Yesterday and today, Thursday and Friday, I spent managing the trip rather than actually travelling, so no pictures until you get down to the bottom two-thirds of this report-- the part about Knossos.
I had to change the travel schedule from Crete to Athens, tried to move up the coming home date a couple of days (I’m still working on that one), got packed up (consolidating, finishing the food I’d been eating out of the little fridge in the last hotel on Crete), swapped out a couple of paperbacks for new ones— the thrills were pretty much non-stop.
And the long day today—turning in the rental car, waiting for the plane (there’s an air traffic control work slow-down), getting reprimanded by the chair police, and then having a somewhat typical adventure once I got off the plane.
I had all the luggage (this is where I confess to buying a new gym bag) on me— I looked like Yertle the Turtle just got evicted: big backpack on the back, school back-pack on the front, carrying the laptop courier bag and the new (how did it get so full so soon?) gym bag.
So I got the bags at the Athens airport and was planning on taking the Metro right to Omonia Square, then walk the two blocks to the hotel.
Well, Metro wasn’t running to the airport today, because of a minor construction issue, so I went to wait for the bus. Once it arrived (I hadn’t planned on the bus, of course) I learned that I couldn’t give money to the driver, I had to go to a kiosk and buy a ticket.
But the closest one was out of tickets so I had to go to the next one (about a hundred more feet away but I’m probably carrying 50 lbs of stuff, and by the time I got back to the bus it was Standing Room Only, and so I stood for the 55 minutes it took to come into town, still wearing the big back-pack as the bus was so full there was no room for it on the floor and no racks or luggage, either.
Then a two-stop Metro ride (up and down flights and flights of stairs) and then the two blocks to the hotel, and now it’s 5 something and I was supposed to eat at 3:00, but the plane was late. . . .
Just another day in paradise.
And, hell— I could be home, which after 83 days is starting to sound better and better.
Well, it’s a Greek Homer, if not the Greek Homer
And walking through the lobby of the hotel in Crete last night, before they had the live Greek music and Cretan cuisine special weekly dinner (for all their German guests) I saw Homer Simpson in Greek.
I could hear the music last night from my room as my balcony overlooked the little dining area at the end of the swimming pool.
Very nice, although I was wondering what the Greeks would do for nightclub and entertainment music without “Never on Sunday” or “Zorba, the Greek.”
Achtung! Achtung! You Will be On-board— Schnell!!! Schnell!!!
And at the airport today, waiting for the plane, about 80% of the flights they called were to cities in Germany, so I’m guessing it’s not unlike the Japanese tourists who come to Hawaii on a Japanese airline, stay in Japanese hotels, go on all-Japanese tours, and never really leave the all-Japanese compounds.
Because I certainly didn’t suspect that 80% of the tourists I saw were German, but from the flight calls this AM, that was clearly the case.
Day 81; Wednesday, June 24
Knossos is a Knockout
I spent the day up at Knossos, which is the single most important archaeological site on the island, and has significance across all of Europe.
It’s trans-European importance is that it’s the earliest European civilization (rising 4700 years ago— only 400 years younger than the very first Egyptian civilization)— technically (a subject introduced earlier in these ramblings) when you get from just a bunch of farms to cities— rulers, priests, administrators (which means writing), usually enough surplus to have soldiers rather than just the farmers coming running with their pitchforks when there’s trouble, and of course soldiers need sergeants and lieutenants and captains and generals. . . . .
And to reinforce control, there are ceremonies and dedications and rituals and such and then all the attendant rules and proscriptions based on the people with the power holding on to the power— in ancient Egypt, for example, it was a capital offense to possess a calendar, because then you, and not just the priests [who had the only legitimate pipeline you-know-where] would know when the Nile was going to flood again. . . .
So there’s not a lot of information on the Minoans before they got here— or even where they are from, although there are a couple of clues.
The very earliest places (Vasiliki, near Aghios Nicolaos— see the June 21 Report) are oriented to the four cardinal directions much as people in the near-east orient their buildings, and the Greek word for East is “Antolia,” which sounds a lot like “Anatolia” (central Turkey) to me.
But when they got here, they got really successful really fast, and were building palace complexes by 4,000 years ago.
Two of their major crops, grapes and olives, don’t take much work until harvest and processing, so that freed up a lot of people to do other things.
They brought stone tools with them (I saw some elegant micro-liths in the museum today at Arhanes) but started making copper, then bronze, tools. The major palaces were built near the sea, so the inference is that they were heavily involved in trading and seafaring.
The trick in the photos today is that there were about 20 tour busses in the lot by the time I left (only two or so when I arrived right as it opened) and getting pictures without throngs of other tourists in them took some dancing.
I’d also like to rescind the rule that people from the cruise ships wear really bright colors ashore, so even if there are only a few of them even way in the background of your pictures, they really stand out clearly. . . . .
And there’s a big problem here that will never be reconciled. The original big-name archaeologist, Arthur Evans, of Oxford, in his own vigorously held (thoroughly English) opinion about what each building was for, rebuilt/re-created/imposed upon the site (he would say “restored”) walls, rooms, roofs, columns, and even though later scholarship has refuted some of his theories, his cement wall and column and staircase “interpretations” are the most easily understood parts of the palace complex.
And certainly the building that he did protected much of the rest of the place— roofs protecting walls and floors from the weather and tourists.
They do give a complete sense to the place, but they aren’t always correct--
This barnacle-sharp rock, by the way, is alabaster, as in
“Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.”
And the amazingly sharp little stalagmites are the result of millennia of rain.
It is, apparently, a kind of marble, but the erosion by the elements suggests a very different hardness index, among other things.
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