The Minoans - A People Who Loved the Sea

by Morelle Smith

Just in front of the Platia Elefterias in Iraklion , the island capital of Crete , is a strange sculpture.  Three badly smashed cars sit there, in a circle of tape, the kind used to rope off accidents.  The sculpture falls somewhere between a stark reminder of 'momento mori' and a joke, a questioning of what can truly be called art.  But this is a question that so much modern art poses, that you shrug it off, just another take on life - or death - just another angle.

So a relatively modern imagination has been used to complete the fragments and we see delicate branches of olive trees painted in blues and greens, dark-haired women against a blue background and the most famous, the Prince of the Lilies, one hand stretched behind him.  Perhaps, as the guide says, he is leading a steer, perhaps the bull whose horned head forms the adjacent fresco, with body painted in, imagined.  In this pose, the bull's head is turned around, as if he is refusing to go in the direction he is being led.  But that is pure speculation. If the Prince of the Lilies is leading a bull, he faces forward, there is nothing to suggest a stubborn or recalcitrant steer behind him, he faces forward, full of confidence and vigour, the muscles of his chest and forearms clearly showing he is male, despite the pale pinkish hue of the fresco, a colour that usually represents the female form.  Or rather, white usually does.  While red shows male bodies.  But perhaps this was once red and has faded to the palest of pink.  His elaborate head-dress curls into the shapes of lilies, which gives him his name.  Dolphins, goddesses seated on rocks, a wide-horned bull, bull-leapers, sacred winged griffins and the Prince of Lilies.

Downstairs, carved and painted pots and storage jars, bronze and ceramic figurines, gods and goddesses, crowned, some with arms upheld, one, most notably, with writhing snakes in her hands.  Our ignorance I feel, is to do with what life is really about.  It is to do with the fact that we have forgotten, or so it seems, how to deeply engage with  life.  We walk through the Archaeological Museum at Iraklion , to be given reminders of the art and beauty, the imagery and imagination of a people who loved life so much, it overflowed into their paintings.  Thousands of years later, we gaze at these depictions of ceremony, serenity and fantasy - gaze and speculate, then retire to sit in the paved Platia Elefterias, fronted by crumpled cars.

Later, I walk down to the sea, where the harbour is lined with fishing boats.  A fisherman sits sewing a heap of yellow net.  Further out, walking past the old Venetian fort, the waves slap against the sea wall.  Just as I walk past, one particularly large wave tosses spray over the wall, drenching me.  I feel privileged that this sea, so beloved of the Minoans, has singled me out for its salty embrace.  I drip sea water as I walk back past the bobbing boats.

                        *                       *                       *

My feet ache, from walking the streets of Iraklion .  I began at the bus station, after getting off the bus from Malia.  I walk round by the sea a little way, then up Avgoustou and find the church of Ayios Titos on my left.  Inside the church, the inner area is screened off, but in the front part, I light a slender bee-brown candle and say a prayer.

I then walk through the pedestrian area - Dedhalou - to the Platia Elefterias, where I find a sunny bench and eat a spinach pastry.  Later, I head back down Dedhalou to the Platia Venizelou.  A Greek man stops in the street, stares at me, says something I do not understand, then kalimera, which I do.  Kalimera I reply.  I continue a short way to El Greco park where I sit in the sun and write some postcards.  I then head back along Avgoustou and veer slightly to the left, to go through the market and continue on to one of the old gates of the city, where Kazantzakis' tomb is to be found.  At least, I think I find it, after wandering through leafy green areas, a sudden quiet, a children's play area.

Heading back down Avgoustou I pass a fruit and vegetable shop.  I stop and buy a pomegranate.  I'm reading Dinner with Persephone  by Patricia Storace, where that myth is explored and the significance of the pomegranate seeds swells into a size that encompasses both hemispheres of our Western minds, the origin perhaps, of our struggle with polarity, with life and death, summer and winter, presence and absence.  The pomegranate I buy has both blush and paleness on its skin, both fever and fear, both ripeness and loneliness.  It also has a tiny sprig of leaves at the top.  Its symbolism is so profound and so intense, that it had to be bought.  I pulled it out of myth into something very personal. 

There was a pomegranate tree growing in the yard outside the Tirana office where I worked last year.  Elona said to me - we'll eat them, when they are ripe.  But I had to leave suddenly, earlier than expected, and I didn't get to eat the fruit.  I am making up for that now.  Or so I tell myself.  At this moment, I am not convinced that I will eat it.  It looks too serene, too compact, too unassailable, too strong to be broken open, split apart, dismembered.  I am not at all sure that I can do it.  Did Hades split the fruit for Persephone before she ate the seeds?  He must have.  Perhaps that was his first violation - or his only one - after that, there was the sweet taste of compliance, the red juice, the flavour of what was still to come -

Perhaps the splitting of the pomegranate was the symbol of what happens when the blush and pallor of resistance is cracked open, revealing the contradictory nature of desire - its chills and fevers, its winters and summers, its yes and its no - one god and goddess more would not really matter to us, but a legacy of polarities is what we have inherited.  So it becomes another Eden myth, not so much a failure as a split, a life lived in paradox, that cannot be resolved.

As I walk through the streets of Iraklion , I feel that the vestiges of guilt and anxiety, so prevalent in the north, drop from my shoulders like loose feathers.  This is simply the way it is and should be - there is no duality at all here.  This is the gift of the land perhaps, expressed by the Minoans in their paintings and their pottery and their graceful bull-leaping. They knew that life itself was sacred.  There was no split in them.

But something happened.  In the Historical Museum , the figures of the icons of the Byzantine era have become rigid, still, contained and stern. Life does not flow through their limbs and their gestures, as it does with the Minoan figures.  There is only one that I can see, who shows movement.  He is a winged figure, perhaps the guardian angel of John the Baptist, whose head unfortunately rests in a chalice in the bottom right hand corner of the painting.  This might explain why the winged figure looks a little grim.  He also looks slightly harassed, his hair is windswept, as if he's in a hurry and a long scroll dangles from his hand.  There is movement here but it is awkward, it is resistant, straining.  A movement that has lost its relationship with the sacred and so, is at odds with its own self.

The streets of Iraklion remind me of Albania, with their sense of 'this is how it is' - and you are not hugely conscious of this until it goes, until you lose it, unimaginable as it may seem, in this late summer sun, that it could be lost.

But after that maroon and cream pitted bite of pomegranate, the unthinkable is just as possible as the acceptance of your daily life, your everyday environment, the streets you walk along.  The seeds have sunk into the Western psyche like indissoluble memories, chunks of disbelief.  We are still trying to spit them out.

As I'm waiting for the bus back to Malia, I notice a cloud in the sky, shaped like a galaxy core - or an elaborate head-dress, with curling feathers leafing over, like peacock plumes or fleurs-de-lis.  The Prince of Lilies is still with us after all, arching in the sky above this sacred island.

*                       *                       *

The lemons are ripening on the trees, on the road that winds uphill  from Neapoli to the Lassithi plateau.  They're shifting into yellow as if escaping from the too-tight skin of green.  Occasionally, a goat bell tinkles.  The sides of the road are layered with olive trees and underneath them the grass is bleached so pale it's almost like white lace stained creamy-yellow with age.  In the valley, there are a few pines, two tall sentinel cypresses and more olive trees.  The mountains are like pyramids with shaped flat sides and pointed tops.  They are stony brown, with gasps of tufted green like drips or crumbs, growing sparse towards the top.

In the little park behind the bus stop, in the main square of Neapoli , huge pine branches are propped up with forks of wood.  I do not know why they have not grown straight up or perhaps have leaned, with the serenity of age, towards the ground, but whatever the reason, they extend at a 45 degree angle to the earth and forked wood holds them up, prevents them from leaning ever closer to the ground.  This reminds me of a Dali painting, but I do not know which one - where forks prop up something - perhaps some soft watches, proclaiming the shrinking and stretching nature of time, its suggestibility.

Dali's limp time is particularly appropriate in this spot, where stray dogs lie curled on the grass, and cats carry a wariness that unowned cats have, and the bus timetable that people claim exists, is nowhere to be seen and I wait almost an hour for the Iraklion bus.  Wandering through Neapoli, I find narrow streets with half-withered foliage crackling round balconies, and mountains leaning over the ends of these deserted streets, filling the sky with their burnt brown camouflage, like rocks of friendship. Perpetually there for you, secure as weather, reliable as light.  One shopfront is piled outside with enormous black pots or cauldrons, with thick spouts.  I am entranced by these containers, never having seen anything like them, piled up, several high, as if in the pantry of some god or goddess, urns and teapots in readiness for some divine party.

Later, some clouds run their fingers over the mountain tops, refusing to let go, refusing to leave, tethering themselves with strings of damp frayed stalks, cloud-stalks, snagging on their beloved mountains.

                        *                       *                       *

I follow signs to the beach, that take me in another direction entirely - doubling back, through the souvenir shops that have replicated rows and rows of storage jars, painted urns, dolphin and Minoan fresco reproductions, I find the sea where it has been all the time, flickering over rocks and sand, clear and greenish near the rock pools, deep blue beyond the rocks, and right out to the horizon.  The sky is ruffled with cloud, like sparse feathers, that turn pinkish and purple as I head back into the old town.

                        *                       *

I hired a bicycle and went to visit the excavations of the palace of Malia , only a few kilometres away from the old town.  These ruins also date from Minoan times (c 1900- 1450 BC) and were first excavated by a joint Greek/French team of archaeologists.  The ground is a dusty yellow/orange and the stone markings of individual rooms are clearly visible.  I like, very much, the feeling of this place.

There are three storage urns or pithoi, pieced back together, but one stands out from the rest, with delicate markings and patternings and is of a greyish/green colour, like rock, while the others are more terracotta, like earth.  There are paved areas, a round stone with indented hollows, all round the circumference, and a few steps, the remains presumably, of a once grand staircase.  The purpose of the round stone is unknown - both gaming-board and altar have been suggested.  Dried yellow grasses stroke your legs as you walk through the intricate series of walls and doorways.  A green bush has grown over a part of the path, which has been paved.  I'm pleased that it has not been cut back, but allowed to grow, a blur of glossy green against the cinnamon coloured earth.  A twisted, leaning tree, its trunk pitted and furrowed with waves and curves, watches over a corner of the site, near the biggest, patterned storage jar.

There are mountains just behind the site and the sun falls over them, in visible bolts and folds of light.  These mountains are layered, becoming more imagined and see-through and blue as sky and distance undefines them.

The golden bee-brooch, now housed in the Archaeological Museum at Iraklion , was unearthed here.  With the yellow sun behind and the setting-sun colour of the earth, gold seems the most appropriate metal for this site.

There is a guide nearby, speaking to a group of Germans.  He has a forceful, almost desperate air to him as if he's trying to sell something, clinch a difficult deal.  He wants to work his audience up, into some lather of energy, the expression of which has still to be decided.  He holds up pictures of some of the vases found here, saying how many hundreds of years old they are, then repeating the number, as if determined to incite vocalised awe and astonishment.  Perhaps he just wants them to dance up and down, clap their hands, cheer, go - yes, yes, Minoan culture, yes yes yes!  It seems unlikely that they would do such a thing, although they do seem to be listening carefully.

I think of the young guide in Iraklion Museum, small and slender and speaking the German words with precise and careful intonation, making each word sound special, and worthy of utterance.  I was captivated by the way she spoke, her relationship with the words, each syllable sounded and given its due expression.  Perhaps it was because of the subject matter of the words, as she described these frescos, these images, these people represented, as if they were real and living people.  They were of course, immensely real - growing more so, increasing in reality as far as I could see, as time adds to their depth, their focus, their consciousness and their mystery.  They are in the process of turning into  myths and myths, as everybody knows, are far, far realer than reality.  Their realness may be less clearly defined, like the mountain peaks behind the site at Malia, vanishing into blue, but it has its anchors in ancient stonework, metalwork and pottery, millennia-old painted walls and stone and all the accretions of centuries of imagination, to add to its stature.

It was interesting to contrast the slim young woman's slow and sensuous delivery at Iraklion , with the impassioned salesman, prodding his audience into response, into feeling, perhaps like a priest, exhorting his congregation into a recognition of their sins and failings,  a felt recognition, an applied contrition.  The upper part of his body jutted forward, to his audience.

While the young woman in the museum turned slowly, like a dancer, inviting her audience to look at the opposite wall.  They followed every movement, every word she uttered.  I'm sure they would have humbly picked up her flowing train, if she had been wearing one.

So the sun beat down on the earth and stones at the Minoan Palace of Malia and the ground gave off a smell like fresh cotton, newly-ironed, a smell of heat and growth and the weight of sun and an occasional cricket rasped, but mostly there was the heavy silence that the sun pours over everything, over olive trees and pomegranates and all growing, ripening things, a kind of syrup of sunshine, a honey of the limbs and senses, turning gold and sweet and lustrous, the contents of the mind.

Morelle Smith - Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a graduate of Edinburgh University (English and French Literature). Has worked as a Teacher (English, Astrology, Creative Writing) and Aid Worker.  Writes poetry, fiction (short stories and a novel) and non-fiction (articles, reviews, travel writing).  Has also collaborated with visual artists in exhibitions. Third volume of poetry due out from "diehard", Edinburgh in 2003.  Currently writing a book of travel experiences.  Contact morellesmith@hotmail.com 

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