First you lustrate, then you libate

Welcome to Crete, or at least to our particular four-day whirlwind tour of Crete, with an emphasis on the Bronze Age and a secondary emphasis on beaches.  Or was it shopping?  You be the judge.

I need a little help from Annabel and my students for the pictures this time, as I didn't have a camera at the ready at all moments.  Hard to believe, since I returned from the trip with 322 pictures, but there were actually many moments when I was not taking a picture, and some of them, like the Roman burial caves inhabited by hippies in the Sixties, and the octopus that Captain Nick brought up and let everyone handle, made for darn good visuals.  Luckily someone had a camera handy at such moments.  At least I managed to get a picture of every single set of pier-and-door partitions that we found among the proto-palatial and neo-palatial ruins we visited, all 30-odd of them at the seven sites.  Would you like to see them all?  No?  You'd rather see the Roman/hippie caves and the octopus?  Well, okay, but I'm going to have to sneak some archaeology into this post.  You'll thank me later, when you finish this extraordinarily long post.  If you finish.  Hey, wait, I could employ my impressive knowledge of cutting edge technology and break this into two posts, or even three, so that it wouldn't take so long to load!  And then I could include a few extra picture of ruins!  Okay, now that that's settled, let's catch our bus to Piraeus and find our ferry.

We made the 10-hour trip to Crete at night, both ways, sleeping in cabins on very big ferries.  The one going down was easily the biggest ship I've ever been on, the size of a small cruise ship, complete with shopping mall and a small swimming pool (closed, unfortunately for Annabel).  In the first shot Kate is very excited at the prospect of climbing up onto what looks like a building in the background, but is actually our boat.  As you can tell by how empty the pier looks in the second shot, we were just about the last people off in the morning, having slept in as long as we were allowed to.  We took a bus to the hotel, left our bags, had breakfast, and re-boarded our bus for the Knossos site.

The thing about this site is not just how important it was historically and archaeologically, but the fact that chunks of it have been reconstructed.  Most of Knossos and almost all of all the other sites we visited looks something like this.

But Knossos, excavated under the aegis of the godfather of Minoan archeaology, Arthur Evans, was selectively "enhanced" by reconstructions based on best evidence of the time.  So parts of it look like what Evans thought it used to look like.  Even in that first shot of the site, above, some reconstruction snuck in.  I don't know if I have any completely unreconstructed pictures from Knossos.  But here are a few more of what it looks like. 

 

How, you may ask, could Evans get away Disney-fying a landmark archaeological site like this?  Simple:  he owned it.  Those were the days when if you wanted to excavate a site, you simply had to buy it.  Nowadays if you want a building permit and there is some reason to believe you have valuable materials on your site, the government might buy it from you, but it might take forever, and you might not get what you think it's worth, and for those and other reasons some builders simply bulldoze their sites and never mention the cool stuff at all.  Because, come to think of it, the odds are pretty good that anywhere you want to put a building in Crete, somebody else put one there first, sometime in the previous five thousand years or so.

But as Michael, our fearless leader, explained, there is some advantage to starting with Knossos, because we would be better able to picture the significance of what we were seeing later.  Scroll back up to that last picture.  Those are reconstructed pier-and-door partitions, minus the wooden doors, which were kind of an ancient folding or louver door that allowed for the control of light as well as access, and were associated with ritual locations.  Maybe I'll show you a few dozen more pictures of them--if you ask nicely--but those will only be the stone (or concrete-enhanced) bases of the piers; this is what the stone portion of the whole thing looked like.  Very helpful to students like us, though real archaeologists swear under their breath against this desecration.

We caught Michael here taking one of his rare pictures (rare because he's seen these sites so many times), and of a reconstruction at that, in this case a lustral basin.  Remember that term:  lustral basin.  Or L.B., as we came to call it.  Evans gave them that name, and even though it's pretty clear that he was way wrong about them being sites for ritual cleansing, the name has stuck.  If he had been right, the Minoans would have been the ritual-bathingest people in history (or pre-history), because no palace worthy of the name could have less than a few of these.  Mostly connected to fancy walls, paved floors, pier-and-door partitions, and other cool stuff that we soon learned to recognize.

Michael did his dissertation work and other excavations on Bronze Age stuff, and however much we may learn from him about those Athenian and Spartan Johnny-come-latelies in the 6th century, it's clear that Michael's heart belongs to the Minoans, perhaps with a soft spot for the Mycenaeans.  As much fun as he had trotting us all about the Acropolis, he'd really rather be somewhere in the second millenium.  (All dates are B.C.E. in this class,which makes it particularly difficult to ask questions about Byzantine and Renaissance Venetian sites.)

The archaeological museum in Heraklion is undergoing renovation, so we toured a relatively small area which contained all the best artifacts from the museum, kind of a concentrated essence-of-museum, the cream of the crop, just the really, really good stuff.  How perfect is that?  The quarters were a bit close, but we were a small group and it was not crowded, so Michael was able to pause at each display and talk about it.  Here are a couple of the more famous pieces.  You can find much better pictures of them with the help of Google, but these will help me remember what Michael told us about the snake goddesses and the bull jumpers.  He's clearly put a lot of time into imagining what bull jumping involved, and impressed me at least with the challenge of something that makes modern matadors look like wimps.

That last image, the first you see as you enter the museum, has become an icon of Crete--you might be able to see it in the logo of our ferry company on the side of the ship, and it is one of Arthur Evans' reconstructions.  It actually consists of four separate pieces, as you might be able to see even in my poor picture:  crown, chest and right arm, thigh, and hand gripping a rein.  Unfortunately, these pieces were not found anywhere near each other, and we now know for sure that they don't belong together, can't even reasonably go together.  The thigh points one way, the chest the other; the lily crown was only worn by women.  But when a howler becomes an icon, iconography wins, and even the experts in the museum cave in and lead off their display with the famous mistake.

We saw a number of libation vessels in Crete, but this was my favorite.  They have a hole near the bottom which the libation bearer plugs with a finger until it's time to make that liquid offering to the gods.  Being a language person, I particularly enjoyed learning new verbs like "libate."  One can never have too many verbs at one's disposal.

We had a bit of adventure with the afternoon, which was free.  A few of us took a city bus trip to the beach, were battered about joyfully by enormous waves, and ending up hitching a ride most of the way home in the back of a pickup truck.  Annabel loved every bit of it, of course.

The next morning we loaded up in our bus again and headed south across the island.  This might be the time to mention that we were a little spoiled by the Athens Centre, bus-wise.  Being such a small group we fit nicely (i.e., everyone got his or her own row) in a small and nimble bus, a Mercedes no less.  Moreover, we had a very nice driver, who readily agreed to stay an extra hour in Matala so we could have more beach time.  But why say any more when there's a picture handy?--here's a shot of the Kriti-bus and our fabulous driver.  We felt very smug parked next to all those giant tour buses.

Our first stop after crossing the spine of the mountains was Gortyna, distinguished by the most complete surviving inscribed Greek law code.  Granted, this was not Bronze Age stuff, but we can't read Linear A anyway, so what the heck?  Michael explained that huge chunks of Greek law concerned inheritance when there was no male heir.  Only male heads of household supplied soldiers, so city-states that let women inherit easily soon ran out of soldiers.  And thus the fall of Sparta, we learned, which was by far the most liberal in allowing women to inherit and own property.  And here I thought it was because they threw too many babies off the rocks.  That'll teach me to get my Greek history from movies.  Here's a couple shots of that code, written Boustrophon, "as the ox plows," right to left and then back left to write, with the letters changing direction as well as the words themselves.  It fills that whole wall in the second picture.

The other big attraction at Gortyna was a ruined Byzantine church, constructed partly of materials from the earlier pagan buildings.  But perhaps "ruined" is the wrong term, given that somebody maintains this shrine.  Annabel lit a candle to the memory of her less pagan forebears.

That's Katja in the middle, by the way.  She was our official Athens Centre representative, Travel Coordinator, Entertainment Director, and Other Fearless Leader.  She kept Michael on his toes, and set a very high bar for those in the group who considered themselves skilled shoppers.

After Gortyna we had just a short hop to Phaistos, another fabulous Bronze Age site, just jam-packed with L.B.s and other now-recognizable features.  But perhaps it's time to end this post and pick things up with a fresh download.