But the symbolism of Christianity, dramatic, tragic, extremely undomestic, intervenes when you least expect it. On the way up toward the cave a rough track leads off to a steep rise with a life-size wooden image of Christ on the Cross at the summit. A stony slope, the crucified figure outlined against the sky, and it is Calvary we are looking at.
The Cretan maquis, the scrub of the hillsides, is less green than that of Umbria and Tuscany, which is the region I am used to, but it is not pale. The earth is reddish, and as spring advances into summer the vegetation dries to russet in the fierce sun, and there are colors of orange and purple in it—fire colors. In evening or morning, when the sun is low in the sky and falls more obliquely on the hillsides, the scrub glows with a soft burnish, flame-colored, forming a landscape almost too beautiful to be quite believed in. From March to May or early June, a profusion of wildflowers clothes the whole expanse: malva, borage, sumptuous thistles, large, pale yellow marguerites, asphodel, orchis. Later the aromatic shrubs take over, warmed into dizzying scent by the sun: cistus, savory, thyme, sage, broom, and many others.
This flowering from the stony soil in a country of relentless summers seems almost miraculous, precarious by virtue of its own tenacity, something dearly achieved. Especially this is so with the more delicate-seeming flowers, thrift, pale pink convolvulus, petromarula, the tiny exquisite flowers resembling speedwell but darker blue that thrust the perfect shape of flower and leaf from the stones of the path under our feet. Blind growth, of course, subject to its own laws; but it is hard not to feel it the result of some caring, nurturing agency, some quality of devotion similar to that we felt at work in the surroundings of the church below.
Reaching the grotto of Agios Ioannis Xenos, St. John the Stranger, we felt this presence again. A large cave on various levels, with twisting passages, sudden openings into sunlight, small secondary chambers resembling chapels, where there might be a table draped with a fringed cloth, a geranium in an earthenware pot, candles to be lit by the faithful, icons here and there, propped against the rough rock of the walls.
St. John the Stranger was a hermit who lived in this grotto—and died here—in the eleventh century. Almost certainly a succession of holy men had inhabited the place before him. Built into a cave adjoining the main grotto is a small basilica, roughly vaulted and walled. An altarpiece, covered with a plain cloth, a brass candlestick with the stub of a candle in it. All around, on walls and vault, is evidence of frescoes painted at the time of the saint, now largely effaced by the long years of damp and decay. There is the same sense here of something dearly achieved, achieved against the odds, the order, the patient care in this lonely place so long deserted, mainly visited now by the curious and skeptical—like us; something stubborn and unyielding in it too, this care, something of the spirit that kept Cretan identity intact through centuries of grinding oppression. The frescoes seem to express the same indomitable spirit. Despite the ruining of time, the lineaments of humanity have not been lost; here and there the dark expressive faces are almost untouched. One of the three kings survives, leaning forward, proffering his gift; the head of the Virgin is still inclined in the icon posture of submission.
Less than a mile south from here, in the direction of Episkopi, a footpath leads off the road through woods to the tiny chapel of St. Stephen. With its whitewashed walls shaded by overhanging oak trees, it seems at the same time remote from the landscape and perfectly at home in it. Even in midsummer you are likely to find this tiny jewel of a church deserted. The frescoes here date from the period immediately following the expulsion of the Arabs from Crete in A.D. 961.
The Arab conquest and occupation of the island was one of the darkest periods in Cretan history. Originally from Cordoba in Spain, a band of Saracen adventurers, who had been driven from their base in Alexandria in A.D. 823, landed on Crete, led by their emir, Abu Hafs Omar. They defeated the Byzantine rulers and subjugated the island piece by piece, destroying most of the existing towns in the process. The invaders were interested only in plunder. In the 150 years of their rule, they turned the island into a slave market and pirate base, subjecting the Cretans to a degrading servitude, preying on the neighboring coasts, and pillaging the islands of the Aegean. During this period Crete was cut off from Byzantium and so from her co-religionists and the whole world of Christendom.
When the Saracens were finally defeated and Crete restored to Byzantine rule—which was to last until the Venetian invasion of 1204—there was a great sense of liberation throughout the island. The beauty and vitality of the church frescoes of this period give evidence of this, and we see a striking example in this tiny, isolated chapel of St. Stephen, where, after a thousand years of time and chance, the face of St. Mark the Evangelist, complete in every detail, still arrests the visitor with its power and delicacy. Aira took a photograph of this marvelous face and then worried in case it would be too dark, though in fact it came out beautifully. Of course, photographs never do justice to our experience. They can’t contain the complex of impressions that made the experience so memorable. But memory too suffers from a similar sort of necessary simplification. A visual image is never purely visual; it depends on the feelings and sensations of the moment, elements beyond our power of recall.
Closer to Chania, on the eastern side, the Akrotiri peninsula thrusts out to sea like a helmeted head on a long and bony neck. Here again there are caves to see, and for those visitors who don’t mind a bit of scrambling, it offers a rich and rewarding experience—and a great deal more besides.
Near Episkopi: The fresco of St. Mark the Evangelist in the chapel of St. Stephen
Following the roads on the eastern side of the peninsula will bring you to the monastery of Agia Triada, surrounded by cultivated fields and luxuriant olive groves—all the work of the monks. This is one of the best preserved of Cretan monasteries, built in the Venetian style, the stone of its walls a beautiful reddish sand color that glows in the sun as if radiating its own light. Unlike the great majority of monasteries on the island, it still functions as a community, but the outlying buildings are dilapidated and more or less abandoned—goats and cats are the main tenants nowadays.
Perhaps because such communities, and the life of work and prayer that goes with them, are dwindling and under threat of extinction, they exercise a strong fascination for many of the people who come to Crete. It was only nine o’clock in the morning when we made our visit and still fairly early in the season, but we found four buses parked outside and a sizable crowd in the precincts of the monastery. The monks’ cells were locked and silent, and we supposed their occupants were out working in the fields. The abbot sat at one side of the ticket desk, watching the people come and go. There was olive oil on sale, made by the monks themselves on their own press, bearing the label of the monastery. The income from tourism is devoted to reconstruction and repair and general upkeep, but it is difficult to imagine that this alone can restore the fortunes of the monastery. And certainly it can’t redress what is of course the main problem: the steady decline in the monastic spirit and way of life, the shortage of candidates.
All the same, the glories of the past are very much in evidence, though much has had to be rebuilt in the course of the monastery’s violent history. The main church, which stands in the center of the courtyard, was sacked by Turkish irregulars engaged in suppressing the Cretan uprising of 1821, in which many of the monks took part. After everything of value that was detachable had been carried off, the church was set alight. According to eyewitness accounts, the fire was so devastating that afterward the church resembled a limekiln. So intense was the heat that the stone blocks of the building turned to lime, and the iron bars supporting the chandelier, and the bronze of the chandelier itself, melted like wax. Naturally, none of the original church decorations could survive this. But the monks returned and set to work. The present rood screen is an exact replica of the original astonishing proliferation of carved forms, patterns of foliage and birds and beasts and hu
man figures, with the gaze of prophets and saints in the icons, somber and intent and of utmost simplicity, seeming, as always, to repudiate the opulence of decoration in which they are set.
The monastery of Agia Triada
The best way to go on from here, still on the way to our cave, is on foot, at least if one wants to get the feel of the landscape. But preferably not in the middle hours of the day in summer: The Cretan sun can be fierce and there is little shade. We took a detour roughly two miles farther north, toward the sea, to another monastery, that of Gouvernetou. The road to it is spectacularly scenic, running at first through a landscape of scattered rocks and wild olives, a setting that seems, in its beauty and desolation, to be awaiting some imminent miraculous event, then following the twists and turns of a ravine between faces of rock and scrub rising sheer on either side.
In early summer these slopes are ablaze with flowering gorse, the bushes a rounded shape, keeping close to the ground. Black goats clamber at impossible angles—most often one hears the tinkling of their bells without seeing the animal. The kids sound an anxious lonely bleating when they feel too far away from the mother. This, and the fugitive sound of the bells, and the murmur of the bees as they move among the spreads of thyme and rockrose, are all the sounds there are in these hills.
The monastery of Gouvernetou is older than Agia Triada and more austere in its architecture, with fortress-like walls enclosing the beautiful cruciform church. In the seventeenth century, during the final years of Venetian rule, it was one of the wealthiest monasteries on the island, with huge estates and a thriving community of monks. But it suffered losses under the Turks, and in the great uprising of 1821 it underwent the same fate as Agia Triada—and all the other monasteries on this peninsula of Akrotiri, in greater or lesser degree. Many of the monks were massacred and the monastery was sacked. Today it feels remote and isolated. Strange tormented faces are carved on the stone columns of the church facade, an unusual feature, more resembling the grotesqueries of Western Romanesque architecture than the more formal Orthodox tradition. Souls in pain? Demons excluded from the holy precincts? It is difficult to tell. A disheveled, sad-looking monk sells us some postcards. There are only four monks left in residence.
Now for our cave. From the northern end of the monastery square a rocky footpath winds gradually down in the direction of the sea. A few minutes’ walk brings you to a large cavern with daylight at its mouth and strange effects of shadow in its recesses. This is the very ancient cave of Arkoudiotissa, or Arkouda, once sacred to the goddess Artemis, who was worshiped here in the form of a bear—arkouda in modern Greek. And indeed there is a bear here, or the effigy of one, a stalagmite formation hunched in the dimness, leaning forward with lowered head over a stone-built cistern. Water drips steadily from overhead into the cistern. You are never likely to hear another sound so clear and distinct.
Many hundreds of thousands of slow-dripping years have gone to form this crouching creature. He was already a very old bear when Artemis was brought from Asia to be incorporated in the pantheon of the Greeks. Not difficult to see why this cave would become the center of her cult—the bear was sacred to her. But inside this same cave is another shrine, belonging to another faith: a chapel dedicated to Mary Arkoudiotissa and consecrated to the Purification of the Virgin. Mary inherited the bear, so to speak, just as the Orthodox Church inherited the ancient gods and absorbed them into its rituals.
Nikos Psilakis relates the local legend according to which the bear was alive once and used to come to the cave and drink up the water in the cistern, so that the monks of Gouvernetou went thirsty. They never caught the bear in the act of drinking, but when they went for water they always found the cistern dry. So one day they waited in hiding. But when the bear appeared it was so huge that they were panic-stricken. They couldn’t see anything, the bear shut out the light. One of them began asking the Virgin to intercede. Even as he prayed, the bear, caught in the act of drinking, was turned to stone.
The path goes on descending, more steeply now, with steps cut in the rock. Half an hour or so brings you to the ruins of another monastery, this one with its own cave, and a deeply impressive one—the church itself is built into a cavern in the hillside. This is the Katholiko monastery, also known as the Monastery of St. John the Hermit, generally thought to be the oldest on Crete. It was abandoned by the monks three hundred years ago because of repeated pirate raids.
Whether, in its long history, Crete has endured more suffering through piracy than it has inflicted is a question that can have no final answer. The totals, on both sides, are beyond arithmetic. The Cretans practiced piracy even in prehistoric times. By Homer’s day they were famous for it, raiding coasts far and near. The practice does not seem to have been frowned upon. In the fourteenth book of The Odyssey, Odysseus, passing himself off as a Cretan, relates his exploits as a pirate so as to gain the respect of his hosts, boasting of the nine raids that he made and the haul of plunder that fell into his hands.
However, in later times the island suffered terribly from Muslim corsairs raiding from their bases in North Africa. This was particularly so after 1204, when the Byzantine sea power was destroyed in the course of the Fourth Crusade and they were no longer able to patrol the coasts. Most of the best land lies on the coastal plains and so is peculiarly vulnerable. Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody, in their book on the making of the Cretan landscape, draw attention to the extreme fluctuations of population in these regions, which remained abandoned and uncultivated for long periods out of fear of pirate raids. The Venetians, during the centuries of their rule, maintained a fleet of galleys on the island whose main purpose was to protect the coasts against these marauders. But the situation did not greatly improve until the Turkish conquest in the seventeenth century, when the Christian islanders and the Muslim pirates became fellow subjects of the Ottoman Empire. This must be accounted one of the benefits brought about by Turkish occupation—they were extremely few.
Katholiko is dramatic and spectacular in its desolation now, with its church cut into the rock, its monumental stone bridge spanning a deep chasm. Built to join the monastery buildings, the bridge joins only ruins now, arching proudly over a wilderness of rock and shrub. From the track above you can trace the course of the streambed, dry in the summer months, following the gorge to the sea, which is visible from here, a gleam of water, a narrow inlet, a stony beach—the track of the pirates.
Remains of Katholiko monastery
The sides of this wild valley are dotted with caves, places of earlier worship perhaps—or earlier refuge. The cave of the hermit, in which he is said to have lived and died, lies just above the monastery, tunneling deep into the hillside, following the course of an underground stream. The saint’s grave is here, but one needs a flashlight to see it. It is said that, enfeebled by his privations and ascetic way of life, he could no longer walk upright but stooped so much that it looked as if he was going on all fours. A man out hunting mistook him for an animal and wounded him fatally with an arrow. He was just able to crawl back to his cave, and there he died.
There is always a story, especially on Crete. It can sometimes seem that the whole island is a patchwork of stories, from primal myth to heroic legend to the embroideries of local gossip. But there have been some discoveries here that defy all attempts at narrative elaboration, so bizarre and surreal do they seem. The fossil bones of dwarf mammals have been found in Cretan caves, an elephant smaller than a bullock, a pig-size hippopotamus, a deer with legs shorter than a sheep’s. The large mammals that were the ancestors of these beasts migrated to Crete some time after the end of the Miocene period, four million years ago, probably by following one of the land bridges that came and went, connecting Crete with adjacent mainlands. When these bridges were finally submerged, the migrants found themselves stranded on a mountainous island. They had no enemies to worry about, but the areas of standing water and marshland were steadily dwindling. They had to adapt or die. Smallness was the solution;
without predators they didn’t need to be so big and food supplies went further. By the time they encountered their first carnivores, in the shape of Neolithic man, they had forgotten how to run away…. After studying the bones, scientists have come to the conclusion that these dwarf hippos could climb. We are not far away here from the country of the centaur and the unicorn.
Returning to Chania on the western side of the peninsula via Stavros, one of the best beaches on the island, a slight detour brought us to the Venizelos graves, the stone-built tombs of Eleutherios Venizelos and his son Sophocles. Venizelos is Crete’s most famous son, regarded by many as the greatest of modern Greek statesmen for his role in freeing Greece from Turkish occupation and extending her territories in the early years of the twentieth century.
The graves are simple, unpretentious, lacking in pomp. From the heights you get commanding views of the city of Chania and the great sweep of the bay beyond, as far as the tip of the Rodopos peninsula. But the tombs were not situated here for the view alone, marvelous as it is. Once again, in a way that seems peculiarly Cretan, history and legend interweave. On this spot, in 1897, Venizelos, in the course of leading an insurrection against the Turkish rulers, raised the flag of a united Greece in defiance of the European powers, who still had not consented to the union of Crete with Greece. The flagpole was smashed by a shell from one of the ships in the bay below, but the Cretan rebels took up the flag and kept it flying, braving the enemy fire. The story goes that this so impressed the sailors that they broke into applause, abandoning the guns. It is also related, and in parts of the island still believed, that a Russian shell damaged the roof of the Church of Elijah the Prophet, and that this sacrilegious act brought divine retribution—the ship exploded the very next day, for no apparent reason….