The Golden Step (8 page)

George Aphordakos is a classic aegagros. I am probably more of a
vouvaloi
, a buffalo. Somehow we hit it off, to the point where George would take me out for long days hiking in the mountains from which I would return with scrub scratches on my shins, Pleistocene dwarf hippopotamus teeth in my pocket and green ends to my fingers. George climbs mountains like the wind, pock-pock-pock from ledge to ledge, a hardback tome of Byzantine iconography in his hand, a flower book and a bird book in his pack. Out with George you pinch every herb you pass and sniff your fingertips, you truffle for fossils and Venetian frescoes, you grub up painted shards of pottery last seen by Minoan eyes. George's eagle glance picks out these things; his bony finger points you to them. When he has finished thoughtfully turning the rim of a 4,000-year-old vase in his hand, he gently reinserts it between the same two stones of the terrace wall from which he has retrieved it – such treasures, however tempting, belong to Crete, and are to be left in the field for the pleasure and instruction of some future wanderer.

In George's company during that first sojourn in Kritsa, and despite the fact that his English vocabulary had consisted of two phrases – ‘Problem!' and ‘No problem!' – I had my antennae finely tuned, my eyes and ears well and truly opened. One day we climbed to the Dorian city of Lato, high in the saddle of twin hilltops a little north of Kritsa. By the time we had trudged the slopes of thyme, oregano, sage and rosemary, my hands smelt like those of a herbalist. ‘Minoic!' grinned George, on his knees before a bush of wild olives growing in the shade of a wall. Cousin to the olives found uncorrupted after three millennia in the well at Kato Zakros, this primitive crop tastes tough and bitter, the thin little fruits hard to spot among leaves like slips of privet. Higher up we struck a cobbled kalderimi, which led to the gates of Lato. Walking between the massive stone blocks of the entrance and on up the stepped main street, glancing from side to side into the depths of grey stone rooms that sheltered olive presses, corn-grinding querns and cisterns unused since before the birth of Christ, I wished, as so often, I could speak better Greek. Later on in my travels around Crete I would learn the outlines of the island's wild and extraordinary history. But for now George Aphordakos, halting in the shrine of Artemis between the peaks and turning to me eagerly with a book in his hand and a whole mouthful of explanations, could only smile and shake his head in wry frustration before murmuring his catch-all mantra: ‘Problem!'

When the palaces of the Minoans came crashing down in flames, it did not signal the immediate and final end of that sunny, life-loving civilisation. Whatever happened around 1450
BC
– earthquake, tidal wave or insurrection – the Minoan way of life limped on. But the island of Crete, so green and fertile, so conveniently situated at the crossroads of trade routes between Europe, Asia and Africa, was always going to be a valuable prize for incomers who could summon the aggression and drive to take over. It was mainland Greeks from Mycenae who reoccupied the ruined palace at Knossos and dragged life and commerce in Crete back onto its feet. The Myceneans were a more warlike people than the Minoans; their dead were buried with swords and spears, and the designs on their pottery featured war chariots ridden by helmeted warriors – a far cry from joyful Minoan dancers and harvesters. The newcomers seem to have established a foothold in the island – perhaps as a servant class, perhaps as equals – for quite some time before the cataclysm. Now their influence spread throughout Crete as more palaces and towns were reoccupied. For a couple of centuries dominant Mycenean and decaying Minoan cultures uneasily coexisted. Then came the Dorians, efficient and well-organised fighters of Balkan origin who made a victorious drive south through mainland Greece and arrived in Crete from 1100
BC
onwards. The Myceneans found themselves displaced, and the remnants of the Minoan people – sometimes called the Eteo-Cretans or ‘real Cretans' – retreated with the rump of their language and their culture to the hills, where they may have hung on in decline for another thousand years.

With its shrines and temples, grand staircases, central courtyard and massive stone guard towers, the Dorian hilltop settlement of Lato was evidently more than a back country market town. In fact it was an autonomous city state, one of dozens that now established themselves in easily defended places within range of a sea port – Lato pros Kamara (present-day Agios Nikolaos) in the case of Lato. Gortyn was a great power in the south of the island, Kydonia (present-day Chania) and Polyrhynnia in the west, Praisos and Ierapytna (Ierapetra) in the east. Crete's city states warred and co-operated, feuded and forgave, made alliances and broke them, and traded as widely as they could across the Mediterranean. Pirates based themselves in the island, too, battening on merchant shipping out in the Cretan and Libyan Seas. During this last millennium
BC
Athens grew to dominate the Greek mainland, while Egypt remained the power in North Africa. Caught geographically between the two, Crete absorbed classical modes of architecture and sculpture from one, a starchy and formal Archaic style from the other. The fluid self-expression, the natural forms and individualistic styles of High Minoan art and society seemed a very long way off.

Enter the Romans in 67
BC
, ruling from Gortyn and ushering in a period (as in Britain) of nearly 400 years of peace, prosperity and social stability, of temple-building, of theatres and forums, of villas and bathrooms, aqueducts and flush lavatories. As a captive on his way by sea to Rome, St Paul the Apostle made a brief stopover in the wild winter of
AD
59, and a couple of years later his disciple Titus arrived to bring Christianity to the island. Roman rule began to run out of steam with the general decay of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, and it was the turn of the vigorous young Byzantine empire, spreading west like wildfire from its capital in Constantinople, to take over in Crete. By now the city up on the twin peaks and the high saddle of Lato had been abandoned; the humble port of Lato pros Kamara, formerly simply the commercial conduit of mighty Lato, had swollen to become a trading centre far better situated and more important than the old place back in the hills.

With one significant but obscurity-shrouded break, the Byzantines ruled Crete for almost a thousand years. They started by running the island's affairs with a business-like efficiency insisted upon by Constantinople. Crete became a big agricultural producer and a far-and-wide trader. Christianity flourished in the round-apsidal basilica churches that sprang up all across the island. The rule of Byzantium seemed as assured as ever did that of Rome; but it could not withstand the great northward impulse of militant Islam when that phenomenon began to swell through North Africa and the Middle East during the 7th and 8th centuries. Arab Saracens invaded Crete from Alexandria around
AD
824, driving out the Byzantine overlords and establishing an emirate in the island. And what then? According to tradition the newcomers slew thousands and pulled down the basilicas, including the great Church of Agios Titos at Gortyn after they had murdered its bishop Cyril. But modern historians are doubtful. The only fact everyone agrees on is that the invaders made their capital at the port of Knossos and named it Rabdh-el-Khandak, City of the Ditch – the city we know today as Iraklion. The Saracens used it as a slave market, and as a base for attacking shipping far out into the Aegean Sea.

The following century and a half lies cloaked in mystery. Looking back now, from a post-2001 perspective, the period of Islamic rule in the island assumes a resonance it did not carry when I walked through Crete. In the spring of 1999, reflecting on the regime of the Saracens, their actions and inactions seemed those of an alien civilisation whose motives, unless purely and absolutely mercenary, were incomprehensible. The Saracens appear to have destroyed much and built little in Crete. They left only a handful of coins to us – nothing of their art, of their architecture, of Arab culture. The Byzantines returned in 961 under their ferocious general Nikephoros Phokas to capture Rabdh-el-Khandak after a siege laden with every kind of savagery, including catapulting the heads of captured Saracens in among the defenders. Byzantine rule, once re-established, continued in prosperity for the next 250 years. Meanwhile the Arabs of Crete, and all they had done or failed to do in the island, slipped away down history's river of oblivion.

Limping on blistered feet from Argyro's house into town, I find the Aphordakos clan about its several businesses. In the years since I was last here Billy Aphordakos has transformed his simple kafenion into a youngsters' hangout quivering with brutal disco beats. Denim and leather hang heavy in the air. Lads slouch against their motorbikes on the pavement, posing for girls and each other. I have to pick my way over an obstacle course of crossed legs to get inside the bar. But this is nothing at all compared to the macho posturing in the north coast resorts of Crete where local bikers, fags in mouths, do wheelies all along the seafront with maximum noise and attitude. The boys and girls at Billy's are village kids, and politely point out the way to the Kafenion Kamara, the Aphordakos owned café under the Moorish arch where I'll be bound to bump into someone I know. Tonight it's Iannis Siganos, the former mayor of Kritsa, bearded and forceful. He nods his leonine head, gives me a bear hug, orders
mezedes
and a little green flask of ice-cold raki.

‘Well, Christopher, let me tell you …'

It seems that Kritsa has been doing pretty well for a village of 2,500 inhabitants some miles from the sea. The 600,000 kilos of olive oil produced last year netted close to 400 million drachmas – something over a million pounds sterling. The
touristas
, Iannis says, are still turning up to buy the fine hand-loom weaving for which the village has a long-standing reputation. But it's seaside tourism that underpins prosperity in Crete these days; and Kritsa possesses neither beach nor sea, a terminal drawback in this sector of the economy. The villagers have had to do some lateral thinking and come up with an alternative enticement. Iannis and the other business heads of Kritsa have initiated a programme of local and agricultural tourism under the slogan: ‘Come and see the REAL Cretan village!' Local families are being urged to encourage visitors to stay in their houses, accompany them to their work in vineyard and olive grove, eat at the family table, join in with the evening stroll and the morning marketing.

Kritsa, like almost every other Cretan town and village, is nervous about its future as a community. Can any of those youngsters hanging round Billy's doorway be persuaded to throw in their lot with the village, rather than drifting away to wait at table and clean hotel rooms in Agios Nikolaos, or take the plane for the bright lights of Athens and the wider world? Upcountry places, even those as big and lively as Kritsa, are suffering from a steady drain on their most important human resource, the energy and optimism of youth. The steady leaching away of young people from the country to the town isn't just a turn-of-the-millennium Cretan phenomenon, of course. It's been gathering pace all over Europe since the Industrial Revolution. In any case, bold young men and women have always struck out from their home villages for fame and fortune. Now, though, sighs Iannis as he refills his thimble glass and mine, it's as if someone has stuck a big needle in the heart of rural Crete and has been siphoning off our life blood. Maybe this ‘Real Crete' thing will encourage some of our brighter youngsters to start a business here, raise their children in their home village. Maybe these computers will help, too. Who really knows? Anyway – as long as I have Katharo, I will stay sane, that's for sure.

The fertile plain of Katharo (‘the clean place') lies 3,600 feet up in the Dhikti Mountains a few miles west of Kritsa. Most big villages of the Cretan lowlands have a ‘mountain garden' high in the hills where they grow their vegetables, cultivate their nut trees and graze the sheep and goats on the spring and summer grass while they make cheese from the rich mountain milk. From Kritsa the rough road climbs some 2,300 feet to Katharo, and when you tip over the rim and descend into the lumpy, roughly circular plain in its cradle of mountains, it's like entering a green corner of heaven full of birdsong and the trickle of well water. So Iannis Siganos thinks, anyway. We leaf through the books of Cretan botany that he has brought along to the kafenion. ‘You see this lily, this crocus, these white star flowers? All of Katharo! Oh, I love Katharo, my little house there, my garden. When I eat Katharo tomatoes, Katharo beans, it's something beautiful. There I can leave all my problems – breathe the air – be free! If I can live in Katharo all year, I would be happy. Ah, yes!' We bang our glasses on the table and chink them together.
Yia sou, Christophere! Yia mas, Ianni!
The emptied thimbles clash down on the tin table top, and Iannis tilts the raki flask once more while I select another olive from the dish.