Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  What was it about the Minoans that made them embrace nature—especially the ocean—rather than fearing it, exploiting it, or trying to conquer it, like other civilizations that followed them? Why were dolphins given such an eminent place in their world, along with other recurring creatures: birds, bees, bulls, snakes, lions, and octopi cropped up often in their art. Trees were another favorite subject, and so were flowers. And what about the Minoan fascination with spirals? They drew that symbol everywhere. What did these things mean to them—and what, after all these years, should they mean to anyone else?

  Akrotiri was a city of ash, layers and layers and layers of ash, and to make out the contours of its buildings and streets—still partially entombed, strewn with pottery, and braced with scaffolding—my eyes had to adjust to the monochrome view. There was an enveloping stillness that almost seemed to be breathing; an aura of sweetness tinged with lament. I was dumbstruck, and given the expressions on other people’s faces as they entered, this was a typical response. The sight of a buried city is one you can never really prepare for, or easily make sense of. Which is where my guide, Lefteris Zorzos, came in.

  Zorzos was the youngest archaeologist ever to work at Akrotiri, beginning his lifelong devotion to the site in 1999, at age sixteen. He was a dashing Greek, Athens-born and London-educated, a founding member of the Society for Aegean Prehistory, and someone who could elucidate the past with astounding detail. In his studies, Zorzos had identified thirty Minoan sites around Thera—and that was just for starters. “There’s quite a bit underneath everything we’re standing on,” he said, in a refined accent with clipped corners. “When the eruption happened it wasn’t just Akrotiri that was preserved—the entire island was preserved.”

  The day was as hot as lava, but under the climate-controlled roof the air was cool and dry. From the beginning, Marinatos had realized that Akrotiri yielded such an avalanche of intelligence, so many artifacts, that no one collection could ever hold them, and lobbied instead to turn the whole dig into a museum. Over time the Greek government, moving at glacial bureaucratic pace, had shelled out to protect the Minoan treasures, but the country’s current economic crisis had halted any further work. “There hasn’t been an excavation in several years,” Zorzos said, in a rueful voice. “Very little research, very little conservation. So we are fighting on a local level to get things going.” Often, he told me, he paid out of his own pocket for Akrotiri’s essential expenses: “In 2000, we had a hundred archaeologists working here. Now we have just four or five guards. You can imagine the difference.”

  We stood near the entrance on an elevated planked floor that was level with the top stories of the buildings. From there, visitors could peer down on the city’s layout as it was when the eruption struck. Only one structure had been fully uncovered; the rest were revealed only in sections. The site was expansive, but it likely represented only 3 percent of Akrotiri’s full footprint. This had been a bustling place, home to thousands of people, conveniently situated by the sea like a Minoan San Francisco or Sydney. No one knew the extent of its boundaries: part of the settlement might lie at the bottom of the caldera now, or it might rest farther inland, still hidden under the ground.

  Most of Akrotiri’s buildings were private houses, Zorzos said, but a few had the grand appearance of public gathering spaces. “What we’re seeing is the urban core,” he pointed out. “And if you look below, you can see the sewer system running underneath the street level. It was a very, very advanced society.”

  The most electrifying find at Akrotiri was that the walls of every building had been painted with vibrant Minoan frescoes, and these artworks had survived under the ash. “This has never been seen before anywhere,” Zorzos emphasized. Pottery of all shapes and sizes filled the houses, decorated with spirals and flowers and birds and dolphins; some buildings’ floors had shimmered with crushed seashells. Akrotiri’s post at the water’s edge made it an obvious place for Minoan marine dreams to have blossomed. “They do have dolphins in many frescoes,” Zorzos said, “and in a lot of the pottery. You also see them on seal stones. The animal was definitely significant to them.”

  We toured the settlement, Zorzos pointing out how the blanketing layers corresponded to the phases of the eruption. When Thera’s volcano first cleared its throat, it spewed out a coarse pumice, followed by a torrential silvery hail. At some point, boulders had been ejected like cannonballs, crashing through walls, and they could still be seen, lying where they’d landed. Early in the destruction, the temperature inside the town hit 300 degrees Celsius. Then things got even hotter: “The second phase was four hundred degrees,” Zorzos said. “So you’re talking about complete annihilation.”

  He showed me the West House next, a structure that had contained so many ocean-themed artworks that researchers suspected it was the home of a high-ranking seaman, an admiral perhaps, or a ship captain. “This is probably one of the most important buildings in the Mediterranean,” Zorzos said, with an air of nostalgia. In his first assignment at Akrotiri he had excavated a clay pipe on its ground floor, part of an efficient, anti-erosion drainage system. There was also a stone toilet that flushed, the earliest ever found.

  The West House rose two stories high, with a wide stone staircase connecting the floors. Picture windows in its facade looked out on a triangular town square. The top floor had been wrapped in a 360-degree frieze of Thera’s sailing fleet; this 39-foot-long, 17-inch-high painting was so intimately wrought it was as though the artist were documenting the scene like a newspaper reporter. The panels illustrated a red sand beach that still exists next to Akrotiri, with seven oceangoing ships and assorted smaller boats triumphantly circling the harbor. The city was drawn with precision too, thronged with people dressed for a party. (In frescoes, the Minoan women are always decked out in jewelry, wearing voluptuously flounced skirts. Above the waist they tended to go topless, their breasts showcased for admiration.) One nautical historian pointed out that in the fresco the Minoan ships appeared to have hydroplanes under their sterns, a feat of engineering that seemed impossibly futuristic for 1,600 BC. Personally, what I’d noted first were the festive pods of dolphins: they were everywhere, painted in cobalt, scarlet, rust, and ochre, vaulting over the ships, escorting the flotilla, and in some cases, even mingling among the crowds on shore.

  Zorzos had saved one corner for last, a monumental, three-story building known as Xeste 3. It had been constructed with masonry blocks of volcanic stone, fitted together as seamlessly as matching puzzle pieces. “They had ingenious ways of keeping these tall buildings upright,” Zorzos explained. “Every floor is built slightly further inward to make it stable. I’ve discussed it with architects—what you’re seeing is very difficult to do even with cement today.” Archaeologists believed that Xeste 3 had a sacred purpose; that it was a place with special intrigue. Considering what they found inside it, this was an excellent guess.

  The lower two floors were a maze of rooms, many of them small and cloistered. At least one room was sunken, and probably used for ritual cleansing or bathing. But the building’s most phenomenal feature, Zorzos stressed, was its artwork: in Xeste 3, not a single vertical surface had been left unadorned. These outlandishly fabulous frescoes, some crumbled into pieces by the eruption, had been carefully removed and transferred to a workshop on site, where they were restored for years before being loaned to museums. This process was closed to the public, but Zorzos had arranged for a private audience. In particular, he wanted to show me the paintings that had enveloped Xeste 3’s top floor. “I will not say anymore,” he declared, with a knowing grin. “Seeing them…well, I don’t think you will believe what you see.” He checked his watch and nodded. “So let’s go. I think we are ready.”

  Litsa was a pocket genie with a pixie haircut, maybe five feet tall and a hundred pounds and most of it was her smile. She leaned her whole body into the task of pulling the ten-foot-square fresco out on its rollers, digging in with her silver sneakers. I gasped when I saw the
painting, and Zorzos beamed because he’d been expecting my reaction. Potnia flooded the room, casting magic on even the beige electrical sockets. The goddess was unspeakably lovely. She was seated in profile, leaning forward so you could see her cascading black ponytail, dotted with rubies, and beside her were the ornate, feathered wings of a griffin. She wore a necklace of dragonflies, and earrings like gold moons; crocuses, the emblem of spring, were embroidered on her flowing dress. Below her, appearing as smaller figures, a girl and a blue monkey made offerings. The fresco’s colors—crimson, navy, gold, ivory, white, black—were as luminous as if they had been laid down yesterday. Maybe half the fragments had been refixed into place; this was a work in progress that, when finished, would reveal the pinnacle of Xeste 3. When the Minoans came to worship they had ascended to the top of this building, and this is whom they expected to find. This lady represented everything to them. Her calling card was benevolence: a love for all things clawed and finned and winged and flowering, the creatures that scampered and swam and flew and grew on this earth. She was Mother Nature, and never had I seen her in such corporeal glory. All I could say in the face of her image was, “Oh my God,” which was, if you thought about it, pretty ironic.

  “The level of detail is incredible,” Zorzos said, in a hushed voice. “You can see it in her hands. Her fingernails are painted; her hair is very elaborate. Her dress itself is absolutely spectacular—there is an actual landscape on it: swallows, lilies, everything together. It has a lot of energy and power.” Every piece we were seeing, he told me, had been painstakingly reassembled by Litsa and her team. “There are many more frescoes being worked on,” he added.

  The next panels Litsa pulled out were enormous, embellished spirals, huge blue whorls that had presided over Xeste 3’s top floor, sitting above the goddess. “We haven’t identified any windows in the building,” Zorzos said, “so this may have been something that was completely closed off.” Viewing them, I was lost for superlatives. It was easy to imagine falling on your knees in front of these frescoes, which was likely the point. The Minoans, it seemed, were determined to immerse themselves in beauty, sensuality, and wonder, a set of intentions that diverge radically from our own. That wasn’t the only difference between us, either.

  Scholars believe the Minoans’ ubiquitous spirals represented a circular view of time, as opposed to the linear one we’ve adopted. In their outlook, birth, life, death, and rebirth existed in an unbroken continuum. The goddess’s touchstones were the ever-regenerating moon, the constantly cycling seasons. To the Minoans, life was not a highway that dead-ended in a cliff: it wound on forever, and throughout all of it, nature supported them. In this context, the dolphins who popped up so buoyantly were the guides, the guardians, the intermediaries between this world and the underworld, and then back again. The word “dolphin” in Greek is delphis, which is, not coincidentally, almost identical to delphys—the womb. Out of the darkness below the surface comes the inevitable rebirth, with the dolphins as its midwives.

  This may seem like a lot to infer from some pots and rubble, a fixation with sea creatures, a bellicose volcano, a drowned people—but to me, it all rang true. Anyone could see that even the humblest Minoan objects exuded a reverence for—and a profound connection to—the natural world. That connection had frayed now, but perhaps it wasn’t completely severed. Maybe, with the help of some primordial memories, we could renew it. Craig Barnes, the author of a book called In Search of the Lost Feminine, summed this up hopefully: “The Minoans were not an anomaly or an aberration or a mystery of the deep past,” he wrote, “so much as an early and vivid example of some innate quality of the human that does not ever go away.”

  Whatever name that quality had, whatever its etheric substance, it still infused these ruins. It seeped out of doors and wafted out of windows, and the frescoes positively oozed with it. I wondered if Zorzos, who had spent so much time among the Minoan ghosts, had picked up on this vibe. Walking around Akrotiri late at night, for instance, had he ever sensed its presence?

  He answered emphatically. “Yes…but it’s hard to describe.”

  “Is it a good feeling?” I asked, probing.

  Zorzos smiled slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Definitely, yes.”

  The road was unremarkable, a typical thoroughfare running south and slightly uphill from Crete’s dreary capital city, Heraklion. Anything formerly gorgeous or poetic along its route had long been paved over. There were markets and tavernas and T-shirt shops and car-repair joints, the usual commercial dross, nothing at all to indicate that if you followed this road, it would lead you directly to the dazzling zenith of the Minoan world: the Palace of Knossos.

  In the late nineteenth century, archaeologists—alerted by farmers and shepherds who had been tripping over scraps of pottery and the tops of buried walls for years—had become interested in a promising stretch of Cretan fields, set among low-lying hills. There was something down there, they’d realized, something big. A wealthy Englishman named Sir Arthur Evans ultimately scooped them all, buying the land outright and embarking on a full excavation in 1900.

  It was a heady time for hunters of lost civilizations. The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had just unearthed Troy and Mycenae, validating Homer’s accuracy and hauling up boatloads of gold; just about anybody willing to put in the elbow grease could find something primeval and priceless kicking around. When Evans first visited Crete, he was shocked to find the local women wearing necklaces of carved gemstones they’d collected in the fields. Walking around, Evans himself had more or less stubbed his toe on a clay tablet covered with inscriptions, markings that resembled nothing in linguistic history.

  (This Minoan language is now known as Linear A, and to this day it remains undeciphered. Many more examples of it would be found on Crete and Thera, including the famous Phaistos Disc, a circle of fired clay about the size and shape of a mini-pizza. The disc was stamped 241 times with cryptic, pictorial symbols arranged in a spiral on both sides. Some of the symbols are familiar: a bird in flight, a woman in a long skirt, a man’s head, an oar, a beehive, a leafy branch, a snake, the flower of life. Others were utterly arcane. Countless scholars have tackled the translation; none have succeeded. But there is one thing I can tell you for sure about the Phaistos Disc: the image of a dolphin appears on it five times.)

  Having secured his site, Evans dug with gusto—and Knossos proved to be even more amazing than anyone had suspected. It was a vast complex of top-to-bottom architectural splendor, stuffed with the Minoans’ signature artworks. One of his most celebrated finds was a suite of rooms known as the Queen’s Megaron, the centerpiece of which was a panoramic fresco of dolphins, painted as though underwater. In Thera, I had noticed other dolphin artworks rendered from this perspective, including two altar tables that showed the animals hunting beak-down in the sea grass—a specific foraging technique they do use—and idly wondered how the Minoans would have known what the dolphins were doing below the surface. But then I read that Evans had turned up Minoan magnifying lenses and mirrors made of crystal. It was delicious to imagine that someday we might find a Minoan scuba mask on the Aegean seafloor—who would bet against this? Whatever their means, it was clear these dolphin artists had observed their subjects in action.

  I’d been warned that Knossos was a mosh pit of sightseers, so I arrived early in the morning, but I still found myself queuing for a ticket behind busloads of people. It was an inferno of a day and tourists milled at the entrance, fanning themselves with guidebooks. Guides wearing earpieces held signs aloft and attempted to herd their charges; vendors hawking Knossos posters and tote bags and fridge magnets swarmed outside the gates.

  I decided to do the tour backward, reasoning that I’d be free of the crowds until at least the halfway point. Knossos was colossal. Its focal point was a central courtyard the size of a football field. This arena’s purpose might have gone down as another puzzle, but the Minoans themselves had demonstrated it for us. Evans found an immense
fresco that depicted a highly risky (and understandably defunct) sport. It involved a charging aurochs bull—a now-extinct species the size of a rhino, with cruel, impaling horns—along with three athletes, a man and two women. One woman faced the bull, grasping its horns, while the other woman tossed the man, handspring-style, onto the animal’s back. It was a harrowing activity, but the scene had a gleeful quality: there was nothing gladiatorial about it. These people were playing, albeit in a don’t-try-this-at-home sort of way. Bull leaping was clearly a beloved Minoan pastime—it appears on numerous artifacts.

  Wandering through Knossos, I was staggered by the sheer volume of stone that had been used to construct the place. There were broad stone roads, stone staircases on the scale of the Mayan pyramids, facades made of limestone, floors and rooms lined with gypsum, a crystalline alabaster. Evans, searching for a way to describe what he found, had coined the term “palace,” though he was far from certain the word summed up Knossos’s role. It was a hub, that much was apparent, with multiple functions. The Minoans had gathered here for events and rituals and celebrations; they’d kept grain and olive oil and wine in an extensive web of storerooms. Using hydraulics, a bogglingly tough science, they’d built a system of clay pipes to divert and filter drinking water from a nearby spring. Artists had worked their alchemy on these grounds: metalsmithing, painting, stonecutting, and pottery studios had been excavated. And in a quiet, shaded room, not particularly big or imposing, someone had sat on a carved gypsum throne with a tall, scalloped back, flanked by a pair of sentinel griffins. Judging from the throne’s size, shape, and décor, and the artwork and stonework that had been found along with it, researchers believed that someone had been a woman.