free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Roman, Byzantine and Arab Crete
My Crete, lovely island, flower-planted garden,
There is none like you in all the peopled world.
Other folk cultures, our own for instance, arc not so insistent on the
beauty of their own country. It is something they can take for granted.
For the Cretan it has been one of his only solaces. Consciousness of the
blood that nourishes the flowers has never been far from his mind. It
is the foreigner who looks at the island without having to remember her
people, and praises the clean line of the mountains or the comfortable
orchards of lemon, orange, fig, almond and pomegranate - in Belon’s
words, ‘moult beaux jardinages et vergers d’excellente beauté et en grande
quantité, qui leur sont de grand revenu, dont les uns sont en pays si plaisant qu’un
homme ne s’ennuirait à les contempler’. Crete has not changed much. In the
evenings you can feel a great stillness, which is the best comfort, and is
harder to find in England. Even in a town, say Athens, the noises of
pneumatic drills, children playing, tyres screaming on the corners, and
the fishman shouting ‘Fine Seafood’, make a disjointed counterpoint;
but you have to impose the form on them. In the country, sounds arise
as it were naturally, point against point, from the earth. In the evening
Scop’s owl calls (that odd noise: pok . . . pok . . . pok . . .) against the
stream; and then the frogs croak; and then it is still night, with maybe a
dog barking, and if you are lucky a nightingale, but often silence. In
this silence, for one hour each night, the water sleeps in the springs and
streams, and flows gently. Whoever wishes to drink at this hour must
not be rough, but must disturb the water tenderly with his hand to
awaken it, for otherwise it may steal away his brains.
I want to turn over the Cretan earth and uncover some of those
bones; to stab a knife into the vein of Cretan history at certain selected
points and let the blood flow again. But where to start? Not with the
Minoans, who are to be found in the books of archaeologists. Their
great sites, Knossos, Phaistos, Gournia, Zakros and the rest, do not
touch the life of Cretans today except indirectly by attracting tourists
and offering a new field for defying the law, in the smuggling and sale
of antiquities. The assiduous hunter of survivals can point to strange
facts. In Minoan religion the emphasis was on female goddesses – the
huntress goddess with her beasts, the snake goddess, those whom Sir
Arthur Evans provisionally regarded as ‘the same great Nature Goddess
under various aspects’, or the Mother. Later, we find in Plato and
others that the Cretans were unique in calling their country Mitris, the
motherland, instead of the usual Patris, the fatherland. And the image
of the land as mother has persisted through folk poetry and speech into
the novels of Kazantzakis, where Crete is seen as a hard and demanding
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