The Golden Step Read online

  ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ sang the Psalmist, turning his back for once on the broken potsherds and the coals of fire. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord: for he hath showed me his marvellous kindness in a strong city.’

  Kastelli (‘the Castle’) was a sleepy little agricultural town sunk among vineyards and olive groves in the rolling country south of Iraklion. Farmers went buzzing through the streets by day on their mikani, motorised tricycle pickups that farted out toxic plumes of two-stroke pollution. The men of Kastelli came in at night to the kafenia round the main square for noisy sessions of backgammon and cards. Old women wrapped to the eyes in black hobbled through the streets, carrying on their backs their own bulk in green stuff harvested from their gardens outside the town. Goats bleated behind ancient wooden house doors in the narrow side lanes. It was just the place to recuperate by lazing a day away.

  In the morning, delighting in soft shoes and a light day-pack, I hired Michalis the taxi-driver – black rumpled suit, wraparound shades, Ronald Colman moustache – to take me out to a hilltop a couple of miles away, where I had been told the ruins of the Dorian city-state of Lyttos lay. I had got well into the Odyssey by now, and had an idea of Lyttos in its pomp as a large and powerful place. Homer asserted that Idomineos, grandson of Minos and King of Crete, had managed to fill 80 black ships with men of Lyttos to go to the siege of Troy. Lyttos was a prosperous city, controlling a strip of the island which stretched from the north to the south coast and contained the fertile plain of Lasithi – a vital source of supply. Certainly the city-state was at war with Knossos from the 4th century BC onwards, and it had its claws out for other neighbours, too. This aggression rebounded on Lyttos during the war of 221–219 BC when, after launching an attack on Ierapytna (present-day Ierapetra), the men of the city returned home to find that warriors from Knossos had descended on Lyttos in their absence, wiped the place off the map, and decamped with all the women and children. Utterly devastated, the Lyttos men could not even bring themselves to enter the ruins of their city.

  Lyttos was rebuilt. The city-state is known to have resisted the Romans on their invasion of the island in 67 BC, and it seems to have prospered for a good six or seven hundred years more. Today, poking around the overgrown hilltop, I found few signs of that vanished city. Two churches stood there, one dedicated to St George and the other to the Holy Cross, their walls partly constructed with stones from ancient Lyttos carrying fragments of inscription and beautifully carved acanthus leaves. Between the churches the hilltop was a riot of spring flowers – poppies, mallows, marguerites, vetches, treacle mustard in a spatter of scarlet, yellow, gold and white. Through screens of flowers and mats of hanging greenery, patches of coarsely squared blocks and rubble showed where the great defensive wall of Lyttos had once run. I sat on the stump of a Dorian column, basking in the sunshine and looking out east to the grey wall of Dhikti. With my binoculars I could distinguish the line of the dirt road from Lasithi petering out in its terminal rock face, and the slope down which Pantelis and I had come. How very easy it looked from here and now.

  Idling back into Kastelli late in the afternoon I passed between olive groves scented with wood smoke. Under the recently pruned trees glowed lines of bonfires where the trimmings were burning. A man stopped me to touch and admire my stick with the by now familiar ‘Poli orea! Very beautiful!’ A flood of delight, one of those throat-catching, unfathomable surges of bliss that visit at rare moments, poured through me as I sniffed the olive smoke on the darkening road.

  The olive fires

  A football thumps the wall; young footsteps

  skelter down the lane; the old man bleats,

  ‘Yanni, Yanni.’ His grandson scoots to other

  mischief. If he had his way, those brats

  would learn some manners. Drained by the long day’s drift,

  he sighs, yawns, marooned in easy weather;

  prowls to the door, flicks his beads, unwilling

  idler in calms, circling on boredom’s raft.

  All day a tang has hung about the town,

  seeping downwind from bonfires lit to burn

  dry olive prunings. Nosing the lobby air,

  sterile and stale, the hotel owner’s father

  scents bitter sweat and woodsmoke from the bar

  where old men in stained work clothes drink together.

  In a restaurant in town that night an enormously fat cook slugged on a bottle of Coke and puffed a fag as he prepared my (delicious) pizza. The place was all but empty, something I was grateful for when the cook switched on the TV to reveal a chaos of shattered buildings and screaming ambulances. NATO planes had hit the office of the main Serbian television station in Belgrade. Fourteen dead, many maimed, said the reporter through tight lips.

  I sat late at a table in the hotel lobby, talking olive farming with the owner and his father, very pleased to discover that I had mustered enough Greek by now to keep my end up and maintain the threads of a conversation in my head. The older man – neat, tall, upright, his thick hair smoothed back – spoke courteously with the slow, carefully enunciated phrases of an educated man. I had seen him during the day prowling the lobby between desk and door, back and forth, back and forth, swinging his worry beads, occasionally sighing, fastidiously covering his yawns of boredom with a well-manicured hand. Such refined elderly men suffer excruciatingly from ennui in modern-day Crete, cut off from the cameraderie of their village contemporaries, the ordinary chaps who drink together and still get their hands dirty in orchard and field.

  By eleven o’clock next morning, 23 April, I was sitting in a cell in Angarathou monastery, drinking raki with Archimandrite Stephanos Marankakis. Already that day I had seen a nasty road accident (an old man knocked over by a boy racer in Kastelli), and had eaten an on-the-hoof breakfast of sweet bread and new cheese pressed on me by church-going crowds celebrating St George’s Day. I had covered the best part of 10 miles, too, blundering through gardens and following dead-end tracks on the bad advice of lying waymarks, being reminded all over again of the frustrations and farcicalities of European Hiking Route E4. But now, chatting with the vigorous old monk in a mixture of my minimal Greek, his two words of English and a tiny mutual store of German, our creaky talk helped along with sips of raki and nibbles of sweets and nuts, all was well.

  Well now, how old do you think I am, eh? 21? Ha, ha, flatterer! Come on, have a guess. 65? No, more than that. 70? Certainly not! I’m 88, I am. Look, here’s a photo of me during the war with my friends. Which one d’you think is me? That one, the handsome boy with the slim figure? How did you guess, eh? Ha, ha! Come along, have another drop of this raki, it won’t hurt you. Walking? Excellent – raki will make you strong, make you into a proper palikare, like I used to be. Not now, alas. You beg to differ? Think I’m not quite ready for the scrap-heap yet? I agree with you! Life in the old dog yet, eh? That’s right! Ha, ha, ha!

  Dear old man with his white-rimmed eyes, his healthy ego and sense of himself, full of glee and gaiety. I left him waving at the door of his cell, calling out blessings and brushing cake crumbs from his long white beard. It didn’t take more than half an hour to get myself thoroughly lost once more.

  Angarathou monastery lay in semi-wild gardens thick with Cretan sage and drowsy with the cluck of hens and the murmur of bees. I took the tarmac road up to Sgourokefali, where it was washing day. Cylindrical electric coppers bubbled in front gardens. Among the green waves of trees the flat rooftops of the village streamed shirts and pants like a fleet of signalling ships. Beyond here the country rolled and dipped, its billows broken by green ravines with cliff-like sides that cut north across the grain of the land to reach the coast around Iraklion. The pale earth was studded with the round green buttons of olive trees lined up in ranks, and with rows of vines, some up on trellises, others free-standing. It was good, fertile, profitable farming country, and new grant-aided dirt roads to olive groves and vineyards had proliferated and intertwined in recent y
ears like a nest of identical but equally untrustworthy snakes. Among them E4 occasionally raised a black and yellow sign, invariably in the apex of a fork. I chose a turning at random, and found myself after an hour looking up at the flapping underwear of Sgourokefali once more.

  The village men were all standing under a tree, getting drunk in honour of St George with the help of a 20-litre box of paint-stripper plonk labelled ‘The Party’s Wine’. There were lots of firecracker explosions, and a none-too-friendly air about the shouts of laughter that greeted my enquiry concerning the path to Mirtia. One man took me to the top of his dirt road and pointed out the track that had just led me round in a circle. There, man, there! Like the old man back in Vori on my second day out, he just couldn’t believe I could have any doubt about a route he knew all too well. I raised my hands and shrugged. Yes, but … To placate him and show willing, I set off once more down the road and turned the other way when I reached the fork. Twenty minutes later I was slinking back through the square at Sgourokefali. The drinkers under the tree sniggered and shook their heads. In the end a man not quite as far gone as the rest fetched his three-wheeler mikani, loaded me into the pick-up part and put-putted me down to the fork in the dirt road. There he indicated an obscure green track that I hadn’t even spotted. Along there to Mirtia! OK!

  I crossed a ravine by a slender Turkish bridge and came up through Ano Astraki into Mirtia, where I asked for directions in a kafenion full of men even drunker than the tree-huggers of Sgourokefali. I won’t even try to unpick what went wrong after that, nor how I came to a standstill at last on the brink of a hundred-foot cliff; let alone dwell on the many miles of uphill backtracking that had to be faced. It is wonderful how one’s feet feel fine when the going is good, but every cut and blister opens up and screams when you’re feeling sorry for yourself.

  Back in Mirtia, one of the kafenion merrymakers seemed to be offering me a lift. Half an hour later I was still twiddling my thumbs. Then I caught him smiling slyly round his circle of friends and making a little contemptuous gesture in my direction. Good old rustic humour at the foreign boy’s expense, eh? I phoned for a taxi and had myself taken off to the next sizeable town, Archanes, where there proved to be a rent room available at not too outrageous a charge. Cold water from the hot tap, and from the cold tap too. But so what? It was a roof and four walls.

  In the taverna that night there was a sudden high farce panic with much shouting, wielding of brooms and hasty mounting of chairs. ‘Zpider with poisoning,’ said a fellow diner by way of explanation. I joined the chair-climbers. These alarums and excursions drove the name of Mirtia out of my mind; but later, picturing the place and the Turkish bridge I’d crossed to get to it, I recalled Mirtia’s illustrious literary connection. It had been the family village of Nikos Kazantzakis, the ‘Tolstoy of Crete’, certainly the island’s most famous and best-selling writer, a controversial figure whose novel The Last Temptation of Christ attracted widespread condemnation as blasphemous. The author of two classic novels set in Crete, Zorba the Greek and Freedom and Death, was born in 1883, when the island was still battling to throw off the oppressive yoke of Turkish rule. His early experiences of that archetypal Cretan life-and-death struggle for freedom shaped Kazantzakis’s whole life and art, causing him to travel the world in search of a code of individual and spiritual liberation. This lifelong journey brought him from revolutionary nationalism through sympathy with communism to an exploration of religion, and on out along more recondite philosophical shores. After his death in 1957, the Orthodox Church would not permit this atheist with strong religious impulses a burial in consecrated ground. So Kazantzakis lies buried in the ramparts of the Martinengo Bastion on Iraklion’s city walls, facing Mount Iouchtas with its noble escarpment profile of Zeus. The writer’s monolithic slab carries his simple statement of belief: ‘I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free.’

  Like the Byzantines before them, like the Romans before that, the Venetians’ rule in Crete reflected the drift of affairs in the parent state, gradually turning soft, rotten and ripe for the plucking. And like the Byzantines, it was yet another upsurge of expansionist Islam that brought about their downfall. The Ottoman Empire’s capture of Constantinople in 1453 was a giant blow to Christian security, and equally a formidable boost to Muslim self-confidence. Pirate raids by Turks and Arabs became the scourge of the Mediterranean. Not for nothing did the authorities in Crete engage the greatest Venetian engineer of the day, Michele Sanmichele, in 1538 to strengthen with mighty bastions the walls that had been built around the Cretan capital of Candia the previous century on the foundations of the Byzantine city wall. Rethymnon and La Canea (modern-day Chania) followed suit, to mixed effect – Rethymnon was sacked and burned in 1567 by Algerian corsairs. But wall upon wall could not keep out the Turks when they finally launched their invasion of Crete in 1645. Under Yussuf Pasha they took La Canea in their first eastward push after a bloody siege of 55 days, and Rethymnon fell to Yussuf the following year. With Candia things went less easily. It took an epic siege of 21 years, with many thousands of deaths and countless unrecorded barbarities on both sides, before the gates of the city were finally opened by the defenders on 5 September 1669. The Venetians remaining inside were the last unconquered of their era, and were allowed by the Turks to leave in peace the now subjugated island they themselves had dominated, exploited, influenced and made their own for over 450 years.

  What followed was, essentially, 230 years of decline and neglect, a period still seen by Cretans as the nadir of their island’s fortunes. Feelings run very strong on the subject of Turkey and the Turks. The surest way to catch it hot, verbally if not physically, from a Cretan – a small town or village dweller in particular – is to utter anything that sounds even remotely like approval for anything originating east of Greece and south of the Black Sea.

  Turkish rule was characterised by long periods of laissez-faire and navel-gazing. Minarets and domes were grafted on to churches-turned-mosques, beautiful fountains were built, Moorish window arches and wooden balconies were added to Venetian town houses. Thick sweet coffee, honeyed pastries and the pleasures of the narghile or hubble-bubble pipe were introduced, as was the affectionate diminutive ‘-akis’ – Theodorakis, ‘little Theodore’, Kakoulakis, ‘little Kakoulis’ – that ends so many Cretan surnames. But it would be hard to point to any solid, sensible, hard-headed benefits of those two and a half centuries of Turkish rule. The everyday business of agriculture and trade did not seem to interest the new masters, urban by inclination and habit as they were. Pashas or overlords ruled the three districts into which Crete was now divided, and these officials and their minions tended not only to spend their time in the three main towns of Megalo Kastro (Iraklion), Rethymnon and Chania, but to dismiss the ever-worsening financial and agricultural problems of the countryside as unimportant. Lack of economic vision and purpose meant that the coffers of this naturally fertile and commercially well situated island – coffers that should have been full to bulging – were too often depleted, and the temptation for the Turkish authorities in Crete was always to top them up by increasing taxes on a population that could not maintain the prosperity necessary to pay these levies.

  Given the independent-minded and combustible Cretan temperament, it is small wonder that the era of Turkish rule was punctuated by ferocious uprisings based in rural and mountain areas. These were always guaranteed to fetch the authorities out of their lethargy with a bang, and to trigger savage suppression. The leader of the 1770 rising in the west, a learned Sfakiot nicknamed Daskalogiannis or ‘John the Teacher’ who had counted in vain on Russian support in his struggle against their mutual enemy, gave himself up at Frangokastello Castle on the south coast and was brought for questioning in front of the Pasha of Iraklion. At first the Pasha treated the prisoner with courtesy, but when Daskalogiannis was bold enough to defy his captor he was taken out and flayed alive. The unfortunate leaders of some other rebellions were impaled, or dropped from poles on
to boards stuck with meat hooks. Hatzimichali Dalianis and his followers were slaughtered wholesale at Frangokastello in 1828. Those who took up arms under the rebel leaders, and the people of the districts considered to have supported them, could likewise expect no mercy from a Turkish and native soldiery which gained itself a name for vicious behaviour, even in times of comparative peace. In the opening years of the 19th-century, for example, the French consul reported from Chania that the city’s Janissaries – young Christian men who had converted to become elite Muslim soldiers – were casually shooting Cretan passers-by for fun, after making bets as to whether they would fall face down or up.

  Urban and lowland Cretans who lived cheek by jowl with the Turks had to learn to get along with them. Mostly they did. There were large-scale conversions to Islam, some perhaps from sincere motives, many to ensure an easier life. But up in the back country and the mountains it was a different story, especially after mainland Greece broke free from the Ottoman Empire in 1832 after a ten-year war of independence. Emboldened, the islanders mounted rising after rising. In 1862 rebels fired the powder magazine at Arkadi monastery in the mountains behind Rethymnon, killing 2,000 friends and foes. The outside world began to take note and apply pressure on Constantinople.

  The next uprising, that of 1878, was supported by Greece. This was the rebellion that formed the backdrop to Nikos Kazantzakis’s greatest novel, Freedom and Death, with its ultimate palikare of a hero in Captain Michales, who goes down fighting for the glory and freedom of Crete along with the cream of his men. The 1878 rising ended with the establishment of Crete as a semi-autonomous state, and like those that followed in 1889 and 1896 forced more concessions from the Turks. As the Cretans sensed that their Turkish rulers were reaching the end of the road in the island, the four Great Powers of Europe – France, Italy, Russia and Britain – brought their diplomatic weight and the threat of their warships to bear on the Cretan rump of the tottering Ottoman Empire. In 1897 the Greek flag was raised on the hill of Profitis Ilias outside Chania in a protest organised by the man destined to become Greek Prime Minister and Crete’s greatest political hero, Eleftherias (‘Freedom’) Venizelos. Its pole was shot away by the gunfire of naval units of the Great Powers at anchor in Suda Bay, but the Cretan patriots streamed the flag out manually and continued to fly it by hand, a bold gesture which brought spontaneous applause from the gunners in the ships. Finally in 1898, between diplomacy and threats, the Great Powers imposed a settlement. Unlamented, the Turks at last quit Crete.