The Golden Step (4 page)

If he had been wiser, or better-mannered, King Minos would have returned Poseidon's bull to its godly donor in the form of a sacrifice – the ultimate token of respect. But the Cretan king couldn't bring himself to destroy such a magnificent animal, and made the mistake of offering a lesser beast instead. Poseidon, mortally insulted, cast a spell on Minos's wife, Queen Pasiphae, causing her to fall hotly in love with the bull. The animal, however, showed no interest in her. Pasiphae secretly enlisted the help of Daedalus, who constructed a hollow model cow in which the queen concealed herself. The bull, inflamed by the beauty of the cow, mounted both model and hidden woman simultaneously. The offspring of this tragi-comic union turned out to be a freak, the Minotaur, with the body of a human and the head of a bull, whom King Minos ordered to be incarcerated in the mazy labyrinth of passages and dungeons that Daedalus constructed beneath his palace. Here the monster was fed on batches of youths and maidens shipped in from Athens.

Brave Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, volunteered to join one of the consignments and try to put an end to the terrible toll of fine young women and men. On arrival in Crete the handsome young prince enlisted the help of Minos's daughter Ariadne. She gave him her heart, along with a ball of wool. Unravelling the wool as he went, Theseus entered the dark labyrinth, confronted and killed the Minotaur, and found his way out again by following the thread. The lovers escaped from Crete together with the other Athenian hostages, but after a night of passion Theseus – not quite as honourable as he was handsome – abandoned Minos's daughter on the island of Naxos. To punish him, the gods caused him to forget to change the sails of his ship – the agreed signal that his mission had succeeded – and King Aegeus, watching from the cliffs, assumed his beloved son was dead and threw himself to his own death in the sea.

Back on Crete a furious King Minos was looking around for a scapegoat. Daedalus and his son Icarus fled the wrath of the king by flying away from the island on homemade wings of wax and feathers. High over the sea, Icarus became careless and flew too near the sun. The wax on his wings melted, sending him plummeting into the water. His grief-stricken father flew on to Sicily, where he went into hiding at the court of King Kokalos.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. King Minos, crazed with lust for revenge on Daedalus – the architect, as he saw it, of the whole tragedy – was rash enough to follow him into the foreign island of Sicily. The daughters of King Kokalos attended the maniacal Minos as he took a bath, and there they scalded him to death.

As a mythic backdrop to an island of strong passions and quick tempers, this bloody and fast-moving tale seems absolutely apt. Poking around the ruins of Zakros Palace that April morning, I thought of the gradual dawning during the 19th century of the realisation that there might be a historical foundation for the Gothic extravagances of these ancient world fables. The Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr, shadowily remembered in Crete as a dashing figure astride a galloping black horse, initiated many digs around the island in the 1880s and '90s, discovering fragments of towns and dwellings and their artefacts that had lain under the fields and hillside rocks for thousands of years. But it was Arthur Evans's epic excavation from 1900 onwards of the palace of King Minos at Knossos, focus of the whole splendid old story, that grabbed hold of the public imagination. Whether there had ever really been a King Minos, or a Labyrinth with a bull-headed Minotaur, was beside the point. Evans unearthed a giant complex of dwellings – more like a close-packed town than a royal palace, in fact – with workshops and ceremonial rooms, strongholds and halls, staircases and colonnades, complete with pottery, glassware, domestic fittings, cutlery, tools, jewellery, and beautiful, vividly executed frescoes. There was controversy about some of his methods, particularly his penchant for reconstructing parts of the palace on fairly flimsy factual grounds. No matter, thought most of the watching world. Evans's discovery flung the door wide open on the brilliant 4,000-year-old civilisation he named ‘Minoan' after its best-known, if not quite verifiable, ruler. By their paintings and sculptures, their buildings and engravings, the Minoans stood revealed as a vibrant, peaceful, prosperous and life-loving people, dancers and musicians, traders and manufacturers of beautiful jewellery and pottery, worshippers of bulls and of the deities in nature, able to read and write long before any of their European counterparts, with a spiritual and artistic sensibility far in advance of anything that had been expected of so ancient a culture.

Where there was one Minoan palace, there must be more. So judged the archaeologists, native and foreign, as they combed the island during the early 20th century, looking for signs and wonders. Grand complexes of buildings were unearthed at Phaistos on the Mesara Plain near Gortyn, and at Malia on the north coast some 30 miles east of Iraklion. But the far east of Crete seemed fruitless ground.

Stylianos Giamalakis, an Irakliot doctor, was an avid collector of antiquities. It was a call to the sickbed of a farmer at Ano Zakros that brought Giamalakis to the eastern end of the island shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, and he had his reward when the grateful patient offered him, as in a fairy story, three gifts of gold – a bowl, a bull's-head pendant, and a diadem depicting a goddess-goatherd. They came, the farmer said, from that flat place down by the sea where an Englishman had found some antique houses forty years before. Dr Giamalakis knew of an archaeological dig carried out on the coastal plain below the Valley of the Dead in 1901 by the British antiquarian David Hogarth, and he could see with his own eyes the exquisite workmanship of the three jewels. He gave the farmer everything he had in his pockets, and added his gold watch. The ‘finds' were priceless treasures of the Bronze Age, at least as fine as anything that Evans had dug up at Knossos, and they pointed clearly to the strong possibility of another wonderful palace lying hidden under the olive groves and terraces of Kato Zakros.

With the war came German occupation of Crete, and archaeological activity shut down for the duration. Afterwards it was slow to get going again, but in 1962 the Greek archaeologist Nikolaos Platon began to excavate only a few feet away from Hogarth's old site. Immediately he struck a set of ruins which, as the dig widened out, revealed themselves as belonging to a palace of around the same date as Knossos and the other unearthed Minoan palaces, roughly 1900–1700
BC
. Here were state apartments, bedrooms fit for a king and queen, treasury rooms, bathing halls, kitchens, workshops, cisterns, paved roadways. But there was one crucial difference. Zakros was far more complete, far richer in artefacts, than its sister sites. Unlike the other Minoan complexes, the ruins of the magnificent palace at the eastern end of Crete, it appeared, had lain undiscovered, undisturbed and unplundered ever since the Great Disaster of 1450
BC
.

No-one yet knows exactly what caused the destruction of all the big town-like palaces at that late Bronze Age stage. Everyone is agreed that they had all been felled simultaneously some 250 years previously in a catastrophic earthquake. The archaeological evidence is quite clear about their destruction around 1700
BC
, and their subsequent rebuilding in even more magnificent style – the hallmark of a vigorous and confident society. But what epic disaster could it have been that struck Crete in 1450
BC
, levelling every palace in the island? The one common theme is fire, which scorched the stones and tiles at every site. An earthquake such as the one in 1700
BC
would have trapped people in large numbers in the ruins, but there is no sign of that having happened. A tidal wave, perhaps? There was a huge explosion around this era on the volcanic island of Santorini, less than 80 miles to the north. A massive tsunami might have overwhelmed the north coast palace of Malia and the one at Knossos just inland. Zakros in its coastal position in the east could have been vulnerable, too. But Phaistos, ten miles inland in the sheltered south of the island? Most unlikely. And wouldn't a tidal wave have swamped and extinguished all fires when it hit? The eruption of Santorini, anyway, almost certainly happened many decades before Crete's disaster.

The finger seems to point to some man-made catastrophe, probably an uprising in the island which saw the palaces and other main buildings burned by rioters. Perhaps the insurgents were Myceneans from mainland Greece – they were well established in Crete by then, and subsequently took over from the Minoans, or at any rate lived alongside them. But could the participants in a raggle-taggle rising really have caused such damage, such crushing and flattening of solid stone buildings, of large, complicated structures? Or had that been simply the work of time? Whatever the truth of that ancient cataclysm, it spelt the sudden and complete end of the Minoan civilisation in its full flourishing. The secrets of those fabulous, expressive people sank underground and stayed hibernating there, stumbled in upon from time to time by robbers or lucky chancers, to re-emerge after some 3,500 years in all their butterfly glory.

I climbed the ancient roadway up the hill to a vantage point from which the whole palace of Zakros lay spread out for inspection – the dark eye of the circular cistern, the square shapes of the royal apartments, the great central court with its well where the excavators found a jar of olives that had lain perfectly preserved by the water for 3,500 years. Anyone who has strolled round Knossos with its reconstructed buildings and frescoes might be forgiven for finding the other Minoan sites of Crete baffling or even boring, unlabelled and at shin height as most of them are. But here at silent Zakros the mind's eye could conjure up, from previous visits to Iraklion's superb archaeological museum, the wonderful things so indicative of that Minoan love of life that were found among these ochre-coloured rectangles: ritual vessels of turned stone with gracefully curved handles, pigeon-chested jugs patterned with bamboo leaves and floral swirls, a
rhyton
or ceremonial ewer fashioned in the semblance of a bull's head, another made of exquisitely carved rock crystal with a handle of crystal beads stained a delicate green by the copper wire on which they were threaded. I descended the roadway and stepped out through the hole in the fence with a head full of marvels.

‘Dead's Gorge' said the notice by the path. I crunched over sheets of pebbles brought down the gorge by last winter's floods, and entered the narrow mouth of the Valley of the Dead. Birds whistled and flew from dark caves high in the gorge walls where the Minoans buried their dead long before the great palaces were built. Signs of spring were everywhere – hard little green fruits on the fig trees, bird nests in the rock crevices, wild sage and thyme sending out their aromatic message. Scraggy sheep browsed among the oleanders with a donging of neck bells. Yellow-flowered asphodels rose from stony beds, and down on the floor of the gorge grew dragon lilies, the most sexual of plants, each large shoot resembling a slim pointed dog's pizzle sheathed in a crinkly-edged vulva of deep velvety purple. As symbols of springtime and the risen sap they couldn't have been more blatant.

The path, very rocky and marked with splodges of red paint, climbed gradually through the windings of the gorge to reach the road a little short of Ano Zakros. As I walked into the village a car pulled up alongside. At the window grinned the face of a Frenchman I'd spoken to about my expedition in Kato Zakros last night. ‘Je suis Le Tentateur!' he hissed melodramatically, twirling an imaginary moustache and jerking his thumb towards the passenger seat. ‘Va-t-en en arrière de moi, Tentateur,' I riposted, firmly if ungrammatically, and watched him roar away, his free hand making the sign of the devil's horns out of the window.

In Ano Zakros a battered tin E4 sign tacked to a telegraph pole pointed me on up a rough, rubbly path, an old
kalderimi
or cobbled track engineered centuries ago for transport by donkey. This was my first proper taste of conditions underfoot that would persist from end to end of the limestone island and wear the soles of my boots quite flat over seven weeks of tramping. I dug the figwood katsouna into the pebbles and skittered on up. At the top of the hill the path led out into stony and spiny uplands, gave a couple of wriggles and made off through a gate – a proper Cretan field gate, a square of metal rods filled in with chicken wire, hinged with wire and fastened with a wire loop to a lopsided opening in the fence. These rustic gates, just sturdy enough to deter a sheep, were a feature of the Cretan countryside that I soon came to look for, their rusty orange materials hard to spot against the rust-red rocks. Beyond the gate the path, marked with sun-faded E4 signs, wound among the grasses of the sweet green valley of Skalia, side by side at first with a broad dirt road, then gradually diverging until the two routes vanished over the skyline several hundred yards apart.

Notwithstanding Le Tentateur, here was my first temptation. The map told me (I had not yet learned to treat the map with deep suspicion) that both ways would bring me to Ziros, the village where I hoped to beg a room for the night from Charis Kakoulakis's friend Mr Kharkiolakis. Was I going to give in this early and follow the dirt road with its implications of safety, its likelihood of a passing pickup truck? Or would I trust E4 to lead me through a lonely area where I'd quickly be in trouble if I turned an ankle, where I could get worryingly lost if the signs and poles ran out? I thought that if I didn't face the challenge now, in the not-too-formidable hill country of eastern Crete, I'd be slinking on dirt roads and looking for asphalt all the way. So it was a comforting twirl of the stick, and off along the thread-like path that lay beaten by sheep hooves into a dry orange strip among the spiky bushes.

A tiny wayside church came into view beside a scummy cistern. I went in and found lamps burning before an icon of a long-faced Virgin. The frame of the image was loaded with gently tinkling strings of
taximata
, tin squares stamped with legs and arms, eyes and hearts, youths in smart school uniforms, playfully kicking babies – symbols to reinforce prayers for afflicted body parts, for family members in trouble or joy, for a longed-for child. It was a continuation of an ancient tradition. The Minoans, too, had offered clay taximata to their gods in caves or in sanctuaries at the peaks of mountains. The tiny, crudely made models of dogs, babies, male and female genitals, heads and limbs, together with other statuettes of slim-waisted figures praying in a backward-bending attitude with the right hand pressed to the brow, are one of the staples of Cretan archaeological museums, somehow retaining their mysterious force even when confined in a glass case. Here in the lonely church the metal taximata, uncomplicated symbols of the faith of their successors, held power, too.