher’s works and have provoked many commentaries, glosses, and explications. Both dialogues were probably inspired by Pythagorean but perhaps also Egyptian and Oriental sources. They are great poems on the universe, its creation and early history, but the sober-minded Aristotle already thought they were creatures of Plato’s fantasy, devoid of any scientific foundation. This does not bother Atlantologists. They only make certain corrections to the chronology and topography of the alleged Atlantis.
Some of them think—clearly under the influence of the discoveries on Thera—that it was in the Aegean Sea. Plato himself situates it in the Atlantic Ocean, but supporters of an Atlantis-in-the-Aegean theory say that the Ancients’ geography was full of lacunas, contradictions, and misleading information. But how to accommodate Plato’s claim that Atlantis was a continent rather than an island, larger than Libya and Asia combined, and that the catastrophe took place nine thousand years before Solon’s visit to Egypt? The answer given to the latter question: that Solon, not being that fluent in hieroglyphics, read the symbol for a hundred as the symbol for a thousand. If we then consider that according to tradition the Greek sage visited Egypt in 570 B.C., let us add nine hundred years and we get 1470 B.C. and this is the approximate date of the fall of Minoan culture and the explosion of the volcano on Thera. But can we take these Platonic millennia or centuries so literally; don’t they simply mean “a long time ago”?
In the archaeological museum in Heraklion there is a disc called the Phaestos disc, which I spent a long time studying; I even made a sketch of it in the secret hope that I might be touched by grace and bring off what so many scholars failed to do. This daydream was so intense that one night I dreamt that I was to announce the results of my revelatory discovery. I stood at a high lectern with a circle of prominent scholars before me—including Humboldt, Schliemann, and…all of them from the nineteenth century, brownish as in daguerrotypes; in the first row I saw my gymnasium Latin teacher who must have been invited to witness the triumph of his brilliant pupil; they were all looking at me, only my teacher had his eyes fixed on the ground. I understood why only when I took out my notes and laid them out in front of me—they were white, terrifyingly blank pages, without any mark, without a single spot; I bowed and stood there silent, then bowed again and continued to say nothing for an even longer time, until whispers and stifled laughter reached me from the auditorium. I took flight suppressing a cry of terror and tore through meadows, bogs, ditches filled with water, woods, until I awoke, soaked, on the bank of consciousness. From that time I forbade myself all dreams of deciphering the Phaestos disc, I even stopped thinking about it, or if I did it was with spite—that it was a forgery, a malicious practical joke by some unhinged archaeologist.
In fact the Phaestos disc, one more Cretan riddle, is a plate of burnt clay in the shape of a not quite symmetrical circle, 2 centimeters thick and with a radius of 16 centimeters. This plate is covered on both sides with hieroglyphic marks running spirally. To add to the difficulty, the hieroglyphs differ from the known but as yet undeciphered hieroglyphic script of the Minoans. It seems they were the precursors of Gutenberg, as each sign is made with a separate stamp, a prototype of a font.
The Phaestos disc was found in 1908, in the ruins of the palace. Some scholars think it is a relic of the Middle Minoan period on Crete, others maintain it is an import from Asia Minor. 45 separate signs have been distinguished on the discus. They are very distinct and represent human heads, whole figures, instruments, dishes, birds, flowers, fish, and a bunch of ideograms difficult to define: dotted fields, squares, geometric figures, wavy lines. Every so often the signs are interrupted by a vertical line, but we don’t know if these are punctuation marks.
The French researcher Marcel F. Homet, basing his view on a certain similarity between the Phaestos hieroglyphs and South American native rock carvings, concluded that the Cretan relic is neither more nor less than a list of the last inhabitants of Atlantis, containing a description of the catastrophe and the fate of the few who came out of it alive. Serious scholars, however, count M. Homet’s theory among the fairy tales.
VII
IT IS ALMOST TIME to leave Crete. Never before have I raked the dust of history so patiently, never have I gulped down ancient stones so greedily, and so the contours of time, of past and present, have begun to erode. Only in these two elements can man truly live to the full; I postponed the date of
my departure, more frugally than ever dividing my melting drachmas, to trick fate out of one more day, two more days, telling myself that Crete is not only Heraklion and Knossos, that I need to see much more than that, because to see means to believe, and I wanted to believe in the reality of the Great Mother, of Evans, and Ida’s snowy top, and lemons, which were just then ripening in the Messara valley.
I made my way around in eternally packed buses, with folk melodies trickling unevenly like pebbles from crackly loudspeakers, I wended my way in those boxes of noise from the Bay of Miravel to the promontory of Spanda and from north to south from the Aegean to the Libyan Sea. I visited many places, including Mallia with its remains of a Minoan palace, Gournia, that poor man’s Pompeii, as it has been so aptly called, Gortynia, where the scraps of many cultures were found as never before on an island together with visible traces of the Romans, a tablet of laws written on a wall in confident antiqua, the remnants of the royal palace at Hagia Triada and Crete’s most beautiful ruin—Phaestos.
Praise be to the Italian archaeologists entrusted with Phaestos. It is a pure ruin, without pretentious reconstructions, the complete antithesis of Knossos. I was guided through it by Alexandros, the same whom Henry Miller described in his best book, the Colossus of Maroussi. I have no doubt that after his long life, Alexandros will become the patron saint of guides, Sanctus Cicerone. He works miracles, resurrecting life from stone and enthusiasm from the most blasé visitors.
“In our palace,” he says, “the rooms were low, because the Minoans were short, like me. I’m a Minoan.” He smiles all the time, but when he says this, he becomes totally serious. “Our sanitary equipment here was no worse than in Knossos. I would even say it was better.” And he is already taking us to the remains of the sewer trenches, telling us to lean forward, touch the stone and coo in admiration. At the end he leads us to the top of the great stairs and orders silence.
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