The Golden Step (3 page)

‘Would anyone be free to walk those parts with me?' I asked. Tough young Pantelis looked me over consideringly, plainly wondering if I was up to it. ‘I can come with you, depending on the weather,' was his verdict. I walked back to my hotel delighted at the prospect of his company, but more apprehensive than ever about what I was letting myself in for.

Swallows newly arrived from Africa were skimming across Platia Eleftherias, brushing through the trees with soft explosive sounds, and I thought of them winging onward to England. Another harbinger of spring, Charis Kakoulakis, eventually turned up at the hotel, late as usual, rushed as usual, as full as ever of enthusiasm, helpful advice and optimistic purpose. Flecks of lemon blossom still clung to his hair from an afternoon feast on some terrace somewhere. The tickle of his large moustache in my ear was a well-remembered keynote of his embrace. ‘I am one hundred percent sure that you will have no problem about finding the way or where to sleep. Just ask for the village priest or school teacher, and everything will be well.' He drew his characteristic line through the air with O-shaped thumb and index finger to indicate something inexpressibly complete and good. ‘In Ziros ring this friend of mine, Mr Kharkiolakis – he'll give you a room. In Papagianades you will sleep at the school for police officers – ask for
skolí tis astinomías
. Orino, that's a rich village, three tavernas, you will have no problem. At Kritsa you will ask at the
kafenion
of the Aphordakos family …' and so on and on, all the way across my maps, abolishing distance, time and difficulties with equal insouciance. It gave me confidence – greatly exaggerated, as things turned out, but a welcome boost at a time of low ebb.

Now here I was in the bucketing old bus, grinding slowly east from Iraklion, feeling queasy, trying to ignore yet another attack of cold feet. It was a relief when we finally got to Sitia and I disembarked to find the whole town revved up for the holiday. No time for thinking or worrying now; best just to take a deep breath and plunge in.

All Good Friday the amplified voices of priest and cantors, tremendously tinny and lugubrious, poured forth into every crevice of the town. In the late evening I followed the crowds up the hill to the Church of Ayia Aikaterini. The interior was a blaze of candlelight, out of which the deep, doleful chanting of the priests floated to mingle with the funereal donging of the church bell. Young girls and old men went along the line of icons in the porch, reverently touching their lips to each one.

Soon a squad of boys in blue uniforms and berets appeared in the doorway, carrying the
epitaphios –
a model bier shaped like a miniature domed church, covered in a thick mantle of white flowers. They swayed it along the streets in procession, convoyed by lanterns on poles and a candle-bedecked cross, a brass band adding a background thump and blare. I joined the flow of the crowd that shuffled slowly after the funeral party, many thousands strong, a thin brown candle flickering in every hand. Answering twinkles came from the balconies of apartments along the road, where families leaned over to sprinkle us with rose-scented water or waft incense smoke across our heads from tiny brass braziers. The caged finches and linnets that spend all day singing their little jailbird hearts out so poignantly on the balconies had woken up, confused by the lights and noise, and the sweet trickling notes of their false dawn chorus rose momentarily here and there before sinking back under the bumpity-bump of the marching band.

Our circuit of Sitia ended back in the square of Ayia Aikaterini, where the flower-decked epitaphios was positioned on its four legs in front of the door. The crowd jostled quietly in the outer dark as individuals waited their turn to stoop down and pass below the bier into the church. At this moment the left lens of my one and only pair of spectacles popped out of its frame and fell among the close-packed feet. I fully expected it to be shattered under someone's boots, or kicked away and lost forever among the dark stones. But when I knelt and put out my hand it closed immediately on the hard little shell of plastic. With a thank-you to St Jude and St Mathurin, I bent down in my turn and passed in among the lights and singing.

Later, down at the Ouzeri Mixos with a thimbleful of raki, I made friends with Andonis the pony-tailed owner and his chum Pericles. ‘Come and have Easter lunch with us,' Andonis urged, sliding a pile of chopped apple onto the table between our glasses. ‘We are having a lamb roasted on a spit.' I explained that I was on my way through to Zakros. ‘Ah, well,' he said, ‘they won't have a lamb like my lamb.' When I tried to pay for the drinks, Andonis made to give me a slap. ‘No – from me. Kali anastasi; happy resurrection.'

On Easter Saturday I took a taxi down to Ano Zakros, the upland ‘big brother' village of Kato Zakros which lay a couple of miles off by the sea. There were plenty of stares for me in the bar of the Hotel Zakros, where the old men of Ano Zakros were thumping down greasy playing cards and yawning prodigiously when they were not hobbling to the street door in order to hawk and spit into the gutter. It wasn't really a place for the stranger to hang out. I retreated to my room and got a handful of dirty clothes out of my backpack to wash them in the sink. No plug. Why hadn't I thought to bring one? I looked up ‘plug' in my word-book. Confusingly for English-speakers, it was
tapa.
My request for a
tapa
at the bar counter fluttered the hen-coop, but a basin plug materialised at last. Back in the room I got out my plastic bag of soap powder. It seemed curiously limp, and there was a hole in the bottom. I looked in the pack; a blue and white snowstorm. I washed the clothes in the residue, rinsing out the gritty suds. Now to hang the wet clothes up to dry on my balcony. Oh – no washing line. Ah – no clothes-pegs. And no shops open. Here was a lesson, the first of many: think ahead. And stop sulking – it's really quite funny, isn't it? No? Oh, come on, Mr Grumpy, hang them up behind the door and have a sleep and get over it.

At nightfall the boys of Zakros ran through the streets throwing firecrackers, while their grandmothers rolled up and down the stepped alleys with bags of eggs and bread for the night's feast. Mrs Daskalakis, the owner of the Hotel Zakros, invited me to come to her house after the midnight church service for the family's Easter meal. Mr Daskalakis bought me a beer with a wordless smile. Towards midnight they escorted me up to the church where the bare-headed priest with his tightly rolled pigtail was performing hidden mysteries behind the painted wall of the iconostasis. Unlit candles were distributed among the congregation. Just before midnight the lights were extinguished, leaving the church in darkness. The face of the priest appeared in one of the portals, lit dramatically from below by the single taper he was holding. He turned and touched its flame to the nearest candle. Slowly the light passed from person to person, spreading ever more rapidly out from the centre until the whole church and the square outside were filled with soft radiance.

‘Christos anesti, Christ is risen,' murmured Mrs Daskalakis to me, and I was able to dredge the proper response from the back of my memory: ‘Alethos anesti – risen indeed!' I could have said anything, in fact, because at that moment the men and boys waiting outside lit the fuses of the firecrackers they had been saving and threw them in a deafening volley onto the forecourt of the church, where they spat and snapped like mad cats. It was the signal for an orgy of explosions. Whizzers fizzed across the sky, rockets went up with corkscrew trails of gold sparks, and out in the back country something was let off that boomed and reverberated in the hills behind the village like a naval gun. ‘There are some crazies with dynamite …' sighed Mrs Daskalakis.

Up at the house Mr Daskalakis marked a smoky cross on the front door lintel with his carefully warded candle flame. The family sat round the table with a few neighbours and we ate soup of rice, eggs, lemon and globs of stock fat, together with cold chicken legs and lamb cutlets. Mr Daskalakis's wine was very cloudy and very strong. After the meal we grabbed red-stained boiled eggs and attempted to smash those of our neighbours while retaining our own intact. Three-year-old Athi, the melt-in-the-mouth granddaughter of my host, ran out the winner by a mile. The roosters of Ano Zakros were already crowing the day as I entered my room at the hotel, full of egg soup and cloudy wine, and walked face first into my wet shirt. This time it did seem funny – bloody funny.

Mr Daskalakis himself drove me the last few miles down to the sea on Easter Sunday afternoon. Beyond the road the ground opened immense rocky lips to form the easternmost of Crete's many gorges. ‘The Valley of the Dead,' Mr Daskalakis told me. ‘We call it this because of many old tombs high up in caves in the walls. You will see tomorrow.'

Kato Zakros was a single strip of buildings – three or four tavernas, three or four rent rooms – on a curved beach of grey pebbles between headlands of rock. It was as muted and quiet as could be. I checked into a room and took final stock. It was pretty clear by now that I had planned the contents of my backpack badly. I could hardly lift it from the floor, and when it was up between my shoulders its weight crushed me forward into a kind of painful old man's stoop. There was no way on God's earth I was going to be able to carry it 300 miles up gorges and across mountains. A ruthless cull was the only solution.

The rejected items made a small but expensive mountain in the corner of the room. Out went my spare and heavier sweater, my jeans and my leather shoes. Out went my only T-shirt, my travel pillow, one of my two sets of thermal underwear. I tore out the pages I needed from my guide books and added the mutilated volumes to the pile; my collapsible umbrella, too. I considered sacrificing sun cream and survival bag, but thought better of it. Harmonica? No – too good an ice-breaker. Books – were they a luxury I could do without? I had only brought two, after careful thought: a paperback volume of the Psalms for day-to-day inspiration (I was going to allow myself 3 a day), and a copy of the
Odyssey
because I'd never read it and would need a real proper Greek hero to look to in times of trial. No: Homer and the Psalmist had better come along.

After lightening the pack, I felt lighter in spirit, too. I gave my inner poltroon one final pep talk. It's here now. Tomorrow you are going to be out there on the first step of the way with no GPS, no mobile phone, no Greek apart from a few bare phrases to save your neck, nothing to find your way through hard country with but a plain old compass and those shifty maps. Everything's exactly as you've imagined and wanted it to be. Let go of the idea that this is some kind of tough-guy challenge. If you want to bail out at any time, feel free. If there's an editorial voice still lurking in that downsized backpack of yours – the voice that says set the goals, get the story – ignore it. This adventure is not supposed to be like that. If you worry yourself by anticipating problems every day, you'll worry the whole walk long. Dogs? Sod 'em. Just take it as it comes. Go west, middle-aged man, and savour every moment.

Out East

(Kato Zakros to Kritsa)

Near the entrance to the gorge a chicken-wire fence ran beside the path. Beyond it, dusty terraces rose up the hillside. A small hand-painted notice hanging by a dilapidated wire gate said, ‘Minoic Palast Zakros'. The gate was locked, the whole place deserted. A large hole in the fence invited goats, dogs and passers-by to try their luck within. It was a characteristic introduction to a Cretan archaeological site – and the Minoan Palace of Zakros is one of the richest and best in an island laden with magnificent and still only half excavated treasures, an island that could well be styled the cradle of European civilisation.

Cretans developed their own version of their native history thousands of years before a British archaeologist named Arthur Evans began to excavate a little knoll in the Iraklion suburb of Knossos at the turn of the 20th century. The Cretans said that mighty Zeus, chief among Olympian gods, had been born in their island, in a cave on the slopes of the Lasithi Plain, high in the Dhiktean mountains. His mother Rhea, pregnant with the unborn Zeus, fled from her spouse Kronos (who was also her brother), a God-awful monster begotten of a union between his own brother Uranus, ruler of the world, and their mutual mother Gaea. Kronos had castrated Uranus so that he himself could inherit the world; then, fearing a prophecy that he would be dethroned by his own son, the ogre ate the first five children that he sired on his sister Rhea. This was bad behaviour, even by the standards of the ancient gods.

In another cave under Mount Ida, Crete's highest mountain, baby Zeus was nursed by the goat-goddess Amaltheia. When he was grown, Zeus left Crete. He forced Kronos to vomit up his siblings alive and well, and together they succeeded in deposing their bestial father. Zeus became ruler of the heavens, and his two brothers took control of other spheres of Creation – Poseidon the Shaker, god of tempest and earthquake, held sway over the seas, while Hades governed the Underworld. But the chief god often returned to the island of his birth, generally in amorous pursuit of some lovely nymph or human girl. Zeus was immortal in the minds of most Greeks, but Cretans believed that he died and was reborn each year. In a somewhat puzzling twist, they also said that he was buried on the peak of Mount Iouchtas, looking north over the lush country around Iraklion and out across the blue Cretan Sea towards Greece and Mount Olympus.

On one of Zeus's visits to Crete he was accompanied by Europa, the beautiful young daughter of the King of Phoenicia. The god was in the form of a white bull, and Europa rode upon his back as he swam to the island. Once on Cretan soil Zeus reassumed his godly shape – or he may have changed himself into an eagle. At all events, somewhere in the south of the island, in the groves around Gortyn on the plain of Mesara, he had his way with his lovely companion. Of the three sons they conceived, one grew to be Minos the ruler, king in Crete, a man that some say was a just and even-handed monarch, others a bloody tyrant. Zeus loved Minos, and returned every nine years to the cave where Rhea had borne him for a conference with his son, patiently teaching him the arts of kingship. Minos had everything a king could wish for, including a complicated and wonderful palace which was built for him at Knossos near the north coast of Crete by the greatest practical genius in the world, the cunning craftsman Daedalus. To set the seal on his satisfaction, Minos's uncle Poseidon sent him a splendid white bull as a mark of approval. But the gods have a propensity to destroy those who become arrogant; and this gift had disastrous consequences.