I'm not really going to show you all thirty of my pictures of pier-and-door partitions (unless of course you really want to see them, and ask me very nicely). It was fun looking for those few features we had learned to recognize, and asking profoundly ignorant questions about the ones we didn't. One of Michael's main attributes as a teacher is his modesty--he refuses to say he knows what something was for when he doesn't, and he has funny stories about archaeologists who write whole books built on the rankest speculations. His reserve also allowed us room for our own occasionally rank speculations, as when someone suggested that the feature in the third picture above was a Bronze Age cat door. His response was, "Could be, I don't know what it was for, and we know they had cats." He never showed a trace of condescension no matter how far afield we ranged.
I have included just those three pictures of Phaistos, despite the fact that it was a large and beautiful site and I took a whole bunch of pictures, because we've got a lot more to cover today and we need to get moving. Remember, Phaistos was already our second stop of the morning. The third, Agia Triada, only three kilometers away, was likely an administrative center connected with the palace at Phaistos. Much of the Minoan structure was hidden under the ruins of later buildings, but we could make out some of our pet features. And once again there was a Byzantine church on the site. As the Christians sought to drive out pagan beliefs in any way they could think of, they naturally thought of putting a church on every possible pagan sacred site, such that, we were told, anywhere you see a church up at the top of a hill or mountain in Crete, there is likely a Minoan "peak sanctuary" underneath it. At this point Alex and I were guiltily enjoying the Byzantine stuff we were seeing, perhaps almost as much (gasp!) as the Bronze Age stuff. Don't tell Michael which pictures I chose to post from Agia Triada, okay?
I took a lot of versions of that first shot, even though it was starting to rain and the light was jumping all over. I was very much taken with the juxtaposition of the Bronze Age ruins, the delapidated church (from the 9th century, Michael suggested), and the large olive tree, which was in season and dropping ripe olives all over the ground. A few people tasted them; thankfully I did not, as heard, just in time, a chorus of "yucks." Raw olives are extremely bitter, and the nasty aftertaste stayed with the unlucky ones for some time, all the way to lunch at the beautiful beach-cove town of Matala. But for much of the subsequent bus ride I was thinking about this very Greek juxtaposition of olive, church, and palace, of ruin and basilica and tree, of what grows and what endures and what decays.
That was it for ruins for the day--well, except for the Roman burial caves, more recently inhabited by the likes of Joanie Mitchell, built into the cliff along the cove-side in Matala. I already told you that the driver agreed to give us an extra hour, which some used by climbing all over the cliffs, others by shopping, and most of us by swimming in the amazing blue water, floating, jumping off the rocks, lying on the beach, indulging ourselves in the ancient art of being tourists. Here's a view of the cliff of caves, then one of a cave interior, and one of the view out of a cave entrance toward the beach.
The paintings on the cave wall are not as ancient as they may appear, dating back only to the 1960s or 70s, when Matala was a major stop on the international hippie circuit. It's not hard to see why. Matala is an unbelievably perfect little beach town, with tavernas lining the cliffs on the opposite side of the cove, looking down and across at the beach and the caves. Unfortunately, we rather rushed through our delicious lunch, knowing that our time in Matala was limited, even with the grace of the bus driver's additional hour. Annabel, Alex, and I did shower off and change in time to climb the cave cliff, Annabel and I all the way to the fence at the top. It made for ideal scrambling, and if there's one thing Annabel has inherited from her father, it's a love of scrambling up things.
As we drove back to Heraklion, retracing our steps across the mountains, with the white houses of Agia Varvara strung like vertebrae up the spine of the crossing, I listened to Jackson Browne sing "I am a child in these hills" and stared out the window at the slopes of alternating grapes and olives, olives and grapes, and the peaks with tiny white churches built over temples to earlier gods, and marveled at the fact that people had been growing olives and grapes on these hills for thousands of years, and here we were, in our little Mercedes bus, flying like Hermes himself across the width of Crete, so many rich children, still salty from our sea-baths, given the powers of a god, but only for a semester. I don't know how to cue Jackson Browne on the soundtrack at this point, but here's another picture taken from the caves, looking across the cove to our lunch taverna and down to the water where Mackenzie and Annabel and Meredith are lolling on their floaties like three nereids who aren't at all worried about catching a bus.
Alex and Annabel and I had dinner that night at a seafood place near the water in the old Venetian district, where there was an octopus strung up on wires like some sort of pelagic scarecrow and Annabel enjoyed feeding the cats leftover bits of our sardines. I really should go on to talk about some of the next day rather than break it here, because we've still got a lot of Crete to cover, but it's late and I have Minoan dreams to dream, in hippie techno-color.
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