CRETE EXPECTATIONS

Crete is the largest and most legendary island in the Greek archipelago. The ancient Greeks revered it as the birthplace of Zeus and feared it as the lair of the Minotaur, whose insatiable appetite demanded the lives of seven Athenian youths and seven Athenian maidens every year. More importantly though, the island of Crete gave birth to one of the earliest and most advanced civilizations of the Mediterranean – the Minoan. This fact has always beguiled me and made me determined to see it at least once in my lifetime. Now, in the summer of 2001, the opportunity had finally arisen. My family and I were in Greece and we had time enough to go to Crete.

We flew to Crete from Santorini in the late afternoon and promptly hired a car to get to our hotel. Since I was unfamiliar with Crete and had no reliable guidebooks to help me, I had surfed the web months before until I found a hotel that caught my fancy – the Shivas Village Hotel. Its owner, Dr. John Hatzakis, personally corresponded with me about our reservations. Since I had never been to Crete before, I consulted a map to make sure that the hotel was not too far from the airport at Iraklion, Crete’s capital. Was I wrong!

The trip from the airport to the hotel took over two hours, its length compounded by driving after nightfall over unfamiliar terrain. As we drove deeper into the island’s interior though, everything around me started getting oddly familiar. This puzzled me no end until I realized that our surroundings made me feel like I was driving from Pangasinan to La Union. The generic architecture and the rather shabby aspect of every town we passed made me feel right at home! The eeriness was broken when we stopped for dinner. The restaurant’s proprietor and his guests warmly greeted us with hearty food, flowing wine and lively conversation, despite the fact that none of us spoke a common language. The Greeks are a truly friendly people.

After driving through a lonely country road for what seemed like hours, we finally got to the hotel and see Dr. Hatzakis’s creation first- hand. The Shivas Village was a four-storey affair spread out over about a hectare of land in the middle of an olive grove. After checking in, we had to take the elevator to the third floor, go through one corridor, take a few steps up to another corridor, go through an area which looked like the hotel gym but was not, turn right into another corridor, take a few steps up and get into another elevator, get out at the rooftop, walk around a series of what looked like townhouses until we finally got to our room. Looks like Dr. Hatzakis was an amateur architect and hotelier, who had taken a direct hand in designing his hotel and kept adding and adding to it until he had unconsciously recreated King Minos’s labyrinth. As for our room, it turned out to be a two-room apartment with a kitchenette overlooking the hotel pool. Not bad at all!

The next morning, I rustled everyone out of bed early. I was excited about being in Crete, birthplace of Zeus and lair of the legendary Minotaur. I asked the hotel concierge, a lady with a British accent and flaming red hair, how to get to the ancient Minoan site of Phaistos which was, according to my map, the closest archaeological site to our hotel.

"Oh, is that how you want to spend your vacation here, looking at old stones?" From the corner of my eye, I saw all my romantic notions – of the Minotaur and his labyrinth, the 14 Athenian youths and maidens sacrificed to him every year, the athletic men and barebreasted women ritualistically jumping over bulls – fall with a low thud on a heap of ashes where lay this woman’s desperate existence of endlessly weaving the same boring cloth that was surely her life.

After this brush with deadening mediocrity, I decided to drive to Knossos instead. At the turn of the century, Sir Arthur Evans, inspired by the spectacular finds of Heinrich Schliemann in Troy and Mycenae, came to the Cretan countryside in search of clay tablets etched with hieroglyphics. What he found instead was what he proclaimed to be King Minos’s Palace. Palace, or trade centre governed by a priestess-queen as others believe, Knossos is a 1,400-room pile sprawled over six acres. It consists of two- to four-storey buildings connected in irregular fashion and grouped around a large inner courtyard surrounded by open passageways, with red-painted cypress trunks as supports and large frescoes on the walls. Sir Arthur, who must have been a bit of a showman in the style of Walt Disney, decided to have frescoes and throne rooms restored and parts of buildings and columns reconstructed out of reinforced concrete, a fact which horrified archaeologists. This interpretation of Knossos is what the tourist now sees. For a truer picture, one only has to go to the Archaeological Museum in Iraklion which has two floors of artifacts from 5,500 years of Minoan history. But, like it or not, Sir Arthur succeeded in putting life into these old stones, as our concierge so quaintly put it.The next day, we drove to Rethymnon by taking the long route - through the olive groves blanketing the valley where our hotel lay, a short stop at Phaistos, and then through the mountain passes, gorges and valleys of Mount Ida. Every once in a while we would drive by signs indicating an ancient ruin, a monastery, a castle, a lodge, a monument, a mosque. But Mount Ida is most famous for the cave where the ancients believed Zeus to have been born. The latter has been a place of worship since the Stone Age and then well into the Christian era. Every nine years, the great and legendary King Minos came here to receive from the god himself the laws and regulations which provided the foundations of his wise rule. Now if only we could find such a cave for our politicians!

When we finally reached Rethymnon, we were pleasantly surprised to see a long golden beach in the heart of the city which led us right to the old quarter. Painted in tawny yellows, the old quarter is a mix of Venetian and Ottoman influences with its churches, fountains, mosques, harbour and Venetian fortress. One of the more interesting sights of the old quarter is the Venetian Loggia, once the gathering place for Venetian aristocracy and now the Archaeological Museum Shop. Around the Shop is a maze of narrow shopping streets which of course my wife could not resist.

Next day, we left for Athens. Our Cretan sojourn was over. There were many more sights to see and beaches to comb but they will have to wait another day. As we flew over the islands of this ancient country, I could not help but ponder over its uniqueness. On the one hand, the faint echoes of the pagan, Classical world mix with the materialism and overt sexuality of today’s modern travelers. On the other hand, its Orthodox religion remains immutable and steadfast in the face of all the hedonism around it, very much like the black clad women who permanently adorn every city and village of this country. Nevertheless, any contradictions are dispelled by the warmth, gregariousness and friendliness of its people. And it is truly in Greece that one can savor the truth of what Hilaire Belloc, English poet and writer, wrote:

"I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this — we wander for distraction but we travel for fulfillment."