The Great Island a Study of Crete
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THE GREAT ISLAND By the same author Fiction NO EASY ANSWER Michael Llewellyn Smith The Great Island A Study of Crete Longmans This online edition published by SUNSHADE PRESS ISBN 978-0-95282-4-2 © Michael Llewellyn-Smith, 2007 To my Mother and Father Contents Foreword xi 1 Introduction I 2 Roman, Byzantine and Arab Crete 12 3 Venetian Crete 24 4 Art under the Venetians 34 5 The Cretan Renaissance 50 6 The Fall of Candia 63 7 Turkish Crete 74 8 The Revolt of Daskaloyiannis 81 9 The Nineteenth Century 89 10 The Death of Pan 103 11 The Song 113 12 Sphakia - Impressions 126 13 Sphakia - the Vampires 142 14 Return to Asi Gonia 157 Epilogue 169 References 176 Select Bibliography 178 Index 180 Plates Eastern Crctc. The north coast near Mallia facing page 20 View of Sphakia – both Julie du Boulay The church of St Fanourios at Valsamonero 21 –Julie du Boulay Looking towards Heraklion from Agia Pelagia at sunrise The Morosini fountain in Heraklion 36 – Julie du Boulay Fresco of the Abbot Zosimas from the Panagia Kera at Kritsa 37 Fresco from Skaloti Frangokastello from, a 17th century print by Boschini 148 Western Cretan wedding 149 The laouto (lute) George Psychoundakis and family 164 Pavlos Gyparakis The author with Aleko above the gorge of Samaria 165 Goat-skinners at Anopolis – both Julie du Boulay Illustrations by the author except those credited above Foreword This book contains plenty of history, and a fair amount of ‘travel’. It is intended to be an introduction to Crete. It is one man’s view of the island and its culture and its plate in Greek history. In the attempt to see Crete whole I have to move from the general (objective history) to the particular (the impact of Crete on us now). The form therefore - I am aware of the dangers of falling between two stools - is deliberately chosen. Caution: the book is not concerned with Minoan civilization and archaeology. Anyone well read in Cretan studies will recognize my debts, especially in the chapter on art, a subject about which I am ignorant. This chapter could not have been written without the expert work of M. Hadzidakis and K. Kalokyris to consult. Authors whose works I have found useful are mentioned in the references and bibliography. But I must make a general acknowledge- ment to the periodical KρηƬLKά Xρóvlkα (Cretica Chronka), whose pages are essential to anyone who studies Crete. I must also thank Anthony Bryer, for my initiation into the mysteries of Byzantine art; George Psychoundakis, for valuable information about the folklore of his own village, Asi Gonia; Pavlos Gyparakis, for permission to quote from his unpublished diary. I am indebted to Galaxias Editions, Athens, for permission to quote from Pandelis Prevelakis’s The Chronicle of a City and George Sepheris’s Introduction to Emtokritos. The Editor of The Listener has allowed me to reproduce an article of mine originally entitled ‘The White Mountains of Crete’ (12 January 1961) in the Introduction. Finally, especially warm thanks to Julie du Boulay, who accompanied me on an exhilarating trek through the White Mountains, supplied the better of the photographs, and sent useful and hard-won material from Athens while I was writing the book in England. M. J. Ll. S xi 1 Introduction I first saw Crete, which the Greeks call simply the Great Island, on 13 August 1957, in the course of a month’s holiday in Greece. I did not know what to expect, and so was hardly disappointed with the little that we were able to see. One of my friends had studied Pendlebury’s handbook to the excavations at Knossos and was able to conduct us round them efficiently. We slept the night in the ancient Caravanserai, bathed at the Florida beach next day and left for Athens after only thirty-six hours on the island. I had read a book called Freedom and Death by the Cretan, Nikos Kazantzakis, and had in my mind a vague image of wild mountains, savage, heroic mountaineers, poor but indomitable villages. It was probably because we had seen none of these mountains at close quarters that I decided to come back some day. At any rate, I knew then that thirty-six hours had not been enough. On the ship Kanares, as we steamed back across the Cretan sea after that first short visit, I was woken by a bottle which someone had thrust into my mouth. A middle-aged Greek was jogging my elbow and inviting me to drink. The taste was unfamiliar and unpleasant. I now know it was ouzo. All around us on the deck lay sleeping bodies. ‘Where you from?’ he said in broken English. ‘From England,’ I answered in broken Greek. ‘Speak English, no speak Greek. No speak Greek.’ ‘From England.’ ‘Ah, I know England. I go Liverpool, London, Chull’ - the ch guttural as in loch. ‘You know Chull?’ ‘No.’ ‘Here, drink. Ouzo. Good.’ ‘No, thanks. I want to go to sleep now.’ ‘You beautiful. I know you English. I have darling boy in Chull. You all the same.’ ‘Go away now, please.’ His hand was groping somewhere around the entrance to my sleeping-bag. ‘Where you going now?’ 1 The Great Island ‘The Peloponnese. Now go away!’ ‘Ah, Peloponnesos. You comestay in Piraeus. I pay hotel, you stay, eh?’ I pointed to the head of my school’s classics department who lay peacefully sleeping about three yards away. ‘Shut up. You’ll wake the whole ship up. Now get out and go away!’ I made a manic gesture sufficiently violent to get him to leave. This was my first experience of an offer of the hospitality for which Greeks are famous. I kept a diary on that trip; it reads for the next day: ‘I wouldn’t have missed that odd experience. Rest of night uneventful, but deck rather hard on the hip.’ It was, I suppose, the desire to know the Cretans at least as well as this Cretan knew the English – and to know them in a rather different way, I must add - that led me back to Crete. Three years later I was back, with a friend, Brian Saperia, who wished to join me in recording Cretan folk music. There was something arbitrary about the whole enterprise. We might just as well, I feel now, have found ourselves in Epirus doing social work, or in Africa measure- ing skulls, as in Crete recording music. We were bored and dissatisfied with the university, and wanted to do something. Whether you travel to distant parts, as in the old days, because you have been jilted, or as nowadays, because the materialism and mechanism of our civilization become oppressive, the effective motive is likely to be frustration. And whether he knows it or not, the traveller is often searching for a kind of power, a charm derived from foreign lands, which will send him home changed, invested with an authority which sets him apart from the nine- to-fivers. When I came back from Crete in 1960 and read the remarks of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on the subject of travellers, I had the astonishing feeling that he was analysing me. Lévi-Strauss compares foreign travel with the initiation ordeals of certain primitive tribes. In adolescence the youth will separate himself from the tribe, plunge himself into a way of life where the rules and values of the tribe count for nothing. He will isolate himself on a raft, or in the mountains, going for weeks without cooked food, attempting to sever contact with his environment by physical privations such as freezing baths, or torment such as the cutting off of the finger-tips. In the state of weakness and delirium which these hardships produce, the youth hopes to see, in a vision, the spirit who is from now on to be his guardian, and to discover the power, derived from that spirit, which will define his rank and privileges when he returns to the tribe. The strange thing about the initiation ordeal is that it is imposed by society. Society itself sends out the young men beyond its well-defined borders, to snatch power from the unknown territory, to free themselves for a 2 Introduction time from the tyranny of the group. In the same way our society sends out travellers who return to feed the public with vicarious, and often falsified, sensations. ‘Any young man who isolates himself for a few weeks or months from the group and exposes himself to an extreme situation of any sort may count on being invested, on his return, with a kind of magic power. In our world the power comes out in newspaper articles, best-selling books, and lectures with not an empty seat in the hall.’1 Its magic character is evident in the process of auto-mystification, of the group and by the group which is, in every case, ‘the basis of the phenomenon’. If this explanation is correct - and I think it is, even though Lévi- Strauss exaggerates – then embarking on a travel book must be a hazardous undertaking. But there is always the consolation that what one says may be true or interesting, that one may try to avoid the subtle and insidious magic of exaggeration, of making places sound better or stranger than they are. Levi-Strauss himself was writing a travel book when he made these observations. And this is not, for the most part, a ‘travel book’. It might seem from all this that Crete is remote and primitive.