The Golden Step Read online

  Limping on blistered feet from Argyro’s house into town, I find the Aphordakos clan about its several businesses. In the years since I was last here Billy Aphordakos has transformed his simple kafenion into a youngsters’ hangout quivering with brutal disco beats. Denim and leather hang heavy in the air. Lads slouch against their motorbikes on the pavement, posing for girls and each other. I have to pick my way over an obstacle course of crossed legs to get inside the bar. But this is nothing at all compared to the macho posturing in the north coast resorts of Crete where local bikers, fags in mouths, do wheelies all along the seafront with maximum noise and attitude. The boys and girls at Billy’s are village kids, and politely point out the way to the Kafenion Kamara, the Aphordakos owned café under the Moorish arch where I’ll be bound to bump into someone I know. Tonight it’s Iannis Siganos, the former mayor of Kritsa, bearded and forceful. He nods his leonine head, gives me a bear hug, orders mezedes and a little green flask of ice-cold raki.

  ‘Well, Christopher, let me tell you …’

  It seems that Kritsa has been doing pretty well for a village of 2,500 inhabitants some miles from the sea. The 600,000 kilos of olive oil produced last year netted close to 400 million drachmas – something over a million pounds sterling. The touristas, Iannis says, are still turning up to buy the fine hand-loom weaving for which the village has a long-standing reputation. But it’s seaside tourism that underpins prosperity in Crete these days; and Kritsa possesses neither beach nor sea, a terminal drawback in this sector of the economy. The villagers have had to do some lateral thinking and come up with an alternative enticement. Iannis and the other business heads of Kritsa have initiated a programme of local and agricultural tourism under the slogan: ‘Come and see the REAL Cretan village!’ Local families are being urged to encourage visitors to stay in their houses, accompany them to their work in vineyard and olive grove, eat at the family table, join in with the evening stroll and the morning marketing.

  Kritsa, like almost every other Cretan town and village, is nervous about its future as a community. Can any of those youngsters hanging round Billy’s doorway be persuaded to throw in their lot with the village, rather than drifting away to wait at table and clean hotel rooms in Agios Nikolaos, or take the plane for the bright lights of Athens and the wider world? Upcountry places, even those as big and lively as Kritsa, are suffering from a steady drain on their most important human resource, the energy and optimism of youth. The steady leaching away of young people from the country to the town isn’t just a turn-of-the-millennium Cretan phenomenon, of course. It’s been gathering pace all over Europe since the Industrial Revolution. In any case, bold young men and women have always struck out from their home villages for fame and fortune. Now, though, sighs Iannis as he refills his thimble glass and mine, it’s as if someone has stuck a big needle in the heart of rural Crete and has been siphoning off our life blood. Maybe this ‘Real Crete’ thing will encourage some of our brighter youngsters to start a business here, raise their children in their home village. Maybe these computers will help, too. Who really knows? Anyway – as long as I have Katharo, I will stay sane, that’s for sure.

  The fertile plain of Katharo (‘the clean place’) lies 3,600 feet up in the Dhikti Mountains a few miles west of Kritsa. Most big villages of the Cretan lowlands have a ‘mountain garden’ high in the hills where they grow their vegetables, cultivate their nut trees and graze the sheep and goats on the spring and summer grass while they make cheese from the rich mountain milk. From Kritsa the rough road climbs some 2,300 feet to Katharo, and when you tip over the rim and descend into the lumpy, roughly circular plain in its cradle of mountains, it’s like entering a green corner of heaven full of birdsong and the trickle of well water. So Iannis Siganos thinks, anyway. We leaf through the books of Cretan botany that he has brought along to the kafenion. ‘You see this lily, this crocus, these white star flowers? All of Katharo! Oh, I love Katharo, my little house there, my garden. When I eat Katharo tomatoes, Katharo beans, it’s something beautiful. There I can leave all my problems – breathe the air – be free! If I can live in Katharo all year, I would be happy. Ah, yes!’ We bang our glasses on the table and chink them together. Yia sou, Christophere! Yia mas, Ianni! The emptied thimbles clash down on the tin table top, and Iannis tilts the raki flask once more while I select another olive from the dish.

  Disgusting horrors from Yugoslavia flicker on the kafenion TV screen. There is certainly something to be said for showing these appalling things nakedly on television at the dinner hour if you want to bring home what war is and does. Iannis turns to watch. The Greek reporters employ measured tones as they reel off the places that have been hit – ‘school … houses … hospital …’ Shots of roasted and disembowelled corpses, of head-scarfed women wailing in the rubble. Crying, shouting, denunciation and fury on the smoky streets of Belgrade. ‘One can’t have an operation like this without some mistakes being made,’ remarks a US spokesman. ‘We are trying,’ explains British Prime Minister Tony Blair, ‘to stop those who are murdering and oppressing each other.’ These statements don’t go down too well in the Kafenion Kamara. The impression Cretans are getting is of NATO, not the Serbs, as the murderers and oppressors, heavy-handed bullies imposing their will and destroying fleeing civilians from god-like perches in the sky. ‘Why?’ asks Iannis Siganos passionately, driving his two hands together with a smack. ‘Why is America here? Why do they want to push everyone down beneath them? I am not a hating man – but now, in my head, I am hating America.’ He gives me a long look, exhales, and ends with a low growl of ‘Beel Cleenton – fascista!’

  Next day dawns calm. I go out for a walk, wielding the white figwood katsouna, and am stopped by the first old man who spots it. ‘Poli orea, very beautiful!’ he exclaims, and holds out his hand for it. He hefts it, inspects the curve of the handle and taps the end lightly on the ground, nodding his head slowly. ‘Stergios,’ he smiles, and goes on. I stand with dropped jaw. That stick was presented to me on an Easter trip to Kritsa five years ago, and the giver’s name was indeed Stergios. How on earth could the old man know that? I examine the stick myself on the way back to Argyro’s, but it carries no name. Is it the shape, the wood, the feel in the hand that so clearly spells out the identity of the maker to those in the know?

  Soon the light thickens over the village, and it becomes fantastically windy. ‘Phissaiee, it blows!’ exclaims Argyro, and writes the word in my notebook twice over: ‘ΦΥΣΑΕΙ/φυσαει’. It’s exactly the noise the hot wind makes as it roars and whistles over the town. ‘From Africa, bringing the Sahara to Kritsa,’ Argyro mourns, shaking her head over the red dust that stains her newly washed sheets on the garden dryer. Big, tree-shaking blasts send stray papers and cushions into the air and make the olive groves hiss in a white surf of upturned leaves. Argyro’s mother, wrapped in fluttering black like a prophet from the desert, hugs herself in a chair by the wall. Cats and chickens cower. Old men sit and grumble in the kafenia as war news flickers on the screens.

  I turn to the Psalmist for comfort, but today he is at his most terrifying: ‘Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth … He rode upon a cherub, and did fly; yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind … The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire. Yea, he shot out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them. Then the channels of water were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils …’

  Winds and wars, thunder in the heavens, bloody bodies on the screens, hailstones and coals of fire. No day to be abroad. I pull up the drawbridge, fetch a blanket and crouch into a chair with a head full of monsters.

  ‘If it rains,’ says George Aphordakos, who turns up under Argyro’s lemon tree in mid-afternoon, ‘it will rain Africa.’ George has learned a good deal of English since we las
t saw each other – a lot more than I have of Greek. He looks as lean, tough and self-controlled as ever. He shows me a close-up photograph of a tall plant with gracefully curled white petals, rising from a rocky bed. ‘Lilium candidum, Cretan lily,’ says George, as if introducing a queen. It turns out that this lovely flower has not been seen in the Cretan wild for many decades. George has travelled 300 miles on foot to look for it. The moment he spotted it, he says with hand over heart, was something rare. Where did he find it? George makes the sign of the cross over his lips. He is not telling. But he waves a hand in the general direction of the Dhikti mountains, and gives a tight secretive smile.

  With George is his brother Manolis, another friend and walking companion from my former days in Kritsa. The Bros Aphordakos are polar opposites. George is a delicately-strung and abstemious aegagros. Manolis with his big black brows and ruddy complexion, his barrel chest and shovel hands, is the very pattern of a palikare. Manolis stands as strong as a bull, with wrists like thighs from his job working a compressor drill. He is an open-air man, a great sleeper under the stars, a hunter of rabbits and partridges up on Katharo; a laugher and quaffer, a family man and a gentle man, easily moved to embraces, who every now and then reaches out and silently kneads my arm or pats my knee.

  Phissaiee

  The cat fussed her kitten under my chair

  this morning, licking it, yowling uneasily, though

  all seemed well. Stormcrow in black, the old

  woman came, wrapped to the eyes, fluttering:

  bad news in black rags. The day

  thickened, darkened. Then phissaiee

  roared down on Kritsa; hot blast

  pouring east from Africa over the town,

  a prophet shriek out of the desert, raging.

  Groves thrashed; green seas of leaves

  hissed like cats, turning white eyes to heaven.

  Dark dots flew, imps or birds, storm-driven.

  Doors clashed, chairs scattered, tempers

  grated like sand. Old men growled, watching

  war on the screen, Balkan neighbours burn.

  ‘Thunder in the heavens,’ cried the prophet,

  ‘lightnings, hail stones and coals of fire.’

  Apocalyptic, as from a frescoed church,

  these breaths of hell: sliced men, babies

  cooked and smoking, mothers in flames. Kritsa

  crouched, back to the wall; phissaiee

  scourged eyes to tears. ‘Then did I beat them

  small as the dust before the wind,’ the prophet

  foamed, ‘I cast them out, as dirt in the streets.’

  All day the cat prowled, circling

  the chair where I skulked, one of the

  ungodly, bowed under a blast from heaven.

  Gestures are crucial to understanding the tenor of a Cretan conversation. What is said can often sound furiously angry, the words spewing out in a torrent, the timbre of the voice suddenly rising and hardening in a manner that to an English listener would spell imminent trouble, a temper reaching boiling point. Non-initiates expect a punch-up to flare out at any moment. But here in Crete that’s just emphasis. The gesture, or gesticulation, is what’s all-important. Sitting the following afternoon in the Kafenion Kamara with Manolis, George and their friends and family, I pick up on two that I can’t remember having remarked before. The first sees the speaker’s hand, extended with fingers stiffened karate-style, brought down sharply to chop the table with a startling bang, then thrust out palm upwards towards the victim. Translation: ‘Here’s my point right under your nose, fool!’The other piece of body language is more complicated. The hands start wide apart, cupped with palms uppermost, before being swept round, forward and downwards in a semi-circle to join each other, fingertip to fingertip, in the orator’s lap. ‘Well, this is what I think – and what any reasonable person would think, too.’ Admiring the drama of these bits of arm theatre, I have to admit to myself that, however good my Greek gets as I pursue my Cretan odyssey, I will never muster the bluster to enhance my own tatters of talk by employing either myself.

  It is almost time to bid Kritsa goodbye. Pantelis Kampaxis, the fit young mountaineer from Iraklion, has phoned to say he’ll be here bright and early in the morning. Pantelis has volunteered to guide me over the rocky highlands of Dhikti for a couple of days – the footpath shown on the map is a chimera, apparently, and he has assured me that I will never find my way alone in those remote parts. I have the uncomfortable feeling that Pantelis, a young aegagros if ever there was one, has summed me up after our brief encounter up the stairs in Dikeosinis Street, and has pigeon-holed my capabilities only too accurately. Tonight I have been invited to eat at home with Manolis, his wife Rula and George Aphordakos. Before that, I intend to spend an hour or so in the Church of Panagia Kera, rapt among its medieval signs and marvels.

  By the beginning of the 13th century the Byzantine empire had overstretched itself and was well past its sell-by date. Rotting from within, as the Roman Empire it had replaced had rotted nine centuries before, the vast Eastern Orthodox organisation – itself now under renewed attack by a resurgent Islamic movement – trembled on its bough, ripe for the plucking. In the event it was the Latin Catholic Christians of western Europe who got there first in the bloodthirsty, freebooting form of the Fourth Crusade. In 1204 the Crusaders, led by the Italian Count Boniface of Montferrat, sacked Constantinople, and the Byzantine empire was carved up piecemeal. The island of Crete might have been thought of as the plumpest of prizes, but in the end it was sold by Boniface to the Venetians for 1,000 pieces of silver – a somewhat symbolic sum. To claim their prize the Venetians had first to remove the Genoese, who had stepped into the power vacuum in Crete and taken over the island in 1206. It took four years before Crete was wholly controlled by Venice. The island was to remain under Venetian rule for the next 450 years.

  In the 13th century Venice was an immensely powerful city state, keen to extend its arm far across the Mediterranean Sea. Crete proved an excellent forward base for trading, a handily-placed naval centre for dealing with the pirates who plagued the Mediterranean, and a rich source of products such as oil, wine, corn, fruit and timber. Venetian adventurers and entrepreneurs were granted estates throughout the island, and they ran them in a feudal manner under the overall control of the Doge, who ruled from Candia (as the capital known to the Saracens as Rabdh-el-Khandak, and to the Byzantines as Khandakas, was now styled). Though the new overlords established a settled social order and a flourishing commerce in the island, they were by no means popular with the islanders, a tough mongrel breed with native Minoan, mainland Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Arabic blood in their veins. Perhaps owing to this rich mix of genes, the Cretans had evolved into a bloody-minded and independent people, not given to curling up and crying ‘Master!’ to anyone. Discontent soon took root among the islanders against the new taxes, penalties and feudal obligations imposed by the incoming Venetians on old Byzantine families and on the great mass of Cretan peasants. There were uprisings and rebellions – 27 major ones in all, and countless local ‘difficulties’ – during which a tradition of native raiding from mountain strongholds took hold. The Venetians responded by building fortresses down in the lowlands and on the coasts. After a great revolt in the 1520s the leader Kandanoleon, a man from the rugged Sfakia region of south-west Crete, was executed along with many of his family and followers. Such harsh treatment bred resentment. And there were external problems for the Venetians to worry about as well – namely, a great upsurge in the number and daring of Mediterranean pirates. In 1538 the Turkish corsair and admiral Khair ad-Din Pasha, ‘Barbarossa’ by nickname, sacked the north coast port of Rethymnon, causing the Venetians of Crete to strengthen the defences of their towns and cities against attack from the sea.

  The Venetians were great and graceful builders in stone, and in the chief Cretan ports of Candia, Rethymnon and Chania they created harbours, forts and palaces of notable beauty. They also built hundre
ds of churches, all across the island, for the celebration of the Roman religion with which they tried to replace the long-rooted Orthodox faith embedded among the islanders nearly a thousand years before. Roman Catholicism became the official faith of the island, a state of affairs which many islanders could not accept and which bred yet more resentment against the usurpers. Sheer weight of tradition dictated that Orthodox worship continued in the cities where the majority of people followed the Orthodox faith. It carried on elsewhere, too. Orthodox priests approved by the Venetian authorities were supposed to be in favour of close ties or outright amalgamation with the Catholic church. But that was far from the general rule. It was all a hotchpotch and a bit of a bodge, and it meant that the Greek Orthodox faith, its monasteries and churches, continued to maintain a hold in Cretan hearts. This hold became much stronger during the 15th century, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to yet another resurgence of expansionist Islam, this time from Turkish roots. The Venetians of Crete, greatly (and justifiably) fearing the growing power of the Ottoman Empire, began to relax their religious restrictions on the Orthodox natives whom they realised they would probably need as allies against the common enemy.