I’m on the south coast of Crete,
working my way east, then I’ll head north and then west back to where I got the car— Iraklion.
I stayed in Ano Viannos last night, after a real circus of confusion. I stopped at the only Rough Guide recommended place, but it was full. The woman who ran it, a delight named Maria, said I should just head down the road a little to Kerakotambos’s place, and I could stay there. Just right down the road.
So I spent about 20 minutes looping through Ano Viannos without finding that place, and only seeing one other place (a hardware store with rooms to rent upstairs, but the place was locked— siesta time, I suppose, and it was above her up on the main road, not below), so I figured I should just head east to the next town, as I couldn’t find a place to stay in town.
I headed out along the main road and about 4 Km later, hit the big Cretan Massacres Memorial— this is the most striking of the many village memorials to all the Cretan hostages the Germans shot for reprisals in September, 1944. This one is much more stylistically like the ones in Central Europe at the big, well-known camps like Buchenwald or Auschwitz or Tieresenstadt.
But the light was really harsh— it was now about 5:00 PM and it was at least 90, so I got out the map and discovered that Kerakotambos wasn’t a domatia (room rental place) but the town down on the coast about 9 miles away.
So as I headed back through town to get on that road, the hardware store was open and I stopped and €20 later, I had a room for the night.
So early in the AM I loaded up to head back to the memorial to shoot it in the better early light.
There was an old man
by the side of the road with a bag of bread from the bakery, so I gave him a ride up the hill to the massacre memorial— where I stopped to shoot
and he got out of the car to take the side road from there up to his little village about a Km away.
On the way up to the memorial I noticed a hillside olive orchard in the slanting early light, so I went back to shoot it,
and then headed back east again, my original direction (although as you read these adventures you might well think that the notion of “direction” and the way I travel have little to do with each other. . . .
And so now you know why I went by that orchard five different times.
Kato Simi
And up off the main cost road a dozen Km or so is an ancient Shrine to Hermes and Afrodite so I went up there, even though I was warned in the guidebook that it would most probably be locked.
They were right, but I had it all to myself— me and a couple of wild goats.
Here’s the town on the way up here to give you a better sense of what you see from the hills above the coast. This was another of the town where the men were murdered by the Germans during the war. There were five or six local villages that suffered the same retaliation for the same event.
On the way back (on a different road, of course) I found these five abandoned, pretty identical roofless buildings and I thought at first they were from the great Greek-Turkish population exchange in the 1920s, but these are so identical that I now think they were part of some industrial idea that didn’t work out.
Introducing Hizzoner, The Mayor
Here’s the unofficial mayor of the town I’m now in for the night—Mirtos.
Loot— Glorious Loot
I got the place to stay pretty early, then headed up into the hills on a big loop looking for some sheep or goat bells, as I have been pretty well captivated by that sound as I prowl these ancient sites (and more ancient hills).
I struck out, but I did learn where to get them, so early next week I’ll be filling up another gym bag, I’m sure. . . .
In this little hill town
there was an abandoned lot full of stuff,
and one of the things was this pithoi— a huge, terra-cotta storage jar. I’ve seen these all over the museums and ancient sites, although I’m sure this one was from the local garden store, as it had been pretty busted up and even spray painted when the old wall was re-painted
so I figured it was ripe for some level of liberation.
And inside the thing, there were some shards (broken pieces) and I snagged one and plan to bring it home.
I’m sure it’s modern, as I’ve seen them in gardens and lots of garden shops, but I got the part of the rim that included a handle, so although it’s a small piece, compared to the whole thing (four to five feet high) it has two of the primary elements.
More Memorials to More Reprisals
And in many of these little villages—this one had maybe a thousand people in it now, there were more of these statues with lists of names on the base or background, and by now you already know the story.
There were 45 or so names on this one alone.
Other memorials indicated that 500 or more were shot all at once—just rounded up somewhat randomly— any boy over 12 or so and every man they spotted, or dug out somehow, or found hiding in the woods— rounded up, taken to the village square, and shot.
This one was September, 1943, and I thought this detail, showing the Cretan’s left foot,
was particularly telling.
The Industrialization of Death
These memorials bothered me a lot more at the individual level, I think, than even the two camps I’ve seen in Germany: Belsen, where Anne Frank (who would have been 80 earlier this summer) died, and Dachau, outside Munich, the first concentration camp.
The camps eventually exterminated 11,000,000 people (Jews, Russian prisoners, Roma, homosexuals, Communists, the insane and the retarded, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many others) and were, essentially, the use of industrialization to accomplish mass murder.
If WWI was the industrialization of death for soldiers, WWII was the industrialization of death for civilians.
But each person’s role in the death camps was like parts on an assembly line, and the jobs were disconnected: some people moved the victims into the gas chambers, others turned the wheels that introduced the gas, Zyklon-B, others emptied the bodies out of the chambers, others wheeled the bodies to the ovens, others burned the bodies, and still others distributed the ashes.
But here, in the mountains of Crete, there was no industrial-level disassociation. The soldiers who rounded up the villagers to be shot did the shooting.
They were personally connected, at least for a little while, as they looked at the people who were about to die by their direct actions.
I’m not saying we should feel sorry for the soldiers who did these terrible things, just following orders, after their comrades were killed, and I don’t really know what I’m suggesting, except that death at the individual level seems a different experience than death at the industrial level.
If someone has some thoughts about this, I’d sure like to hear them.
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