Pardon that Beavis and Butthead paragraph. It won't happen again.
We boarded our bus bright (all Greek mornings are bright, as far as I can tell) and early for Malia, an hour east along the coast. Michael had actually worked at this site some years ago, and it clearly had a special place in his heart. One separate and very interesting area that he had expected to be closed off was open, and so we were able to see some of the section he worked on. Construction at Malia used three different materials, including red-mud bricks and two different kinds of stone, so the coloring of the ruins was quite dramatic, as you might be able to see in the first picture below.
Things were very conveniently labeled at Malia. Not that we needed the label in this case--by our third day in Crete everyone in the group could have identified an L.B. at a glance.
There were some unique features at Malia. I particularly liked this sort of lazy Susan for the gods, except that I don't think it actually rotated. Little token offerings were put in each of the depressions, maybe a few olives here, some grapes there, some saffron flowers or wheat grains in the next, and so on. Again, note the handy label: "Offering table."
One of the protected areas (under the modern roofs dotting some of the sites, keeping out rain that would wear the softer stone and mud away) was a very large "magazine," a storage area, in this case for large jugs of olive oil, as we can tell by the trenches in the middle designed to catch any spillage and funnel it down to where it could be collected and used for all those things one uses dirty olive oil for--say, lamp fuel.
Being one of those people who feels compelled to know as many things as possible, or, more precisely, who hates not knowing what's going on around him, I especially enjoyed those aspects of Malia that Micheal felt we could actually understand with some confidence, which helps explain the pictures I selected. Clearly there are other people who also like to know what's going on with all these ruins, since halfway through our tour of Malia we picked up a couple of extra students. At first they hung about on the fringes, but when we scooted through the open gate and over to the other part of the site, they were right there with us, and as we stood on a narrow walkway above some rooms and Michael explained what we were looking at, they were both breathing down his neck, practically elbowing us out of the way. It was comical, especially since the mother and daughter were both well over six feet tall and hardly unobtrusive anyway. I think they should have bought Michael lunch.
Speaking of which, after eating our bag lunches in Malia (no eating allowed on the Mercedes, naturally), we boarded and doubled back on our tracks through Heraklion and on to the west. Our first stop was a small site high up in the hills above the city, with absolutely no one else there when we arrived. It was fun to have a site to ourselves. I think that made me feel all the more warm towards it. Besides the Minoan ruins we also saw several very interesting bugs at this site, and I also liked the drainage system and cistern installed by later inhabitants (probably those pesky Mycenaeans). And just for good measure, we have a second-floor pier-and-door partition balanced above a passageway, and a picture of Annabel deep in an L.B.
(Doctor Who fans, please note: Annabel is wearing her "The Angels have the phone box" t-shirt, which luckily arrived in the mail just days before we left Fairbanks. We've got the Weeping Angels episode of the latest season ready to go on the computer, and will be watching it sometime this weekend. The verdict from the Fitts-Heynes on the new Doctor? He's no David Tennant, but he'll do just fine.)
From Tylissos we had our longest stretch of bus ride, west to Hania, a beautiful town with a Venetian fort guarding the snug harbor, cool little hotels in the old buildings above narrow medieval streets that reminded us of Spain, and lots of tourist shops that stayed open on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, which was lucky for us, since that's when we were there. More than lucky--vital, in fact. Hania was added to the itinerary not for the archaeology, but for the shopping. This is where Katja put us all to shame, spending perhaps eight hours in one store. (To be fair, she spent a lot of it talking over coffee with the employees, but still....) We did look at one small Minoan site in the middle of town, on a large hill that was actually entirely man-made, built up by successive centuries of construction by many different cultures. Here's the site, once again protected from the elements, but otherwise almost unmarked and easily overlooked in the middle of a residential area.
Did you spot those pier-and-door partitions, which I located near the middle of the shot purely for your convenience? I sure hope so.
(We exited the bus in Hania so quickly (because we were double-parked with a couple of cops behind us) that we only barely had time to say goodbye to our marvelous driver. Hania is so small that we had no need of further wheeled transportation, except to the ferry terminal (some miles away) late the next day, and that last trip on a big fat bus only made me miss our Mercedes the more. Meanwhile, he had turned around immediately after dropping us off and doubled back to Heraklion.)
We had one more archaeological stop on this trip, at the museum in Hania, which was fabulous. I took pictures galore, and had to delete a couple, when I didn't at first notice the small "Unpublished materials--no pictures" sign in the corner of the display case. But even with some stuff off limits, there was lots to look at, and it was great to wander around in this nearly empty place and ask Michael to explain anything we wanted explained.
Like these Minoan Dixie cups, for instance, mass-produced for single-occasion use. Sometimes it's good to see what those ancient aristocrats did when they weren't holding religious ceremonies or feasting visiting dignitaries. There must have nights when they just didn't feel like hosting people, much less gods. But when they did have people (and gods) in, they brought out the good stuff, like this drinking bowl with an appropriately Dionysian picture on the inside, and on the outside crazy eyeballs which at least one expert claimed were to indicate the drunken state in which you'll find yourself if you have too many bowls of that strong Cretan wine.
There were lots of Roman-era items in the Hania museum, including beautiful floor mosaics like this one, in which the fighting cocks (at the top--with apologies for the dark photo) symbolize the domestic argument this pair of married immortals were having with each other.
Of course Annabel was taken by some of the statues that, although not strictly angels and not covering their eyes, are nevertheless evocative of a certain race of Lonely Assassins.
I caught Michael taking a picture of the next piece, which he said was unique, and when we asked him about it, he explained that the entire air-conditioned wing containing this and many of the other best pieces (including the drinking bowl above) were from the collection of a former prime minister, and mostly looted illegally, which explained why the locations where they were found were not provided in the labels. Archaeologists are fairly sure where this particular piece comes from, but the collection as a whole is a kind of slap in the face to people who care deeply about the proper treatment of ancient artifacts.
And thus endeth the archaeology lesson for the day. We still had most of the day free until our ferry rendezvous at 7:15, so we signed up for an excursion with Captain "Nick the Greek," as he introduced himself on the side of the boat and in person, when we learned that "Nick" and "Greek" rhyme, which makes it a lot catchier. He was very sweet, and we were glad we chose the Aphrodite from the several boats lined up along the dock offering identical cruises. Not at all superstitious, we selected the "three-hour tour," although I couldn't help humming the theme to Gilligan's Island as we sipped iced coffee in the cafe opposite the quay while waiting for our departure.
Captain Nick made Annabel drive the boat, of course--I think she was the only person on board under 18--but he didn't let her drive it for long, because the headwind was fierce and growing fiercer. It looks pretty calm out there in front of Annabel, but in fact we were forced to turn around and give up on two highly touted features of the trip: a swing around a national park island inhabited by native long-horned goats, and a peer through the glass bottom at the wreck of a German WW II bomber. He offered free do-overs to those who were staying another day (and admitted that the airplane wasn't really in great shape after more than sixty years underwater), but we were ecstatic with the decision and needed no persuading, as the boat was going WAAAYYY up and WAAAYYY down, and we had chosen seats near the front in order to minimize seasickness, but found ourselves in front of the screen lowered for protection from spray (with no other seats available), treated to an excellent view of the waves looming above us in the troughs, and soaking wet from the spray coming over the gunwale. Yes, yes, turning around was fine with us, we voted for that, and with a strong tailwind we were very quickly at the last stop on the tour, the very small island and former leper colony of Lazarete, where we had plenty of time to snorkel, and where Captain Nick managed to roust out an octopus for us, which everyone who wanted to got to touch, and which some people even held in hand or on shoulder, before he returned it to a comfortable hole in the rocks.
I'm sort of sorry, but not really, you can't really make out Captain Nick's speedo in that top photo. He cut a dashing figure in mask and snorkel, leading a troop of us out to various sites and making five-meter dives below us to pry out the octopus. But the dashingness was somewhat undercut on land by the speedo.
I'll leave you with a shot of the harbor as we returned, and skip over the ferry ride home, on which we slept anyway, except to mention that the heavy seas tossed even our extremely large ferry about rather noticeably, so that the creaking and swaying kept Alex and I awake for a while, and several of us commented later that we'd had odd moments of wave-like motion, while on dry land, for several days afterward. Those in our group sleeping two decks lower claimed not to have felt it, but we who are still reeling find that hard to believe. Yah sas, Hania. Yas sas, Crete.
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