The Golden Step (27 page)

Summer had come to the coast of Crete. The grasses by the path were dry and weightless, the fields brown, the air full of dust devils. Shepherds parked their pickups on the rocky fields among congregations of madly bleating sheep and unloaded green stuff they had fetched from the mountain plains. The pale grey flanks of the hills quivered in heat haze. I followed the stony path down past Crio, where I had been told that springs of fresh water surface in the bay. As if on cue, a fisherman out in a long green boat dipped a plastic container in the sea and raised it dripping to his mouth. Drops flashed from his arms like diamonds. It seemed a kind of miracle.

Stumbling across thick sand, scrambling over rocks and pushing through tangles of juniper, I came to Elafonissi, the Island of Deer. ‘Oh, ruined! Completely ruined since they allowed the cars to drive down,' grumbled a Frenchwoman who was sharing the shade of an olive tree with me. ‘Now when I first came here, thirty years ago …'

Elafonissi is one of those places that people cherish in jealous recollection. Over a taverna table in Paleochora one of the jolly Germans had confided, with misty eyes: ‘Elafonissi, now … that's a place with magic, plenty of magic.' So it had seemed to adventurous visitors in the 1960s, when they found the track around the hillside and followed it down to find the scimitar-shaped isthmus flanked by white beaches and a limpid turquoise sea. A lonely place, a few lucky people's secret. Now a dirt road had been pushed to the water's edge, and half-built hotels were beginning to march seaward. It was a time of lamentation among those middle-aged children of the golden past. But for me this day, shirt off and wading into that beautiful sea, all was bright and touched with enchantment.

On now along the road, through the dusty coastal plain, out to the westernmost corner of Crete. A block of white, a holy citadel raised high on a rock – Hrissoskalitissas, floating like a ship on a silvery sea of olive leaves. Churches, houses, monastic cells, storerooms all huddled together, a dazzle of white under a cluster of bright blue domes. I sat down on a rock, staring. The map, what there was left of it, showed the thin red line of E4 running on northwards for another thirty miles or more before burying its head in the Gulf of Kissamou between the peninsular horns of the island of Minos. And then where? Over to Cyprus, back to Greece, out into the wild blue yonder? I didn't know. My false-hearted lover had put me through the mill all right. I had tasted magic because of her, all the same, and was thankful. Now she was out of my system. Go where she would, I wasn't following.

I climbed the long stairway that I had dreamed of, gilded from top to bottom in brilliant sunshine. Whatever the state of my heart and soul, it seemed an irrelevance now to look for the golden step. In the monastery courtyard the solitary monk of Hrissoskalitissas came hurrying to greet the stranger. Dressed in a dusty and much-patched blue cassock, his mage's hair and beard floating in a soft white cloud behind him, there was a saintly and at the same time an earthy air to Papa Nektarios – Father Sweetness. Welcome, my friend! You look a little tired. Here are raki, sweet biscuits, water, apples. Where have you travelled from? Hah, that's a long way. Where will you sleep tonight? Why not here? Certainly there's room – one old monk can't sleep in twenty cells, you know!

The cell was spartan – a lumpy bed, a wooden door nailed and shuttered, a small hatch for communication with the outside world. To me it seemed perfection, a simple end to a long and ravelled journey. Dog-tired and drained of steam, still I couldn't sleep that night. Somewhere inside, the spring of energy still bubbled. I sat on the monastery wall, looking across the valley to where black outlines of mountains rose into a starry sky, until the mightiest of yawns almost broke my jaw in two.

Bells woke me, clashing the day to life. Up on the windy terrace Father Sweetness was laughing out loud and hauling bell ropes as if bracing round a set of celestial topsails. It was Pentecost Sunday. In a little while I would haul my wind and square away for other shores. But there was something to do first, a seal to set on things. In the monastery church, in front of a thousand-year-old icon of the Virgin, a cornucopia of offerings lay heaped on a lace mat. Among taximata and lucky charms, between a marriage ring and a tiny golden heart, I placed the sea-smoothed pebble I had carried across the island of earth and dreams.

Author's Note

T
he bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO in 1999 lasted from 24 March until mid-June, a couple of weeks after I had returned home from Crete. By then NATO was considering a ground invasion, although US President Bill Clinton was reluctant to commit American troops. However, Finnish and Russian negotiators finally persuaded Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of the seriousness of the threat of invasion, and he agreed to allow a military presence, KFOR (Kosovo Force), into Kosovo. This force, under UN auspices but containing NATO elements, incorporated troops from France, Germany, Britain, Italy, the United States and Greece.

On 12 June 1999 KFOR began to enter Kosovo. Within three weeks some 500,000 refugees, mostly Albanian Kosovars, had returned home. By the end of November all but a handful were back where they had fled from in the spring, finding when they returned that most of the Serbian Kosovars who had been their neighbours – up to 250,000 people – had in their turn fled over the Serbian border for fear of reprisals.

Accurate casualty figures are hard to come by, but best estimates are that NATO strikes killed over a thousand civilians during the campaign. They also caused up to 5,000 military casualties. NATO casualties amounted to two US helicopter pilots.

Mass graves of Albanian Kosovars killed by Serbian forces were found in Serbia as well as in Kosovo. Estimates are that up to 10,000 may have been killed.

President Milosevic was deposed in 2000, and went on trial in The Hague the following year, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. He died on 11 March 2006, before his trial could be completed.

Since 1999 Kosovo has continued to be administered by the United Nations. At the time of writing (spring 2007) its future status – whether as an independent state or as a part of Serbia – is still being debated.

As for the Cretan section of European Hiking Path E4 – it is far more widely mentioned online nowadays than was the case in 1999. A few more walkers have ventured its baffling byways. But reports suggest it is fundamentally no better waymarked, no easier to follow than when I set out to see where it would lead me. No reliable guidebook in English yet exists – that potential best-seller is waiting to be written by some intrepid soul. E4 could be the Pennine Way of Crete, or the Coast-to-Coast – a much-loved, much-travelled path. At present it remains elusive, enigmatic and fluid; a challenge to all comers, infrequently attempted, seldom accomplished. With all the imperfections and inherent difficulties of the path, there is no more entrancing way to discover the Mediterranean's largest and most magical island. However, E4 offers no guarantees of safety or success. So perhaps it is just as well that it remains in an unfinished and unpolished state – a rare diamond in the rough.

Acknowledgements

D
uring my long walk through Crete I enjoyed so much hospitality among Europe's most hospitable people that I'd need to write another book to thank them all by name. I would especially like to thank these kind friends and acquaintances:

Aglaia Hill of Bristol for helping me to learn some Greek.

Iannis Pantatosakis and Kitsa of the Iraklion branch of the Greek Alpine Club for helpful advice on the vagaries of European Hiking Path E4.

Very special thanks to Pantelis Kampaxis for his invaluable companionship in the mountains.

I am very grateful, as always, to Charis Kakoulakis for the long arm of his help, and to Maria, Dimitris and George for their hospitality.

Stelios Jackson, one of the few to have ventured the E4 path through Crete, distributes news on it and on all things Cretan through his admirable websites http://www.hellenicbookservice.com/Kriti/Kriti.htm and http://sjwalks.interkriti.org/

For help and Easter hospitality in Ano Zakros my thanks are due to Mr and Mrs Daskalakis of Hotel Zakros; in Ziros to the Kharkiolaki family; to Dimitri and Katerina of the Taverna o Pitopoulis in Prina; in Kritsa to Manolis and Argyro Tzanakis, Iannis Siganos, Stergios who gave me my white fig-wood katsouna, and to the mighty Aphordakos clan – especially George, Manolis and Rula. I'm likewise grateful to Archimandrite Stephanos Marankakis of Moni Angarathou; Manolis and Maria Piperakis of Ano Asites; Stelios Manousakas of Argyroupolis; Stelios Giannakakis and his family at Kallikratis; Giannis, Manolis and Georgios Fasoulakis of the Lefka Ori Hotel in Chora Sfakion; Vangelis and family of the Blue House Hotel and Alison Androulakakis of the Hotel Porto Loutro, both in Loutro.

Jean Bienvenue gave me a memorable walk in Lefka Ori, and Papa Nektarios made sure I had somewhere to lay my head at journey's end.

Last, but by no means least of my friends in Crete, I'd like to thank Lambros and Maria Papoutsakis of the Taverna Aravanes in Thronos at the head of the Amari Valley, a fountain of good food, wine, music and delight.

And finally my love and thanks to my wife Jane and my family, who urged me to set out on this walk and encouraged me every step of the way.

I am grateful to Sheil Land Associates for permission to reproduce a passage from George Psychoundakis's inspirational book ‘The Cretan Runner' (Penguin).

The poems ‘Argyro peeling oranges', ‘The olive fires', ‘The high man', ‘The hollow stone', ‘Shepherd', ‘Beautiful Katsouna', ‘Two Cretes', ‘Neroutsiko water' and ‘The tattered map' were first published in Christopher Somerville's collection
Extraordinary Flight
(Rockingham Press, 2000).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Somerville is a writer, journalist and presenter. During the past twenty-five years, he has been threading Europe's most characteristic countryside paths, recording his experience in over thirty books – including two charming collections of poems. Somerville was Walking Correspondent of
The Daily Telegraph
for fifteen years and is the author of
Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places
,
Somerville's 100 Best Walks
and
Greenwood Dark
.