An online exploration of the island's rich and varied archaeological and historical sites
Tourists usually flock to Greece for its silky beaches, pulsating nightclubs, and treasures of classical antiquity, all of which are found there in abundance. But ever since I first visited in 1993, my heart has belonged to the largest and southernmost of the Greek islands—Crete, which boasts the country's only native palm-tree forest; serves up a potent local moonshine called raki from unmarked clear bottles at street-side coffee shops; and was home to the great Bronze Age civilization of the Minoans. For the next few weeks I'll be circumnavigating the island, speaking with archaeologists who will guide us through ancient palaces and towns.
Perhaps the best-known site on Crete is Knossos, whose labyrinthine storage magazines are reminiscent of the legend of Theseus. The Athenian, sent as a sacrificial victim to appease the part-man, part-bull Minotaur, instead slew the creature and found his way out of its mazelike labyrinth thanks to the Minoan king's love-struck daughter, Ariadne.
My trip begins with an overnight stay in Athens and a visit to the new Acropolis Museum, after which I embark on an overnight cruise to Crete. The first week, I'll be visiting the archaeological sites near the modern-day cities of Iraklion, Rethymnon, and Chania. After those stops, we'll see where the archaeology takes me.
Each day—Internet access permitting—I'll be sending updates to our Facebook and Twitter sites. Check back here for the latest photographs, videos, and impressions.
It’s hard to believe, but this is the last full day of my trip. I had hoped to make it even further east, but I’ll have to save that for my next voyage to Crete. This is the night before the full August moon, and as luck (and timing) would have it, I visited the Minoan site of Mochlos this evening. As the sun splashed its last rays into the Aegean, the site glowed for just a moment before becoming engulfed in the dazzling moonlight. Ah, Crete.
Please check back here in the coming weeks. When I return to New York, I’ll be adding even more information about each of the sites listed below, including photos, interviews with the archaeologists, and video footage.
A friendly taxi driver from Agios Nikolaos pulled his cab over to the side of the road so I could take this photo as we passed the Minoan palace of Gournia.
Today I forged eastward again to visit the site of Dreros, known from excavations earlier in the 20th century to have flourished between the Geometric and the late Hellenistic periods. I met up with the French-Greek team working there—led by Alexandre Farnoux and Vassiliki Zografakis—three weeks into a brand-new five-year project.
The team’s goals are to investigate and document the extent of the site, as well as to clean and restore it. In the coming years, they hope to determine the earliest occupation date (nearby, in a small necropolis, Late Minoan tombs have been found) and the course of its later history (up to Byzantine times). They are also looking to glean information about how an urban center like Dreros, spread across two mountaintops, functioned.
Inscriptions from the site state that Dreros was destroyed by enemies from another Cretan city-state called Lyttos in the late third century B.C. The team has already started to see tantalizing traces of the destruction level, which they had wanted to illuminate.
Logic would dictate that I continue making my way eastward, but the opportunity for a second meeting with Elpida Hadjidakis at Falasarna lured me back west yesterday. I’ll be reporting separately on our conversation regarding a groundbreaking discovery she made at another site.
Today, I was delighted also to meet again with Athanasia Kanta, director of Iraklion’s Archaeological Museum. The experienced and passionate archaeologist, who has dug at sites all over Crete, guided me through Monastiraki (named after a small monastery in a nearby village of the same name), where she has been leading excavations since 1980. The Minoan site, which lies in the Amari Valley near the southwest foothills of Mt. Ida, was a major center for wine and cloth production during the Protopalatial period (Middle Bronze Age). Kanta also believes it had a close and special relationship with the palace at Phaistos.
The last year of large-scale excavations at Monastiraki was 1999. Over the past decade, Kanta has focused on studying and publishing material from this fascinating site.
Kanta and her dog Hercules stand in front of a natural rock formation at Monastiraki. The rock was originally covered with thick, coarse, white plaster--her team has collected bagfulls of it--a feature not found at any other site on Crete. On the side of the rock, the archaeologists discovered narrow terraces made of little stones, presumably to facilitate climbing to the top, which had been leveled.
The rock may have provided a vantage point from which people could watch over the surrounding roads. But trial trenches at its base have revealed an intriguing discovery that may lead to another interpretation: a 5.9-inch-tall statuette made of fine clay in the barbotine technique that depicts a couple embracing--a young male and a naked, older female (his head nestled in her breasts). Kanta believes that it is not an erotic pose--one of the man's arms clearly separates the two--but rather a Minoan goddess and either her consort or the ruler of the area. (Parallel examples exist in Egypt and Syria.) The find suggests the rock may also have had religious significance, but further excavations are needed before any conclusions can be drawn.
In 2007, a team of Belgian archaeologists–led by Jan Driessen, general director, and Ilse Schoep, codirector–started digging on Kephali Hill near the village of Sissi, where they have found a Minoan settlement located two and a half miles east of Malia. The team, many members of which also previously dug at Malia, is hoping the excavations will shed light on how Minoan society was structured. The archaeologists believe the site was significant because it guarded the entrance to East Crete.
Driessen (left, facing forward), oversees work atop the 20-meter-high hill, where the latest remains of the settlement (15th-13th century B.C.) are being unearthed. Florence Gaignerot and Quentin Letesson direct excavation of the Late Minoan III central building in this area, while Maud Devolder supervises work in zone 5, also Late Minoan III, against the south top of the summit.
I am now reporting from the eastern part of Crete, where the landscape becomes drier and rockier, and the roads that lie along the shimmering sea taunt drivers as they twist, turn, and snake, hugging each mountain’s curves and doubling the amount of time it takes to get from one village to the next.
All roads on Crete eventually lead back to Iraklion, so here I am again. Spent yesterday in transit and organizing my photos and notes. Today, I saw another important salvage dig and toured the Archaeological Museum.
Salvage excavations were conducted last year at this site near the sea, where a pedestrian walkway was planned. Archaeologists found the remains of a Greek Orthodox church built in the 12th century, with intriguing wall paintings that date to the 13th and 14th centuries (the church appears to have been in use until the 16th century). It also featured 36 rectangular graves in the floor, visible in the foreground.
Yesterday I spent the day in Chania before boarding the 8:30 a.m. bus to Falasarna, one of the westernmost points on Crete. Here, a team under the direction of veteran archaeologist Elpida Hadjidakis has unearthed a “closed” Hellenistic harbor in an unlikely place—dry land.
I caught up with Hadjidakis and the team on the first day of the dig season. The feisty, hands-on excavator, a self-proclaimed “harbor girl” who grew up in Chania and Athens, spoke with me as she scrutinized every centimeter of soil unearthed that windy day.
The archaeologists (lower center) dig for the continuation of the harbor amid a dramatic landscape. Although they haven’t conducted formal excavations atop the hill behind them, they believe the acropolis of the ancient city was located there. The hill’s central chunk was lost in an as-yet-undetermined cataclysmic event.
Over the past two and a half decades, archaeologists have excavated the acropolis, city, and necropolis of ancient Eleutherna under the direction of famous archaeologist Nicholas Stampolidis. Occupation dates from the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 B.C.) to the Middle Ages (12th-13th century A.D.).
Although the cemetery is filled with skeletons, the tranquil site is teeming with life, including an orchestra of chirping cicadas and a troupe of yellow butterflies dancing in the ever-present gentle breeze.
Additional information about the site, featuring video interviews with Stampolidis and important team members, will soon be available online.
The cemetery at Eleutherna (center) is covered with an elaborate protective roof. It was designed to blend in as harmoniously as possible with the landscape.
Today I’m staying at a hotel on the beach just outside Rethymno, near the ancient city of Eleutherna. I’ll get a full tour of the site from the archaeologists tomorrow. In the meantime, they’ve been kind enough to show me the environs. The unmarked, rocky roads that hug the surrounding hills–the northern foothills of Mt. Ida–kick up clouds of dust as the team’s creaky pickup truck shifts gears to avoid uphill catastrophe at each sharp curve. But what awaits us at the other end is well worth the nail-biting journey.
The landscape is dotted with innumerable rock-cut Roman tombs (left) like this one, as far as the eye can see. In recent years, local shepherds have converted an adjacent tomb here into a small chapel.
Traveling west across Crete, the island’s character changes markedly, its landscape becoming more lush and forgiving, and its seaside towns sleepier and dreamier than bustling Iraklion.
A few miles outside of Chania lies Souda Bay. I took this photo from the nearby British Commonwealth War Cemetery, where 1,527 of the 2,000 who lost their lives in the Battle for Crete (between the Allies and German forces) in May 1941 are buried. Today, the otherwise tranquil waters host Greek and U.S. military bases, the fighter-jet exercises from which can be seen and heard from beaches all along the island's northwest coast.
The Labrys Dance Group from the Cretan Association of New York, under the direction of Nikos Zoulakis, performed a couple of nights ago. Chania’s picturesque Firkas Fortress, built in 1629, provided the romantic backdrop along the city’s Venetian harbor. In this video, the group dances the Pentozalis, which is believed to have ancient origins.
According to Greek mythology, the god Kronos killed his father Uranus and usurped his power. Kronos then married his own sister, Rhea, with whom he started fathering children. But Kronos became paranoid that he would succumb to his father’s fate, so he began swallowing his offspring one by one. When Zeus was born, however, Rhea tricked Kronos into swallowing a rock wrapped in a blanket, and instead hid the baby in a cave on Crete. As the legend goes, the Kourites, the guardians of the cave (Ideon Andron), performed this noisy dance—filled with stomping—to stifle the baby’s cries, which ultimately saved his life.
In modern times, the dance has been associated with Crete’s 1770 revolution, led by Yiannis Daskalogiannis, against the Turks. The stomping is believed to represent the army preparing for battle.
I hope to contact the British School archaeologists working at Knossos while I’m staying in Iraklion next week, but in the meantime, I’ve decided to enjoy the iconic site as a tourist. I’ve visited several times over the years, marveling equally at the romance of the finds–deemed the improbable, mythical “Minotaur’s labyrinth” by its most famous excavator Sir Arthur Evans in the early 20th century–and extent of their reconstruction in reinforced concrete. While structured pathways give the site a sterile feel, the layout and architecture are ever impressive. Not only was the complex fitted with running water and flushing toilets, the doors were designed to slide into the walls of each room, opening up spaces and filling them with light, or closing them off to darken them, as needed.
Near the modern entrance to the site are reconstructed bull's "Horns of Consecration" (right), a term coined by Evans to describe one of the sacred symbols of the Minoans.
Although the Minoans are best known as seafarers, excavations at the site of Zominthos, nestled in a plateau on Mt. Ida, Crete’s highest mountain, have shown that they were also highlanders. This important second-millennium B.C. site, located about 1,200 meters above sea level, lies on the ancient route between Knossos and the sacred Ideon Cave, where the god Zeus is believed by some to have been born and raised. (Others think the legend arose from the Dikteon Cave on Eastern Crete.)
Zominthos is the only mountaintop Minoan site ever to have been excavated and is already yielding groundbreaking information on what was thought to be a well-known civilization. Today’s photos provide only a general overview. A video tour of the site, led by excavation director Yannis Sakellarakis, will be available online soon.
Preeminent archaeologist Yannis Sakellarakis directs excavations at Zominthos, along with his (photo-shy) wife, Efi. He first heard of the site from a shepherd in the 1982, when he was excavating the Ideon Cave. He conducted small-scale explorations here over the years, but has only been digging formally at the site since 2004.
At any given time, there are about 20 salvage excavations being conducted in Iraklion, the largest city on Crete. Archaeologist Liana Starida is the director of all of the digs throughout the city. She also oversees the reconstruction of its ancient walls and fortresses.
Over the past 20 years, salvage excavations have contributed greatly to scholars’ understanding of the city’s history. Archaeologists now have a clear picture of the size and affluence of the city during Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian times, as well as Arab, and Byzantine, and Venetian occupations.
At this salvage site in Iraklion, which will one day be a commercial complex, Starida and her team have excavated Arabic, Byzantine, and Venetian structures, including public buildings, houses, and walls. “We find cities under the city,” she says.
East of Iraklion lies the village of Elounda, from which visitors can sail to the island of Spinaloga. Although it is small enough to walk the perimeter in half an hour or so, the island boasts a rich and complicated history, which began with a Roman settlement that dates from 67 B.C. to A.D. 395.
Arabs lived on the island between A.D. 851 and 961, followed by Venetians (1204-1669) and Turks (1715-1898). From 1904 to 1957, Spinaloga was occupied by a leper colony, after which it was abandoned and is now in the process of being reconstructed by the Ministry of Culture.
Don’t worry, we’ll get to the Minoan sites soon. But as they say here in Greece, “siga-siga” (slowly, slowly). For now, I’m enjoying the journey, the famous Cretan hospitality, and a little raki.
Crete may be best known for its ancient Minoan civilization, but the port city of Iraklion is also famous for its well-preserved Venetian walls and fortresses.
Although flights depart regularly from Athens to Iraklion, many people take an overnight ferry to Crete. This cruise line invokes the spirit of the ancient Minoans, who extended their influence across the seas.
I arrived in Athens only yesterday, but have already found it much changed since my last visit in 1997. It is a markedly “post-Olympic” city, with a new airport, a new currency (the Euro having replaced the drachma), and a new sense of how to manage visitors at its major tourist destinations, including marked paths to enter and exit the Acropolis. Unchanged is the proud Greek spirit and sweet mixture of chaos and calm that pervades every aspect of life.
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