by Dilys Powell
As Curator John Pendlebury lived in the small house, the lodge, always known as the Taverna, at the lower end of the garden where the road from Herakleion ran past the high wall. But we all had meals together in the big house, the Villa; and again the position was far from clear to me, for it appeared that the School had the responsibility for both houses but that the Villa was still at the disposal of Sir Arthur Evans when he arrived to carry out further excavations or further studies. Indeed his invisible presence seemed to me that spring to command the house and the dark-foliaged garden. Faint traces of his autocratic scholarly comfort still clung about the place. Denuded though the rooms were, here and there a carpet, a curtain, a sofa recalled the welcome of a Victorian country week-end. The Villa Ariadne was still an enclosed, self-contained little world from which one made forays into a countryside so far tamed by few roads and fewer buses.
We made one such expedition ourselves. Humfry wanted to show me the site of Eleutherna, and in a hired car we were driven off into a landscape which I recall as lowering and claustrophobic. One of the house servants, Kosti the steward, was in attendance, and spread wild flowers round the rug on which we sat to eat our picnic lunch. After it we left the car and the road and walked under a cloudy sky. There was a hill and a moist, luxuriant canopy of trees and it began to rain; on this at least memory is explicit. I was wearing shoes with crepe rubber soles; as we scrambled back towards the car my feet slid on the streaming path, and Kosti tugged me up the inclines. The precipice road was covered with rich mustard-coloured mud, and the driver expressed alarm lest the car should slide. We were thankful to get back to the Villa and drag off our soaking clothes in the basement bedroom. There was even the chance of hot baths. Suddenly, in Hilda’s attentions, I recognised the face of genuine friendship.
Twice more I stayed at Knossos. Humfry’s close friend Alan Blakeway, tutor in ancient history at Corpus Christi College, had raised in Oxford funds for the excavation of an ancient cemetery, and in 1933 we set off with him for Crete. It was high summer. The School session was over, everybody except the servants had left, and we had the Villa to ourselves. Humfry and I slept under mosquito nets on the terrace roof beneath moonlight which seemed to generate heat; at sunrise we woke to the wild rusty screech of the first cicadas. In 1935 the three of us were back at Knossos, joined this time by our friend James Brock, a student of the School who later was to be responsible for the splendid publication of the finds.
Spellbound, I watched the two seasons drifting past me. Once we took time off to drive westward along the coast and through Rethymnon. When we passed Souda Bay there were warships in the huge natural harbour, and somebody remarked that it had been used by Allied shipping in the Great War. But 1914 was more remote to us than the Minoan age. Our lives revolved round the Villa, and though our drive had taken us as far as Canea, capital of the island, though the names of great Minoan sites – Phaistos, Mallia, Hagia Triadha – were constantly in the day’s talk, to me Crete was Knossos. The slopes where Evans’s restorations, the jagended roofs and interrupted colonnades, hung conjecturally in the fiery air; the bleached hills across the valley; and the Villa garden with its rich integument of shade and flowers, pomegranates, plumbago, hibiscus – that was Crete; that and midday with lunch in the long cool dining-room; shadows thickening, and dinner on the terrace with its hoods of jasmine.
Alone in the house during the day, I struggled to write. Then as the afternoon swam on I would throw down my work and stroll out towards the village of Fortetsa and the fields and olive groves and vineyards where, hollowed in the banked earth, the ancient cemetery was giving up its painted burial jars. The little boys of the village looked at me with curiosity as I went by, and once, I remember, I rescued a toad with which they had been amusing themselves. For the rest my exchanges with the Cretans were confined to the minimal daily greetings.
All the same I was learning to fit faces and voices to some of the names which for so long had rung in my head. Kosti I had met on my first visit, Kosti the steward with the flowing, light brown moustache, eyes of a mad bright blue, and a disposition wheedling but obstinate. He was the hero of an abduction, not an uncommon event in the Crete of the 1920s. The young man who served at table was Manoli Markoyannakis, a good-looking boy, quiet-voiced, deferential. Sometimes a woman muffled in black was seen emerging stealthily from the kitchen quarters or sweeping with a vague tentative broom the stone floors in the bedrooms; this was Maria, widowed Maria, like Kosti a relic from the great days of the Evans régime. And when I wandered out to the dig there was Manolaki the foreman – Manolis Akoumianakis, who had long worked for Evans in the excavation of the Palace and who now was serving a season with our party; one of his sons, Micky – a boy like the other village children but graver, more observant – ran industriously about the site, carrying messages.
The sun swung across the screen of pine trees round the Villa garden, the cicadas filled the air with a sound as thick as silence, and a handful of Cretan names were added to my stock of characters. Occasionally an incident, absurd or tragic, broke the routine of the week. There was an invitation to lunch in Herakleion with the British Vice-Consul, a friendly Cretan citizen given to what I am sure he regarded as high-life English persiflage; at any rate he trapped me into desperate apologies for damaging an armchair by upsetting a bottle of ink – which turned out to be a joke-bottle with rubber ink-pool attached. Once at midday, sitting in the dining-room in the Villa, we could hear in the distance long painful cries. It was some time before we discovered that they were cries of uncontrollable mourning; Yanni Katsarakis, our foreman at Perachora, had come over from his home in the east of the island with the news that his wife had died. The loss was calamitous from the practical as well as the emotional point of view. She had been, we knew, an ideally capable woman, good at the management of her household, good at spinning and dyeing and weaving – I still possess a tough, bright-patterned bedspread which she sent me as a present. And all that day Yanni, his face blotched with tears, sat in the kitchen rocking back and forth in his chair and howling with grief and despair.
Meanwhile in the pale crumbling soil beyond the sultana vines the cluster of tombs was being methodically opened and cleared. Sometimes a south wind brought dust and mosquitoes and lassitude; but at the noon-time break in the work, or at night when we dined on the terrace, the archaeologists still wrangled with happy obstinacy. I began to take life in the Villa for granted. We should pick it up again next summer; that seemed as natural as midday.
But next summer Humfry was dead; and a few months after him Alan Blakeway, best of friends, was gone too. Three years later the war broke my remaining ties with Crete.
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Or so I had thought at the time. Now I found that the passage of twenty-three years had left nearly everything clear in my mind. As I loitered about the courts and stairways of Knossos I felt as if I had never been away. There was even, to remind me of Evans’s massive reconstructions, some restoration in progress – only this time it was the restorations which were being restored. Workmen were cleaning the Palace, brushing soil from the pavements, mending the cement in the walls. And like those shreds of coloured paper which, dropped into water, swell and branch into waving flowers, the stones blossomed in my mind. I remembered lost days: an evening on the beach beyond Herakleion, Alan bringing out a bottle of Greek champagne, unpalatably warm from the late sun, to drink after our swim, and the three of us squabbling about the best way of keeping the bubbles in while pouring; night in the Villa and Alan again, flown with Cretan wine, lingering on the stairs to pursue some archaeological argument before he clattered down to his subterranean bedroom – the room, it struck me now, in which Humfry and I had slept on that cool, initiatory spring visit.
The long interval between then and now suddenly contracted, and as if in some non-temporal time the days were telescoped. In the same moment Evans was walking across the garden of the British School to lecture to an Athenian audience; and Kosti was
writing to me from his village to tell me that he had put flowers on Humfry’s grave at Mycenae; and in some war-time office in London I was reading news of the Battle of Crete and the story of John Pendlebury.
In the summers of 1933 and 1935, with the excavation of the cemetery taking up the days from early morning to late afternoon, to go into Herakleion, no more than three miles away, seemed an expedition. I scarcely knew the place. And in that I echoed the ignorance of a good many foreigners. Travellers came to Greece to see the monuments and the museums. Even visitors who were sensible of the charm of the villages were indifferent to the life of urban Greece. Athens they might enjoy. But a provincial town was something which had to be endured, a mere stage in the journey to the collection of sculpture, or the ancient theatre, or the fragmentary temple. My impression of Herakleion – which for years I inclined to call by its old Italian name of Candia – was of sun, market stalls and harbour walls on which with the image of the Lion of St Mark the Venetians had left occasional traces of their former occupation. Once or twice I sat in a café. But I had never really looked.
Now in 1958 with the new, comfortable Hotel Astir to stay in, there was a chance to explore. I took to strolling about the market. One of the streets, I noticed, was called oδós Eβavs: Evans Street. Seventeen years since Evans had died; twenty-three years since he had last visited Crete; twenty-seven years since he had last undertaken any serious excavation of the Palace. In the interval, the Second War; and Greece is a country much given to the political game of renaming its streets. But there in the company of high patriotic tributes (a road a few yards away is called, after the date of a famous bid for Cretan independence, 1866 Street) was the name of the foreign archaeologist; war and Occupation and a temporary coolness between Greece and Britain over Cyprus had not erased it. Interesting, I reflected, to discover the local views. In England many people were still living who had been colleagues of Arthur Evans, and reminiscences had been published by friends and family. But nobody so far as I knew had enquired from the Cretans. Already it might be too late. Those who knew him at the beginning of the excavation of Knossos were long since dead. And the war had made a great crack in the life of the island. Some of the men who had worked on the site in the twenties and thirties had been killed in battle; a younger generation might recall nothing.
Without much hope I began to ask the people I met what they remembered of the great Evans. A few remembered him well – a Greek archaeologist; an Englishwoman who before the war had been an archaeological student and had worked with Evans. Yet this was not quite the kind of opinion I was after. Rather I wanted strictly local memories, and once or twice I found them. There were still Cretans who had dug at Knossos and Cretans who had been servants at the Villa Ariadne. Occasionally from some unexpected quarter – a taxi-driver perhaps – there would be a scrap of reminiscence.
But now there was an interruption. When asked what he remembered of Evans, sometimes a man would break off to talk of another name: Blebbery. At first I could not make it out. Who on earth was Blebbery? Then on a trip eastward I had a flash of recognition. Ashamed of my ignorance of Crete outside Knossos, I was using my time in visiting some of the places which I knew only by name, on this occasion Mallia, a Minoan palace excavated by French archaeologists. A few colossal pithoi, storage jars each of which could have accommodated a couple of Ali Baba’s thieves – for the rest little more than the foundations remained, and bemused by so many interlocking rectangles I reflected that at Knossos with Evans’s restorations one at any rate knew where one was. No, said the driver who took me to Mallia, he had not known Evans. But Blebbery – before the war he had driven Blebbery everywhere, east, west, along this very road. And using the Greek’s phrase of esteem, ‘a golden man’, he exclaimed, ‘a golden man’. And suddenly I knew the name. The Cretans had always found it impossible to pronounce the word Pendlebury.
From that moment my pursuit of the Evans legend grew complicated. The great ghost of the old scholar was everywhere in Crete: in the landscape, in the mountains, in the Herakleion museum amidst the spoils of excavation; at Knossos in the Palace of Minos which he had unearthed and reconstructed; especially at the Villa Ariadne. But often, as I pursued him in the memories of the Cretans, this other figure intervened; the young heroic figure of John Pendlebury. And not Pendlebury alone. The islanders wanted to talk about the British liaison officers who went in during the Occupation to help in organising resistance. They wanted to talk about a famous exploit, the capture by a party of Cretans and British officers of a German general. It was not always easy to identify the heroes, especially the foreign heroes, of such a tale. But little by little under the familiar Christian names by which the British were known in Crete in the war I discovered figures as distinguished as Patrick Leigh Fermor. I discovered my own friends: Tom Dunbabin, for instance. And I heard tales of the Cretans themselves, some still living, some killed in battle. Evans was not the only ghost whose presence could be felt at Knossos. For all these disparate characters, Cretans or British, were linked by place. They had been archaeologists, writers, farmers. But nearly all of them had been in some way connected with the Villa Ariadne. They had lived or worked at the Villa; their stories took flight from there or there came to rest. Their stories: not everything I heard about the war in my Cretan expeditions can be taken as simple fact, and what I repeat must sometimes be read as the accretion of myth. The record, like the tale of the Minotaur himself, is part-history, part-legend. The legend has grown round the people in the story. The Villa Ariadne gives the legend a basis of truth.
ARTHUR EVANS saw Knossos for the first time in the spring of 1894. That is to say he saw a rounded flowery hill known as Kephala, overlooking a stream and bearing on its surface, among the blossoms of anemone and iris, stone blocks with curious markings. Legend, endowed in Greece with a special tenacity, had preserved for scholars the identity of the site. Here Daedalus had designed for Minos, King of Crete, the labyrinth in which lived the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull. But to the Cretans Knossos was known by a humbler name. Sixteen years before Evans’s visit an antiquarian from Herakleion, or Candia, as it was still generally called, had dug up some large ancient storage-jars on the spot, and the local people had come to refer to it as sta pithária – the place, as you might say, of the jars.
The remains visible on the surface – fragments of walls, gypsum blocks – had already attracted foreign archaeologists, and American, German, Italian and French enthusiasts had reconnoitred the hill. Some of them had thought of exploring. Schliemann himself, excavator of Troy and of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, had proposed to dig, but the plan had fallen through. Possession of the land presented the greatest difficulty. As Evans soon discovered, the first requisite for carrying out an archaeological exploration was to be owner of the soil. But Crete up to the end of the nineteenth century was still under Turkish rule, and the Knossos site, he wrote, ‘was unfortunately held by several co-proprietors, native Mahometans, to whose almost inexhaustible powers of obstruction I can pay the highest tribute’.
In Evans, however, the Mahometans had met their match.
He was a confident, slightly lordly figure; small but indomitably tough and capable of exceptional exertions; short-sighted but endowed with close vision of inestimable value to an archaeologist dealing with the minutiae of coins and seals. He came of a family of parsons and antiquarians who in the generation before him had joined forces with the world of industry. His father belonged to the company of Victorian polymaths. Denied an academic education, sent instead to work in the paper-mills of his uncle John Dickinson, John Evans learned mastery of the job; making a love match, he married the daughter of the firm; and finally came to run the business. But his ruling passion was elsewhere – in the fields of numismatics, geology and anthropology.
He amassed a vast collection of flint implements and prehistoric bronzes; his discoveries in palaeontology made him internationally famous. To his physical vitality the family circle itsel
f was witness. He was three times married, the last time at the age of sixty-nine, and Arthur, his eldest son, was forty-two when of the third marriage a half-sister, Joan, was born. And in the grand Victorian manner the physical resources were matched by ceaseless intellectual and social activity. Treasurer of the Royal Society, High Sheriff of Hertfordshire, President of the Anthropological Institute, Chairman of Quarter Sessions – John Evans unmasked archaeological forgeries, fought against the excise duty on paper, resisted a vandal restoration of St Alban’s Abbey, taught himself to make flint implements. He attended innumerable committees and congresses, he travelled incessantly, he carried on an enormous personal and business correspondence.
It was not surprising that at the age of twenty-four Arthur should have been condescendingly described (by the historian J. R. Green) as ‘little Evans – son of John Evans the Great’.
Arthur Evans, then, grew up in an atmosphere of enthusiasm for learning. As a schoolboy he was already accompanying his father on archaeological expeditions. He inherited the habit of prodigious industry. For the first half of his life, however, his energies were dissipated. He became archaeologist, collector, administrator, journalist, above all traveller: in France, Germany, Sicily, Sweden, Finland, Lapland, the Crimea and the Balkans – in particular Bosnia and Herzegovina, later to be part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but at the time of his visits first in Turkish hands and later under Austrian protection. His journeys and a certain romantic liberalism in his nature ranged him on the side of the Slavonic peoples. He was special correspondent in the Balkans for the Manchester Guardian and campaigned on behalf of the Bosnian insurgents. When in 1878 Turkish rule was succeeded by what he regarded as an oppressive Austrian administration – and by more insurrections – he continued to send fiery despatches to England, with the result that the Austrian authorities took him for a political conspirator, ordered his expulsion – and arrested him before he could leave. He spent seven weeks in a prison cell in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), a city in which he had enthusiastically settled and which he had come to think of as his home. Fifty years were to go by before he revisited Dalmatia. To the official who in 1932 showed him round the prison he had once occupied ‘I come back every fifty years’, he said (adding, it is reported, in a soft obstinate voice, ‘and I will’).