The Golden Step Read online

  I sat pondering. Jane’s words murmured in my inner ear: ‘You’re not writing a guidebook. You don’t have to stick to a plan. Follow your nose and enjoy it, why don’t you?’ All right, then.

  Below the monastery I found a wire fence across the track, bound up with a pair of ancient pyjama bottoms. Trespass time. I clambered through, tearing my trousers, and went down on sore feet through the olive groves and on into Meseleri. Stop here for the night? I consulted my shoulders, smarting from the pack straps, and my feet, bruised by the constant jabbing of stones on the track. Still a few miles in the tank, they told me. I followed a brand-new tarmac road, shiny black, that had just been slashed through the hills, and came to the village of Prina and the Taverna o Pitopoulis. No, there are no rent rooms anywhere near, said Dimitri the owner. My spirits sank. His wife Katerina took a look at me. Of course you could sleep here, if you don’t mind dossing on the floor. Mind? I could have kissed her. Outside, where the cool wind could blow away the reek, I dumped my pack and took off my boots with a sigh of relief.

  Dimitri worked his olive groves and vineyard, it turned out, while Katerina ran the taverna. They had three children, and little money to spare. A few coaches brought parties of foreigners to the Taverna o Pitopoulis, but Prina remained out of the rich jetstream of tourism. Maybe the new road would make a difference. Prina, they said, was a typical Cretan hill village with an ageing population, pleasant to live in, but steadily losing its youngsters to the lure of seasonal tourist work in the nearby coast towns of Ierapetra and Agios Nikolaos, or to the college courses, brighter lights and better long-term job prospects in Iraklion or Athens. Recently there had been a few economic problems in Crete connected with immigration by Bulgarian and Albanian economic refugees. Their son had asked about several jobs in Ierapetra after leaving school, but all the positions had already been filled by Albanians. Bulgarians were hardworking types, keen to fit in socially – but the Albanians, well … Still, one hoped for better days, didn’t one? Make the best of what you’ve got, that’s the trick, no?

  It turned into a great night. There was no bar TV, and therefore no talk of war in Kosovo. A German couple pitched up after dark in search of a meal. Can you show us some vegetarian options? ‘Ochi! No!’ expostulated Dimitri. A meal without meat – what is that? Nevertheless, rumbling like a subsiding volcano, he produced a gigantic salad. Then the raki bottle was planked down on the table. Out came Dimitri’s laouto, a beautiful old deep-bellied instrument with a fretboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl. We all had a go, and I discovered that the four pairs of strings were tuned like those of a mandola, an instrument I had hacked around on for years. Better still, a G key harmonica was one of the items I had retained during the Great Backpack Purge at Kato Zakros, some 70 miles back along the way. We made the dogs of Prina howl – something they scarcely needed encouragement to do. Dimitri abandoned the laouto to his guests and went out for his lyra. His stubby worker’s fingers, one of them bent from an ancient dislocation, flew along the lyra’s neck as he cradled it on his knee, the three strings keening against his fingernails, the short bow sawing back and forth in his other hand. My Greek was still far too embryonic to allow appreciation of the single-verse mantinades he sang. One featured a monopati, a footpath, and also a dromos, a road, and from Dimitri’s winks and nods in my direction I took this to be a compliment to the sore-footed stranger within the gates.

  ‘For the oppression of the poor,’ said the Psalmist, when I sat on a rock just outside Kritsa to consult him the following afternoon, ‘for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the Lord; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.’ An enjoyable image to take with me, as I gave the katsouna a good stout swing and limped down the hill into Kritsa.

  Upcountry Village:

  Kritsa Interlude

  ‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.’

  Psalm 16

  We sit under Argyro’s tree, eating oranges – young and old, women and men, children, dogs and cats. Everyone in Kritsa knows Manolis and Argyro Tzanakis, and everyone in the place is bound to come down the road and into the Tzanakis garden sooner or later, for Argyro is one of those entirely open-hearted people around whom village life and social interaction revolve. Argyro sits in the leafy shade with a basket of oranges in her lap, a plastic bowl of potatoes on the table beside her, peeling and peeling, dispensing advice, lending an ear, giggling, commiserating, upbraiding. Scribbling opposite her, I imagine that the whole world will eventually drop in on Argyro for a cup of coffee or a glass of sweet spring water, if only one waits long enough under the lemon trees. I am trying out lines for a poem, one of a run that began back in Orino. It is as if the news from Rockingham Press has kicked open a blocked-up door and all these ideas are coming charging through.

  Although I arrived yesterday my feet still ache, and I have carried out a damage inspection of them. Left foot: bruise under little toenail (now blue); abrasion above Achilles tendon; blisters on inside front heel, on ball of foot behind second toe, on outside of big toe. Right foot: bigger Achilles abrasion (strip of Compeed plastic skin on this); four separate rub-marks round ankle; blisters on ball of fourth toe, on tip of third toe. Both feet rather shiny and red. Soles: yellow carapace forming, goat-scented, rubbery to the touch.

  Argyro peeling oranges

  Under a lemon tree Argyro peels

  oranges. Friends encircle her, leaning

  from blue chairs. Her little sharp knife pares

  circlets of oily skin. Lengthening curls

  of gossip swing. Efficiently she snips

  the pitted ends, strips white pith, laughs

  like a young girl. Now the talk digs

  down to the pips. The black knife chops,

  segments split onto the wicker tray

  to sweeten talk. Argyro rocks and nods,

  peels and shares, glancing from face to face,

  her tongue-tip in her lips, calm as a tree.

  I open my paperback book of psalms to see if the Psalmist is in tune with my mood of lazy contentment. He is not. In fact his poem for today is an absolute torrent of self-abasement. ‘I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head …’ He finds himself beset round by strong bulls of Bashan, ravening like lions with gaping mouths. ‘I am poured out like water,’ cries the wretched man, ‘and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.’

  There have been mornings when I have felt like that, too, but not this one. I turn away from the worm in the dust and luxuriate in the smugness of sloth.

  What a pleasure it is to have a shower that’s warm and all-over, to wash all my clothes properly instead of dunking them in a cold sink, to sleep in a clean, sweet-smelling room. Why have I never properly appreciated this sort of thing before? What a delicious, guilty pleasure it is to have nothing whatsoever to do. Oughtn’t I to be at my desk, at my computer, at my worrying and scurrying? I can’t remember the last time I allowed myself just to waste a day. And here I am, doing it. Better not even look at what that stern moralist the Psalmist has to say about the idle. He is bound to threatening me with being broken like a potter’s sherd, or cast out in the dirt. I kick back, stretch and luxuriate in wicked idleness. There’s plenty of lazing still to be done before I saunter into town this evening and check out who’s around. There are friends I’ve been looking forward to seeing, first and foremost George Aphordakos.

  I’d come to Kritsa five or six years before, at the instigation of Charis Kakoulakis. ‘Big village, Christopher – friendly people,’ Charis had said, ‘and one very special man, George Aphordakos, a policeman, a runner of the hills. George will show you all places of the mountains. He is aegagros, a wild goat of Crete.’

&
nbsp; Mountaineers are the epitome of the masculine hero in Crete, and they come in two dimensions. There is the traditional palikare or strongman champion with a great black beard, his chunky figure encased in tight black shirt, capacious breeches and long leather boots. You can see him in any village on fly posters advertising itinerant musicians. Such men love to present themselves in this image, slung about with bandoliers, one fist enveloping a lyra, the other doubled on their hip, a sariki or fringed headband twisted about their fiercely-knitted brows, gazing heroically towards a mountainous horizon. In contrast stands the lightly-made, athletic aegagros or mountain goat type, all sinews and hollows. He might not be able to fell a bear with a blow, but he can leap tirelessly from crag to pinnacle where your palikare would struggle and sweat to follow.

  George Aphordakos is a classic aegagros. I am probably more of a vouvaloi, a buffalo. Somehow we hit it off, to the point where George would take me out for long days hiking in the mountains from which I would return with scrub scratches on my shins, Pleistocene dwarf hippopotamus teeth in my pocket and green ends to my fingers. George climbs mountains like the wind, pock-pock-pock from ledge to ledge, a hardback tome of Byzantine iconography in his hand, a flower book and a bird book in his pack. Out with George you pinch every herb you pass and sniff your fingertips, you truffle for fossils and Venetian frescoes, you grub up painted shards of pottery last seen by Minoan eyes. George’s eagle glance picks out these things; his bony finger points you to them. When he has finished thoughtfully turning the rim of a 4,000-year-old vase in his hand, he gently reinserts it between the same two stones of the terrace wall from which he has retrieved it – such treasures, however tempting, belong to Crete, and are to be left in the field for the pleasure and instruction of some future wanderer.

  In George’s company during that first sojourn in Kritsa, and despite the fact that his English vocabulary had consisted of two phrases – ‘Problem!’ and ‘No problem!’ – I had my antennae finely tuned, my eyes and ears well and truly opened. One day we climbed to the Dorian city of Lato, high in the saddle of twin hilltops a little north of Kritsa. By the time we had trudged the slopes of thyme, oregano, sage and rosemary, my hands smelt like those of a herbalist. ‘Minoic!’ grinned George, on his knees before a bush of wild olives growing in the shade of a wall. Cousin to the olives found uncorrupted after three millennia in the well at Kato Zakros, this primitive crop tastes tough and bitter, the thin little fruits hard to spot among leaves like slips of privet. Higher up we struck a cobbled kalderimi, which led to the gates of Lato. Walking between the massive stone blocks of the entrance and on up the stepped main street, glancing from side to side into the depths of grey stone rooms that sheltered olive presses, corn-grinding querns and cisterns unused since before the birth of Christ, I wished, as so often, I could speak better Greek. Later on in my travels around Crete I would learn the outlines of the island’s wild and extraordinary history. But for now George Aphordakos, halting in the shrine of Artemis between the peaks and turning to me eagerly with a book in his hand and a whole mouthful of explanations, could only smile and shake his head in wry frustration before murmuring his catch-all mantra: ‘Problem!’

  When the palaces of the Minoans came crashing down in flames, it did not signal the immediate and final end of that sunny, life-loving civilisation. Whatever happened around 1450 BC – earthquake, tidal wave or insurrection – the Minoan way of life limped on. But the island of Crete, so green and fertile, so conveniently situated at the crossroads of trade routes between Europe, Asia and Africa, was always going to be a valuable prize for incomers who could summon the aggression and drive to take over. It was mainland Greeks from Mycenae who reoccupied the ruined palace at Knossos and dragged life and commerce in Crete back onto its feet. The Myceneans were a more warlike people than the Minoans; their dead were buried with swords and spears, and the designs on their pottery featured war chariots ridden by helmeted warriors – a far cry from joyful Minoan dancers and harvesters. The newcomers seem to have established a foothold in the island – perhaps as a servant class, perhaps as equals – for quite some time before the cataclysm. Now their influence spread throughout Crete as more palaces and towns were reoccupied. For a couple of centuries dominant Mycenean and decaying Minoan cultures uneasily coexisted. Then came the Dorians, efficient and well-organised fighters of Balkan origin who made a victorious drive south through mainland Greece and arrived in Crete from 1100 BC onwards. The Myceneans found themselves displaced, and the remnants of the Minoan people – sometimes called the Eteo-Cretans or ‘real Cretans’ – retreated with the rump of their language and their culture to the hills, where they may have hung on in decline for another thousand years.

  With its shrines and temples, grand staircases, central courtyard and massive stone guard towers, the Dorian hilltop settlement of Lato was evidently more than a back country market town. In fact it was an autonomous city state, one of dozens that now established themselves in easily defended places within range of a sea port – Lato pros Kamara (present-day Agios Nikolaos) in the case of Lato. Gortyn was a great power in the south of the island, Kydonia (present-day Chania) and Polyrhynnia in the west, Praisos and Ierapytna (Ierapetra) in the east. Crete’s city states warred and co-operated, feuded and forgave, made alliances and broke them, and traded as widely as they could across the Mediterranean. Pirates based themselves in the island, too, battening on merchant shipping out in the Cretan and Libyan Seas. During this last millennium BC Athens grew to dominate the Greek mainland, while Egypt remained the power in North Africa. Caught geographically between the two, Crete absorbed classical modes of architecture and sculpture from one, a starchy and formal Archaic style from the other. The fluid self-expression, the natural forms and individualistic styles of High Minoan art and society seemed a very long way off.

  Enter the Romans in 67 BC, ruling from Gortyn and ushering in a period (as in Britain) of nearly 400 years of peace, prosperity and social stability, of temple-building, of theatres and forums, of villas and bathrooms, aqueducts and flush lavatories. As a captive on his way by sea to Rome, St Paul the Apostle made a brief stopover in the wild winter of AD 59, and a couple of years later his disciple Titus arrived to bring Christianity to the island. Roman rule began to run out of steam with the general decay of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, and it was the turn of the vigorous young Byzantine empire, spreading west like wildfire from its capital in Constantinople, to take over in Crete. By now the city up on the twin peaks and the high saddle of Lato had been abandoned; the humble port of Lato pros Kamara, formerly simply the commercial conduit of mighty Lato, had swollen to become a trading centre far better situated and more important than the old place back in the hills.

  Unknowing

  Shadowy, those Saracens, bequeathing

  scarce footprints, light but cruel;

  curved swords loosed from ships,

  eagle noses savouring fresh blood,

  scorched rafters.

  Why did they not

  build, paint, sculpt in marble?

  Pain and destruction: could these have sustained

  a century of gold-ringed nobles?

  Basilicas toppled, towns melted, a thousand

  private or public Golgothas. Sum total

  a blank; negative time.

  Then this grotesque

  curtain call, the sky over Rabdh-el-Khandak

  raining heads. Clipped beards catapulted,

  eagle beaks broken on Byzantine stone;

  what the modern mind grasps, barbarism

  dealt to barbarians.

  Expunged, a slate

  wiped clean. Folk devils fallen

  out of retrieval into that desert of

  dry dusty hearts we allot them,

  unseeing, unknowing.

  With one significant but obscurity-shrouded break, the Byzantines ruled Crete for almost a thousand years. They started by running the island’s affairs with a business-like efficiency insisted upon
by Constantinople. Crete became a big agricultural producer and a far-and-wide trader. Christianity flourished in the round-apsidal basilica churches that sprang up all across the island. The rule of Byzantium seemed as assured as ever did that of Rome; but it could not withstand the great northward impulse of militant Islam when that phenomenon began to swell through North Africa and the Middle East during the 7th and 8th centuries. Arab Saracens invaded Crete from Alexandria around AD 824, driving out the Byzantine overlords and establishing an emirate in the island. And what then? According to tradition the newcomers slew thousands and pulled down the basilicas, including the great Church of Agios Titos at Gortyn after they had murdered its bishop Cyril. But modern historians are doubtful. The only fact everyone agrees on is that the invaders made their capital at the port of Knossos and named it Rabdh-el-Khandak, City of the Ditch – the city we know today as Iraklion. The Saracens used it as a slave market, and as a base for attacking shipping far out into the Aegean Sea.

  The following century and a half lies cloaked in mystery. Looking back now, from a post-2001 perspective, the period of Islamic rule in the island assumes a resonance it did not carry when I walked through Crete. In the spring of 1999, reflecting on the regime of the Saracens, their actions and inactions seemed those of an alien civilisation whose motives, unless purely and absolutely mercenary, were incomprehensible. The Saracens appear to have destroyed much and built little in Crete. They left only a handful of coins to us – nothing of their art, of their architecture, of Arab culture. The Byzantines returned in 961 under their ferocious general Nikephoros Phokas to capture Rabdh-el-Khandak after a siege laden with every kind of savagery, including catapulting the heads of captured Saracens in among the defenders. Byzantine rule, once re-established, continued in prosperity for the next 250 years. Meanwhile the Arabs of Crete, and all they had done or failed to do in the island, slipped away down history’s river of oblivion.