Crete (2 page)

The cave we were making for is on a hill above the village of Spilia. It is best approached on foot, a walk of just a few minutes, but before taking the track upward we went to see the Church of the Panagia on the edge of the village, with its air of slumbering calm and its fine fourteenth-century frescoes and its wide terrace giving a view of the sea and the headland of Akrotiri. These village churches on Crete have an air of complete and utter tranquility. They are swept and clean, the beveled red roof tiles are repaired or replaced, the walls are whitewashed, there are well-tended gardens all around. Often enough you see no one, but the care of some hand is everywhere evident, a blend of the devotional and the domestic, cats and fig trees and icons all mixed in together. Never a formal garden, no sense of elaboration, no concept of dignifying the space around, but a gardener's care for plants for their own sake, and for what they might yield, the lemon, the fig, and the almond growing among trees planted only for their flowers or the beauty of their shape. So it didn't surprise us to see chickens running about, and a goat or two.

But the symbolism of Christianity, dramatic, tragic, extremely undomestic, intervenes when you least expect it. On the way up toward the cave a rough track leads off to a steep rise with a life-size wooden image of Christ on the Cross at the summit. A stony slope, the crucified figure outlined against the sky, and it is Calvary we are looking at.

The Cretan maquis, the scrub of the hillsides, is less green than that of Umbria and Tuscany, which is the region I am used to, but it is not pale. The earth is reddish, and as spring advances into summer the vegetation dries to russet in the fierce sun, and there are colors of orange and purple in it—fire colors. In evening or morning, when the sun is low in the sky and falls more obliquely on the hillsides, the scrub glows with a soft burnish, flame-colored, forming a landscape almost too beautiful to be quite believed in. From March to May or early June, a profusion of wildflowers clothes the whole expanse: malva, borage, sumptuous thistles, large, pale yellow marguerites, asphodel, orchis. Later the aromatic shrubs take over, warmed into dizzying scent by the sun: cistus, savory, thyme, sage, broom, and many others.

This flowering from the stony soil in a country of relentless summers seems almost miraculous, precarious by virtue of its own tenacity, something dearly achieved. Especially this is so with the more delicate-seeming flowers, thrift, pale pink convolvulus, petromarula, the tiny exquisite flowers resembling speedwell but darker blue that thrust the perfect shape of flower and leaf from the stones of the path under our feet. Blind growth, of course, subject to its own laws; but it is hard not to feel it the result of some caring, nurturing agency, some quality of devotion similar to that we felt at work in the surroundings of the church below.

Reaching the grotto of Agios Ioannis Xenos, St. John the Stranger, we felt this presence again. A large cave on various levels, with twisting passages, sudden openings into sunlight, small secondary chambers resembling chapels, where there might be a table draped with a fringed cloth, a geranium in an earthenware pot, candles to be lit by the faithful, icons here and there, propped against the rough rock of the walls.

St. John the Stranger was a hermit who lived in this grotto—and died here—in the eleventh century. Almost certainly a succession of holy men had inhabited the place before him. Built into a cave adjoining the main grotto is a small basilica, roughly vaulted and walled. An altarpiece, covered with a plain cloth, a brass candlestick with the stub of a candle in it. All around, on walls and vault, is evidence of frescoes painted at the time of the saint, now largely effaced by the long years of damp and decay. There is the same sense here of something dearly achieved, achieved against the odds, the order, the patient care in this lonely place so long deserted, mainly visited now by the curious and skeptical—like us; something stubborn and unyielding in it too, this care, something of the spirit that kept Cretan identity intact through centuries of grinding oppression. The frescoes seem to express the same indomitable spirit. Despite the ruining of time, the lineaments of humanity have not been lost; here and there the dark expressive faces are almost untouched. One of the three kings survives, leaning forward, proffering his gift; the head of the Virgin is still inclined in the icon posture of submission.

Less than a mile south from here, in the direction of Episkopi, a footpath leads off the road through woods to the tiny chapel of St. Stephen. With its whitewashed walls shaded by overhanging oak trees, it seems at the same time remote from the landscape and perfectly at home in it. Even in midsummer you are likely to find this tiny jewel of a church deserted. The frescoes here date from the period immediately following the expulsion of the Arabs from Crete in
A.D.
961.

The Arab conquest and occupation of the island was one of the darkest periods in Cretan history. Originally from Cordoba in Spain, a band of Saracen adventurers, who had been driven from their base in Alexandria in
A.D.
823, landed on Crete, led by their emir, Abu Hafs Omar. They defeated the Byzantine rulers and subjugated the island piece by piece, destroying most of the existing towns in the process. The invaders were interested only in plunder. In the 150 years of their rule, they turned the island into a slave market and pirate base, subjecting the Cretans to a degrading servitude, preying on the neighboring coasts, and pillaging the islands of the Aegean. During this period Crete was cut off from Byzantium and so from her co-religionists and the whole world of Christendom.

When the Saracens were finally defeated and Crete restored to Byzantine rule—which was to last until the Venetian invasion of 1204—there was a great sense of liberation throughout the island. The beauty and vitality of the church frescoes of this period give evidence of this, and we see a striking example in this tiny, isolated chapel of St. Stephen, where, after a thousand years of time and chance, the face of St. Mark the Evangelist, complete in every detail, still arrests the visitor with its power and delicacy. Aira took a photograph of this marvelous face and then worried in case it would be too dark, though in fact it came out beautifully. Of course, photographs never do justice to our experience. They can't contain the complex of impressions that made the experience so memorable. But memory too suffers from a similar sort of necessary simplification. A visual image is never purely visual; it depends on the feelings and sensations of the moment, elements beyond our power of recall.

Closer to Chania, on the eastern side, the Akrotiri peninsula thrusts out to sea like a helmeted head on a long and bony neck. Here again there are caves to see, and for those visitors who don't mind a bit of scrambling, it offers a rich and rewarding experience—and a great deal more besides.

Near Episkopi: The fresco of St. Mark the Evangelist in the chapel of St. Stephen

Following the roads on the eastern side of the peninsula will bring you to the monastery of Agia Triada, surrounded by cultivated fields and luxuriant olive groves—all the work of the monks. This is one of the best preserved of Cretan monasteries, built in the Venetian style, the stone of its walls a beautiful reddish sand color that glows in the sun as if radiating its own light. Unlike the great majority of monasteries on the island, it still functions as a community, but the outlying buildings are dilapidated and more or less abandoned—goats and cats are the main tenants nowadays.

Perhaps because such communities, and the life of work and prayer that goes with them, are dwindling and under threat of extinction, they exercise a strong fascination for many of the people who come to Crete. It was only nine o'clock in the morning when we made our visit and still fairly early in the season, but we found four buses parked outside and a sizable crowd in the precincts of the monastery. The monks' cells were locked and silent, and we supposed their occupants were out working in the fields. The abbot sat at one side of the ticket desk, watching the people come and go. There was olive oil on sale, made by the monks themselves on their own press, bearing the label of the monastery. The income from tourism is devoted to reconstruction and repair and general upkeep, but it is difficult to imagine that this alone can restore the fortunes of the monastery. And certainly it can't redress what is of course the main problem: the steady decline in the monastic spirit and way of life, the shortage of candidates.

All the same, the glories of the past are very much in evidence, though much has had to be rebuilt in the course of the monastery's violent history. The main church, which stands in the center of the courtyard, was sacked by Turkish irregulars engaged in suppressing the Cretan uprising of 1821, in which many of the monks took part. After everything of value that was detachable had been carried off, the church was set alight. According to eyewitness accounts, the fire was so devastating that afterward the church resembled a limekiln. So intense was the heat that the stone blocks of the building turned to lime, and the iron bars supporting the chandelier, and the bronze of the chandelier itself, melted like wax. Naturally, none of the original church decorations could survive this. But the monks returned and set to work. The present rood screen is an exact replica of the original astonishing proliferation of carved forms, patterns of foliage and birds and beasts and human figures, with the gaze of prophets and saints in the icons, somber and intent and of utmost simplicity, seeming, as always, to repudiate the opulence of decoration in which they are set.

The monastery of Agia Triada

The best way to go on from here, still on the way to our cave, is on foot, at least if one wants to get the feel of the landscape. But preferably not in the middle hours of the day in summer: The Cretan sun can be fierce and there is little shade. We took a detour roughly two miles farther north, toward the sea, to another monastery, that of Gouvernetou. The road to it is spectacularly scenic, running at first through a landscape of scattered rocks and wild olives, a setting that seems, in its beauty and desolation, to be awaiting some imminent miraculous event, then following the twists and turns of a ravine between faces of rock and scrub rising sheer on either side.

In early summer these slopes are ablaze with flowering gorse, the bushes a rounded shape, keeping close to the ground. Black goats clamber at impossible angles—most often one hears the tinkling of their bells without seeing the animal. The kids sound an anxious lonely bleating when they feel too far away from the mother. This, and the fugitive sound of the bells, and the murmur of the bees as they move among the spreads of thyme and rockrose, are all the sounds there are in these hills.

The monastery of Gouvernetou is older than Agia Triada and more austere in its architecture, with fortress-like walls enclosing the beautiful cruciform church. In the seventeenth century, during the final years of Venetian rule, it was one of the wealthiest monasteries on the island, with huge estates and a thriving community of monks. But it suffered losses under the Turks, and in the great uprising of 1821 it underwent the same fate as Agia Triada—and all the other monasteries on this peninsula of Akrotiri, in greater or lesser degree. Many of the monks were massacred and the monastery was sacked. Today it feels remote and isolated. Strange tormented faces are carved on the stone columns of the church facade, an unusual feature, more resembling the grotesqueries of Western Romanesque architecture than the more formal Orthodox tradition. Souls in pain? Demons excluded from the holy precincts? It is difficult to tell. A disheveled, sad-looking monk sells us some postcards. There are only four monks left in residence.

Now for our cave. From the northern end of the monastery square a rocky footpath winds gradually down in the direction of the sea. A few minutes' walk brings you to a large cavern with daylight at its mouth and strange effects of shadow in its recesses. This is the very ancient cave of Arkoudiotissa, or Arkouda, once sacred to the goddess Artemis, who was worshiped here in the form of a bear—
arkouda
in modern Greek. And indeed there is a bear here, or the effigy of one, a stalagmite formation hunched in the dimness, leaning forward with lowered head over a stone-built cistern. Water drips steadily from overhead into the cistern. You are never likely to hear another sound so clear and distinct.