Here, in this mineral landscape
of rock and sea, sapphire and diamond,
which to the wheel of Time offers nothing
that’s perishable;
here in the great victorious light
whose only stain is your own shadow,
and where only your body carries
a germ of death;
here perhaps for a moment the false idols
will vanish; perhaps once again
in a dazzling flash you may stare
at your true self.
—ALEXANDER MÁTSAS
Out early for a swing around the coast, we stop for coffee, good god it’s bad, at a terrace taverna overlooking the sea. The young waiter retires to the side to play his lyre, and I can’t eat my roll because I am watching the black curls and lithe body of young Orpheus back on earth.
We drive on around where northern Crete curves into western Crete, delicately colored in the morning, but this must be the place for big sunsets. Many plastic greenhouses, that blight so helpful to the farmer, blot the landscape. We stop for walks on deserted beaches and a dip in one irresistible cove of purling turquoise water.
At a taverna at Francocastello’s beach, we taste volvi, translated on the menu as “wild roots.” The waiter’s English can’t enlighten us, but he brings out a German wildflower book on Crete and points to a purple flowered plant, Muscari comosum. Little muscari corms? After we have “stuffed wine leaves,” roasted eggplant with an intense taste of roastedness, and tomatoes spiked with mint, we take the person-wide path through bulrushes down to another beach. “What is the decibel level of a single Greek cicada?” Ed wonders. The volume approaches that of a rock concert he attended in Perugia. This wide, endless beach, the polar opposite of the hideous holiday villages that ruin much of Crete, invites a long walk. No one at all swims here on a weekday morning. We don’t swim but wade—the water stays shallow way out.
When our Chaniá stay ends, we go back to Knossos and the museum at Heraklion. We leave our dream cottage and drive across Crete. We then will stay a couple of days at Elounda on the coast, fly to Athens from Heraklion, and drive to the Mani for the baptism.
We find that we absorbed more than we thought on our first trip, when we were travelling in a group in August. These places probably always are crowded, though much less if you’re the first ones there. Getting up early is the key. I have to myself the bull head carved from serpentine, with crystal and jasper eyes and elegantly erect horns, excavated from Knossos. Here’s the bull symbol, way back at the beginning. He had holes on top of his head and in his mouth, probably where libations were poured. The double-ax insignia of the Minoans is carved between his eyes. He gazes with distinctly godlike disdain. As evocative, the kinetic ivory carving of a bull leaper and the figure of the snake goddess in her tiered skirt and bodice with her breasts popping out. She holds two snakes at arm’s length, and I’m certain something loud and oracular is coming out of her mouth. She’s one of many precious artifacts that point to a profoundly symbolic level of Minoan life—the lion, leopard, sea creatures, ax, double spirals, birds, and of course the myriad bulls. I will be studying in detail the famous bull-leaping fresco found in the palace by Sir Arthur Evans, who must have had the most exciting days of any archaeologist. He even named the civilization he was discovering, although Homer says Minos was king for only nine years. We call them Minoans after him, but what they called themselves we do not know. The longer I look, the more mysterious these people become. The fresco’s intricate borders prove to be more fascinating than the figures suspended between the spotted bull’s long horns, or the leaper on the bull’s back, or the standing figure with outstretched arms as if waiting to catch the leaper. An American English professor discovered the hidden meaning of the borders. The tiny stripes and lozenge-shaped overlapping designs represent days of the year and the lunar months. They combine in ways that indicate the magic nine-year cycles that crop up over and over—youths were sacrificed, kings met the goddess. The cycle of nine—and what does this have to do with the leaping acrobat? Interesting as it would be to know, I like being forced to wonder. The art of the Minoans sounds such a dithyrambic call from the ancient world: We were alive, we feasted and loved beauty and saw the world as an animated, forceful dynamic with our beings. Join us in the dance, the leap over time.
Minoans were addicted to jewelry—intricate necklaces and earrings, gold hairpins, bracelets and ankle bracelets, gold spirals through which hair was twisted, an artful pendant of two bees, beaded clothing, arm bracelets, tiaras and other hair ornaments made of flat gold leaf—leaves and crowns. Many artifacts reveal how they lived, what they wore. A bit of mosaic shows early houses. They enlivened their rooms with frescoes, as at Pompeii and Herculaneum. An early small cart shows that they had four-wheeled transport. How often women’s breasts are displayed. The clothing looks constructed to showcase the breasts. How much and how little we know about these mysterious people who rocked the cradle of civilization. These stones stood at the beginning, and laying a hand on one makes me imagine the hand that placed it.
The site at Knossos again thrums with buses and clumps of people on tours. How good to travel alone and slip in and out at will. Ed seems fascinated by the drains. Flushing toilets were available to the Minoans—something that flashes through my mind when I encounter those hole-in-the-floor toilets with the rippled footprints on either side, apparently to guide a giant to straddle the opening. At one serene and pure monastery perched high above the sea, one of these holes emptied directly into the aqua and violet water below. A fetid barrel of water with a scoop made from a detergent bottle stood by, in case you wanted to flush. I glanced in and backed out, as did two Greek women.
The Minoans guided rainwater from the roof cistern into an open pipe in the floor, located just outside the bathroom, which flowed under the toilet seat. Even when no water flowed from above, by employing the same system as the monastery, you could flush. Even today Cretan houses typically have water tanks on the roof, providing pressure to the system. Knossos is riddled with means for draining or bringing in water to the complex. Little channels run down the sides of staircases; there are stone drains that lead to sediment traps, reminding me of the installation of our elaborate septic system in Italy. A pozzo, a little well filled with stones, was constructed every few dozen meters, for settlement and filtration. Ever since, we’ve been fixated on plumbing.
Ed is wandering. I sit down on a hot stone with my notebook looking down at many terra-cotta pots, imagining what they held and what people ate. Accounts from Knossos list large quantities of coriander, used both in cooking and perfume making. Pistachios were produced in quantity, too. I can imagine the tables around the bull-leaping ring laden with baklava layered with dried cherries and nuts, plates of dipla, those folded pastries with a filling made with sweetened eggs, and others scented with thyme, honey, and nuts. The deeply rustic smoked sausages with cumin, and others with vinegar, and the omathia, a sweet sausage stuffed with liver, rice, and raisins—all these must have fed the Minoans, too. Lighter fare might have included the many preparations of snails, and the pilafs—a rice boiled in lamb broth and seasoned. The Mediterranean diet came to fame after a study of long-lived natives. Cretan food does have its spleen with fennel, and “lamp” bowels in various guises, but the strong counterbalance comes from the olive oil, wild greens, cheeses, and salads such as boureki, which is made of dakos, rusks of barley, topped with tomatoes, cheeses, and oil. We’ve loved eating here—the rabbit with oranges and olives, meatballs in egg and lemon sauce, but mainly the variety of salads, such as grilled eggplant salad with walnuts, and all the fresh cheeses. I like the invitation to the kitchen in all the tavernas, the olive oil cans planted with begonias, the bright clotheslines strung between massive olive trees. Imagine the table, and the people spring to life.
Dusty from Knossos, we check into Elounda Mare. The hotel has a basically modern design, but they have recuperated old
door surrounds and Cretan stone floors, weavings, and copper trays. Old farm doors are sparingly but effectively used for ornaments, on either side of openings, and for tables. We get lost. The architect must have been inspired by the labyrinth at Knossos. We are luckily upgraded to a room with a private pool, terrace, and small yard with the sea below. We have a couple of days to look around at this part of Crete, but really we just laze about, taking a brief jaunt to see Spinalonga, a tiny island that formerly was a leper colony. Back at the hotel gift shop, I buy glass evil eye protectors for my house in California. The clerk says, “The sun gives us power. If we have two days without sun, we go crazy.”
We walk to dinner at the Calypso restaurant. It’s under the tutelage of a chef with a two-star restaurant in France. We’re seated near a marble pool with fountain jets; below, the sea spreads calmly to infinity. At the next table I’m convinced we have a member of the Russian mafia. The big-muscled, no-neck guy can’t put his arms down because of his expanded waist. He’s sweating alarmingly. His wife across from him is plump, too, but they have refused to acknowledge girth and are squeezed into clothes from an earlier size. He looks like a bouncer, and she’s forced-smiley and crunched into an aqua blue sequined top with tiny straps cutting into her soft meaty shoulders. Square-cut emerald earrings dangle on either side of her puffy little face with darting eyes. She looks trapped. He is silent, she is chattering. He moves to another chair at the table. Didn’t want his back to the door? Doubtless my mind is leaping; he made a fortune in cell phones or BMWs. We say good evening to them as they leave, this being a civilized custom practiced all over Europe, but they stare stonily ahead and do not respond.
This is our last night in Crete.
A quick flight to Athens, and we’re suddenly in our rental car, heading toward the city. After the solitude of Crete, these roads look chaotic. We’re on a bumper-car course, with detours, closed lanes, flares in the road, and no signs. I’m gazing at the map, trying to catch a name, a street, a direction. Ed plows forward. We cross the entire city and somehow, miraculously, emerge on the road to Náfplio. The baptism of our friends Steven and Vicki’s boy will be in three days.
Just out of the Athens sprawl—oh, please let us find the airport when we return—we pass a building supply company that sells prefabricated chapels, painted yellow, trimmed in white. I want one. I’ve photographed every one we’ve passed. They may be memorials to the roadside dead, but I think of them as tributes to the travel gods. Ed keeps driving. “They weigh probably two hundred pounds. Hoist that onto luggage check-in?”
“Look, a Byzantine model, white with blue dome.”
“We are not hauling one of those through two airports. Who would be the one to carry it?”
“I could set it in front of our house in California. We could keep a votive lighted and photographs of our own dead inside. Maybe a poem by Ritsos.”
“The homeowners’ association would be on you in a heartbeat.”
Hotel Byron in Náfplio, not easy to find, hides behind a boarded-up, domed Arab building and across from the church where the Mavromihalis clan assassinated the first president of Greece. I’m looking forward to meeting Steven’s Greek family, but the bullet hole in the church wall is disconcerting. We hoist our bags up several flights of stairs to get to the hotel, then hoist again up to the third floor above that. No elevator. Náfplio shows everywhere the inheritance of the Venetian taskmasters. They ruled capriciously and often heartlessly, but wherever their Machiavellian hard hand was felt, the legacy is efficacious—the mellow colors along the water, the genteel houses, the piazzas; the Venetians knew how to set up a city for living pleasantly. We came to Náfplio on the previous trip and now stop by to see George Couveris at his shop Preludio, where Ed bought gold earrings with sapphires to remind me of the Aegean. His is the prettiest jewelry I’ve seen in Greece. I’m tempted again by a heavy gold cross with other sea-colored stones, but under the influence of Cretan simplicity, I don’t even try it on. He remembers us and shows us all the latest designs, then sends us off to eat at Basilis, tables on the street, because they make the spiciest eggplant imam in town.
Because Ed likes hardware stores, we stop in to admire those triangular-handled aluminum trays for delivering coffee from the bar to a shop—how Italian that is. We buy skewers topped with brass owls, hares, and fish for our neighbor Placido, the master griller. What a throwback—they stock a number of frosted aluminum glasses and pitchers—those redolent of the 1960s colors, fuchsia, magenta, lime, blue, all sheened with the glow of moonlight. I’ll take Fiorella a few handmade bells, though she has no sheep or goats.
The road gnarls through the hard mountains of the Peloponnese, and every kilometer subtracts something else from the landscape until only stark rock and determined shrub trees remain. Occasionally a lone monastery, a muscular little donkey, a scrawny mimosa. Finally we arrive in Monemvassía, the poet Yannis Ritsos’s hometown, which he called “the rocky ship, my ship of stone, which carries me across the world.” I love his poems and quote to Ed, “I’ve always wanted to tell you about this miracle,” and “I am totally inside myself like a person returning home after an exhausting journey.” The great heap of a rock island joins the mainland by a causeway. Mostly abandoned, the town carved into the unforgiving rock broods alone, now that the only marauders approaching the islet are tourists. Taken by the Turks, the Venetians, then the Turks again, the history and geography conspire together to emphasize a besieged stance in the world. Ritsos, too, was always in trouble with politics, a resister, exiled to various islands. Monemvassía, built facing sea, turns its back on the mainland. But they had to get their wheat somewhere; perhaps they were vulnerable after all. They had to go to the mainland to farm. A few houses have been restored; most lie empty and often roofless. Everywhere the sea reminds you of its beauty. Every house knew the beauty of the sea at all hours, and now the town’s remaining restaurants occupy terraces that offer to visitors the three-hundred-degree views.
After climbing up and down the streets, we walk back to the modern town on the other side of the stone causeway. I sit down with an ice cream cone, while I wait for Ed to have coffee. Practically at my feet a man falls off his bicycle and lies unconscious in the street. People swarm out of their shops, someone slaps him, someone throws a pitcher of cold water in his face. I’m horrified—he’s had a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. But no, he rouses, shakes his head, and soon pushes on. They must be used to heat prostration around here. “It happened to my nephew,” a waitress tells me. “He fell off the tractor, and the tractor just kept going until it hit a stone wall.” We spend a quiet night at a hotel right at the entrance to the secretive town.
Before we leave, I pay a visit to Yannis Ritsos, buried among his townspeople in a simple grave.
By noon we are in Sparta. Mother, imagine, I went to Sparta! A clean and modern city that has long since lost its legendary warrior rigor. We drive on in the afternoon to Mystras, another abandoned city, on the precipitous slopes of Mount Taigetos. According to Nature Guides: Europe/Greece by Bob Gibbons, there are blooming on this mountain three types of white saxifrage, golden drop, figwort, peacock anemones, giant orchids, spurge, white irises, Judas trees, vetches—blue and yellow—and a scattering of horseshoe, somber, and yellow bee orchids. He lists toadflax, starry clover, and on and on. In the summer heat we don’t see anything except dried grasses and a few drifts of something that looks like Queen Anne’s lace but isn’t. I would like to come back and spot the Nottingham catchfly, asphodel, and cranesbill and, in the air, rock nuthatches, booted eagles, peregrines, and blue rock thrushes. But will we ever come back to Mystras? The places people have abandoned have the rub of loss, the erasure of the particulars of living and the remains of form only. Gibbons’s description of wildflowers in the Mani and around Mystras creates images in my mind of olive groves lushly carpeted in spring with spotted orchids, milk thistles, bellflowers, and burnt candytuft. Just the names of the mostly unfamiliar flowers
lure me: valerian, grass pea, furry-leaved woundwort, catchfly. Dreaming of wildflowers not in bloom, I scurry over the hills peering into the abandoned houses. In the main church, I see for the first time ex-votos of houses. Why should that be surprising? After the body, what do we want to protect? Our homes.
We’re drowsy as bees in the heat. Cicadas rhythmically shake their bags of nails, they’re chugging like a train, rattling a thousand tambourines. I want to pour a bottle of water over my head. When we get back to the car, the temperature is 44.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a heat-stroke-zone 112 degrees in the other world.
Now we head deep into the Mani. The Peloponnese has three thumbs of land protruding at the bottom of the peninsula. Mani is the middle one, and surely the wildest and most individualistic part of Greece. We are meeting our friends at Limeni on the coast, where there is a new hotel. Exhilarating to travel early in the morning with the car packed with luggage, heading into the roaring sun. How forlorn the landscape. Mountains jut straight up, and any slope is littered with low stone walls—sheep folds—that look like archaeological remains of a village. The pastel scent of oleander flies through the window, and no sign of human life appears for mile after mile after mile. If your car broke down, you would be in limbo. As we go deeper, hour after hour—niente, only stone. Nary a posy, only the rare pitiful tree. The ultimate subtracted landscape. I can imagine a pterodactyl setting down a big foot on the windshield of the car with an ear-splitting shriek.
But finally we emerge from a pass and wind down to the village of Limeni on the sea. At the taverna suddenly, we are greeted. We must have arrived for the baptism. The owners are cousins of our friend—everyone must be cousins in the Mani—but for now we are taken into the kitchen, fish are pointed out, and we are seated right by the water where cheery fishing boats ride their reflections. The cousins point out the home of Petrobey Mavromihalis, Steven’s ancestor, who led the revolt against the Ottomans, in a classic bite-the-hand maneuver. He’d been appointed bey, ruler of the area, a move by the Ottomans to give the illusion of power back to local people. Instead he united the famously warring clans of the area and led an attack against the Ottomans that resulted in the liberation of Kalamata. The Mavromihalis family conducted themselves with the same fearless zeal on many fronts. Elias Mavromihalis is honored every July 20 in Styra for a famous battle at a windmill, in which he and six other Maniots lost their lives in a brave exit from the windmill with swords.
A Year in the World Page 31