Map of Eastern Crete

Map of Western Crete

Map of Paros

Crete - Heraklion and Knossos

 Ivory bull-dancer in flight (full size, 1600 BC). This small, weathered figure in the Museum of Heraklion is one of the most beautiful pieces from Knossos.

We traveled for two weeks through Crete with Norm Cohen, a friend and colleague of mine at Aerospace Corporation. We had met him in Athens and then flown to Heraklion from there.

Knossos

 Minos' bull horns and the entry to the lower level of the palace. Click here for a map of Knossos.

 A reconstructed part of the palace.

After Sir Arthur Evans had found and excavated Knossos (1900-1925) he reconstructed large parts of it using concrete to fill the gaps. This method, now scorned on by archeologists, created a kind of Minoan Disneyland, but has the advantage that the layman sees something. In the newer excavations like in Phaistos one finds only fundaments and has to imagine the palaces that once stood there - but the power of the spiritus loci of Phaistos is much stronger than that of Knossos....

Storage pots, part of the palace and the hills surrounding Knossos . - What we see today was built between 1700 and 1500 BC. It is estimated that at that time the settlement had a population of 100 000 inhabitants. The explosion of the volcano of Thira-Santorini in 1450 BC destroyed also Knossos. The Mycenian Greeks, who had arrived in Knossos before the Thira catastrophe, found the location indefensible and abandoned Knossos thereafter. It was never rebuilt.

The location of Knossos is indeed remarkable. It lies in a valley and seems to never have been protected by a defense wall, as if the Minoans never had to fear any enemies. The original purpose of this city is unclear (a few archeologists argue that it was a city of the dead). More instructive is a comparison with the cities of Yucatan: like there Knossos appears to have been primarily a sacred district, which simultaneously served as the royal palace of the kings of the Minoan empire. All indications seem to show that Minoan religion was a matriarchal cult of the Great Goddess, the images from Knossos and Akrotiri on Thira show only priestesses.

 Barbara among the ruins.

 The entry and staircase to the lower level. the walls are covered with frescoes of "shields" which have the shape of a violoncello, an early shorthand for the Great Goddess, marble idols of this shape were found, e.g., in the contemporary Minoan graves in the Cycladic Islands.

 An extensively in situ restored fresco of bull dancers. The darker spots are the few remnants of the original. For an excellent historical reconstruction of the life in Knossos read Mary Renault's novel "The Bull from the Sea."

The "Megaron of the Queen" (#25 on the map of Knossos) with frescoes of Dolphins. The door leads to the "bedroom of the queen", and.... 

 ... her bathtub next door - supported by an almost modern system of water pipes and sewage channels....

Storage pots in the magazines below the palace where the Minotaur must have lived... 

 The seemingly inverted columns at Knossos were designed to withstand earthquakes, and were made from wood for the same reason - today they are cast concrete.

The Museum of Heraklion

is one of the best appointed museums in Greece with uncounted treasures.

 Minoan sarcophagi from Aghia Triada decorated with the double-axe, the sign of transcendence and the afterlife,

One of the many beautiful Minoan jugs.

 A collection of priestesses of the Great Goddess

Late-Minoan gold ring (Archeological Museum, Athens, from a museum slide) Minoan priestesses, a man, and two altars. These rings are lively miniatures depictring the sacred rites in Minoa.

Late-Minoan gold ring (Archeological Museum, Athens), three priestesses, the double-axe, and a tree representing the Goddess 

 Mycenian-Minoan gold ring (Archeological Museum, Athens), four emissaries from the other world (or Egypt?), wearing animal masks, bring ritual presents to the Queen of Minoa? or the High-Priestess?

 Arkhanes

South of Knossos, overlooking its valley rises Mount Profetis Elias, a steep hill with a magnificent view. Below it, at Arkhanes, a Minoan farm has been unearthed, an idyllic place and no tourists. Nearby, then unknown to me, a small temple has very recently been excavated in which two priests were found sacrificing a bound young man on the altar. They had been buried by a violent earthquake. Closer investigation showed that the human sacrifice was only half-complete when the the earthquake struck, in the lower body parts of the victim the bones and tissues were still filled with his blood.... This is the first and only proof of the age-old conjecture that in pre-Hellenic times young men were sacrificed to the Goddess. A practice, which according to Pausanias, was occasionally still secretly performed in remote Arcadia until the 2^nd-century AD!

 The chapel of Profetis Elias above Arkhanes, south of Knossos

 View of the valley of Knossos and the sea from Profetis Elias

The hills across the valley from Phaistos.  Driving south from Herakleion on the way to archeological sites of Phaistos and Aghia Triada we stopped at Gortys to inspect the inscription recording the earliest Greek city law (written alternately from left to right and inverted from right to left in the next line). Most beguiling was the beauty of the letters of this incription.... 

 Norm Cohen and Barbara in Phaistos

 From there we drove west, across the Plain of Lassithi with its windmills to Aghia Nikolaos. Very close to Aghia Nikolaos is the pretty but highly touristy town of Kritsa, with a notable late-Byzantine church.... Kritsa is famous largely because The Temptation of Christ (after Katsantsakis' novel) was filmed here.

Barbara (barely discernible on the left) looking into the church at Kritsa. Crete is dotted with small churches which are covered with late Byzantine murals (14^th to 15^th century). Many were painted by refugees from Constantinople. El Greco came from Crete, his teacher had been one of these painters.

The murals of Kritsa, Christ in Majesty and church fathers. It is difficult to photograph the murals in the Byzantine churches, because they are not frescoes, and their surfaces reflect the light from the photo flash, moreover they are often in very poor condition. 

 Kritsa, a New Testament story: Christ calling Peter who is seen netting fish.

Thira-Santorini

One day, the three of us joined a group-tour from Herakleion to Thira-Santorini. It became a very long day - the boat ride alone took four hours one-way - filled with many new impressions. The highlight was a visit to the excavations at Akrotiri, a Minoan settlement which got buried by the explosion of the Thira volcano in 1450 BC. The astonishing frescoes which Prof. Marinatos had unearthed (Archeological Museum in Athens) had long fascinated and tempted me....

Phira-Thira, dresses for sale. The inner crater with Makro Kameni (the central core of the volcano) on the left and the island formed by the western rim of the caldera in the far distance. - The light! Nobody has ever been able to paint or photograph the Greek light. At Thira it hits you from above and, reflected, from the sea. My eyes were tearing when I took this picture. 

 A staircase in Phira and a white wall. Norm and Barbara are standing on the upper landing

 Pure Escher... Stairs in Thira seem to defy common perspective.

 Akrotiri, Norm on the left and our indefatigable guide at center. These are the only excavations, where you are allowed to visit during the noon break of the archeologists. Click here for a map of Akrotiri.  

 A view of the extensive diggings in progress.

Recently excavated pots and shards in the storage room of one house.

Akrotiri, the Room of the Boxers and Antelopes. In 1982 a reconstruction of several rooms and their frescoes was on exhibition in the Archeological Museum in Athens. Meanwhile, following modern archeological ideas, this reconstruction has unfortunately been dismantled in favor of a less explicit restoration. These pictures are reproductions of post-cards still on sale in Thira and Athens. - Nanno Marinatos, the daughter of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos, who had died in 1981 from a fall in Akrotiri, published a very interesting investigation, "Art and Religion in Thira" ( D. & I. Mathoulakis, Athens, 1984) into the meaning and original use of the Akrotiri shrines.

 Boxing children

 The Room of the Monkeys - a most startling fresco. There surly were no monkeys on Thira, so these must come from North Africa....

 A life-size fisherman with his catch

 The Room painted with Spring flowers...

...and birds. A swallow....

...and a bird on the rocks of a brook

 People in a boat, from the "House of the Seafarer"

 Two women (priestesses?). According to Nanno Marinatos from a room where young girls were initiated.

 A priestess from the same room.

These frescoes are astonishingly sophisticated and less static than Egyptian murals from about the same time, and Akrotiri was not inhabited by royalty like Knossos, these were houses of ordinary people. How baffled the Mycenians must have been by the glamour of Minoa! - For 600 dark years after the Thira explosion the Minoan archipelago lay dormant until around 900 BC the Hellenes began a new cultural bloom - which was only wiped-out in the 3^rd century AD by the Christians.

Southern Crete

 After Norm had left for home we went to Aghia Galini by bus. My idea had been to hike west along the coast from Chora Sfakeion to visit a number of small, but significant Byzantine churches adorned with murals from the 14^th-16^th century. Fate and weather conspired against us. We never completed that hike.

 The waterfront of Aghia Galini.

 From Galini we took another bus to an intersection from where we walked. The first curiosity we came across was this sinister ruin of a former monastery (Ag. Ioannis or Ag. Vasileos).

 Part of it was used as a sheep pen, but then I came across a whole group of drugged out young people who occupied another dingy room...! We fled before they became aware of my presence. 

Eventually we arrived at Plaka Bay, where along a river several dozen of completely nude young northern Europeans lived an "alternative" life in palm huts.... The place had become famous, German TV had filmed the scene a few months earlier. We hung around for a while, the place was truly idyllic. We spent the night on a nearby beach....  

At the end of another long march with our backpacks next day, I came down with a bad case of dysentery - I had drunk the water at Plaka Bay. We got a room with this view, and the good lady who owned the place brewed herb tea for me for two days. Barbara explored the rocks at the point and found a cave above the sea, where she meditated and I later recovered for another day. 

Restored, we continued our hike through lovely country, a thunderstorm brewing over the mountains. A bad, hot wind from Africa blew next day. Hiking became a real chore. So we decided to take a boat from Chora Sfakeion to Aghia Roumeli at the mouth to the Samaria Gorge. Why not walk up for some distance instead of down like everybody else?

 But that night the weather got really ugly.

 We took a walk along the beach and...

 ...finally collapsed exhausted a mile east. We decided to abandon our ambitious hike and took a room in Ag. Roumeli. When we woke next morning the village was suffocating in smog produced by burning tourist trash. That decided the matter for good. We returned to Chora Sfakeion with the next boat and took a bus to Rethymnon from there...

 ...where we found a cool room in the basement of an apartment building. For two days we explored Rethymnon, which is an interesting town with many 19^th-century wooden houses like in Turkey. But it remained very hot. Crete had not welcomed us...

...we fled on the night boat to Paros, where it would be cooler and the people are softer and less macho than in Crete.

 At sunrise we passed through the caldera of Thira again. A landing below Ia, the second largest town on Thira...

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...the upper deck of the boat leaving Santorini behind...

Paros 

 We rented the living room of a very resolute lady right on the top of the hill of Paroikia, Paros' main town. The entertaining view from her balcony included the coming and going of the boats in the harbor and the daily lives of the people living below us, only the window shutters rattled like mad when the wind got strong at night...

Barbara in front of the church of Ag. Konstantin and Helena. The Church stands where the main temple of the classical acropolis had stood, a temple of Apollo and Artemis ? It would be an irony, because now the church is dedicated to Emperor Konstantin and his wife Helena. A famous and curious pair, of whom Byzantine history reports that she was Konstantin's mother, lover, and later wife ! Saints, both! You figure that out. - Byzantine, but true!

Sunset behind the Church of Konstantin and Helena. The nicest aspect of our quartier was that one could walk on the roofs from one house to the next into the sunset.

The "Kastro" of Paros the walls of which are built from innumerable columns and blocks from the Parian acropolis on which it stands.

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The Cathedral of Hekatontapyliades

The surprise discovery in Paroikia was its large Byzantine chathedral dedicated to: Panaghia Ekaton-ta-polyani, the "Virgin of the Hundred Doors". It was obviously not a small village church, which look like mole-hills. There was no such church in Athens, a couple in Thessaloniki - but the nearest examples were in Istanbul.

Separate of the main naos I found a baptisterio with a cruciform baptismal font! It surly had to be older than the main nave.....

Finally on the left side of and attached to the main naos a once separate church exists, with these seats for the bishop and his council. Such an arrangement I had only seen in the 5th and 4th-century churches in Rome....

For years I tried to find information on this church until ten years later I met a German archeologist at work there. He told me that the bishop's church of Ag. Nikolaos and the Baptisterion were built in 326 AD. - There had been a simple central 4th-century basilica between them, which was replaced on orders of Empress Helena with the present one by one of the master builders of the Aghia Sophia in Konstantinople in 538 AD... At once this made the Hekatontapyliadi one of the oldest churcyes surviving in Greece: 211 years older than the Hagia Sofia!

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Moni of the Aghii Anagyri above Paroikia

High up above Paroikia is a spring that waters a stand of pine trees under which we found the abandoned Moni of the Aghii Anagyri, the Heavenly Twins. Our secret in Paros. Entrance to the moni.

From there one can see the two circles of Paroikia Bay, watch the boats coming and going, and on a clear day Tinos, Mykonos, and Delos drift over the the horizon. .

Rock islands at the southern tip of Paros - each with an ancient story attached to it. Amorgos was calling. We split our remaining days and sailed through the lesser Minoan Islands to Katapola.

Amorgos

This time we went on many hikes exploring the island. Barbara on the monopati northeast of the moni Chosoviotissa. According to a mimeographed, German topomap this path led to Aigiali a village and harbor on the northern tip of the island.

Everywhere there were traces of earlier settlements now abandoned. A spring in the hills. It was dry but many votive niches attested to the great age of the place.

Our legs were badly scratched, we had lost the track and were erring cross country. Aigiali, hidden at the end of the bay visible behind the mountainside, was still far away. I had to admit that we were lost - in completely open country embarrassing! Then we came upon an abandoned village (the old German map calls it ****** , the newer Greek topo-map shows nothing. A maze of dilapidated houses, foundations, deep cisterns full of frogs croaking from the slimy green water. Not a soul. Suddenly a dog, barking furiously, came at mgfrom one of the ruins. I drove him back with stones which led us to a flock of sheep in the basement of a house and the dog's owner - King Minos who was just zipping his pants. I explained that we were lost and he put his tyre-sandles on, shouldered a basket with a large round sheep cheese and ran like a goat across the rocks towards the road to the Chora. Exhausted we rested a while when we saw the village and shared a cigarette smoke with him.... Thirty years later a villager accused him of having been addicted to bestiality.....

Barbara crossing the promontory on the southern side of the entry to Katapola Bay. We were on our way across Dokathismata to Agii Serrandi the Chapel of the Holy Forty (Martyred).

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The houses of Levkas on the south-west coast. The entrance to the bay is visible in the distance.

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There is a brook running through wild oleander bushes at Ag. Serrandis with a row of circular holes washed from the standing rock - such are called Gumpen in Bavarian. We spent the day bathing in this lovely hiding place.

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And of course, the view of the sea from the secret Garden of the monks....

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The Chora was rapidly transforming. People who had fled to Athens had begun to come back at least during the summer months. They installed bathrooms and kitchens into the old family houses, repaired and white-washed them, and added some flower pots at strategic points.

Always searching for new reflections in Katapola Bay I caught this woman.

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Barbara writing a letter in she shade of the ermitage in the Garden.

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Sounion

Back in Athens we took the bus to Sunion for a day before we flew home.