Chapter 4: In Which We Try to Do It All

After reviewing the footage (which made me think of Bridget Jones’ ill-fated soup: “it’s umm…. blue”) and growing dispirited, we tried to buoy ourselves. 

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” we said.

“At least we’re trying and we’re learning.” 

As two type-A, first-child perfectionists, at first we only half-believed these attempts at cheerfulness, but soon we were laughing at our failed cinematic efforts. We agreed that tomorrow would be different. We would enjoy ourselves. We would bring the camera, but the camera wouldn’t control us. And so we set out the following morning for Gortyna, about an hour south of Heraklion. 

During the Hellenistic period (lasting from about 5th century BC to the Roman conquest of Crete in 69 BC), Gortyna was a powerful sometimes-ally, sometimes-rival of its more famous neighbor Knossos in the north. And in the first century BC, perhaps sensing which way the winds were blowing, Gortyna supported the Roman invaders against their neighboring Cretan city-states and were rewarded by being made the capital of the new Roman territory. 

Gortyna has several notable monuments from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but most important is the Law Code of Gortyna, which is the most complete written legal code remaining from ancient Greece, dating back to the fifth century BC. Most interesting to me, the Gortyn Code secured several important rights for women: the right to own real property, the right to appear as plaintiff or defendant in a lawsuit, and some degree of freedoms around marriage and divorce. This is sharply at odds with the treatment of women in classical Athens, where women were considered less valuable than slaves. In Athens, women were forbidden to participate in any legal transaction worth more than a very small sum (thus depriving women of all power but still ensuring they could do the family shopping [eyeroll]) and all legal decisions were handled by a woman’s “kyrios” (guardian), usually her father brother, or husband. It is unclear why women’s rights in Gortyna were more advanced, but it’s possible that the legacy of women’s prominent role in Minoan culture may have lingered through the centuries and elevated Cretan women’s role beyond that of their sisters on the Greek mainland. 

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The Code is a massive wall of text, now housed in a protective building behind locked gates, but when it was discovered in the late 1800’s, it was neither intact nor protected. The wall bearing the Code had been dismantled and the large stone cubes into which the Code was carved were repurposed to build the Roman Odeon commissioned by Emperor Trajan. This type of upcycling exists all over Crete as the changing regimes re-used and re-purposed prior buildings. After the stones containing the Gortyn code were removed from the Odeon to be reconstituted, the Odeon now looks a bit cannibalized and only the first few rows of seats remain.   

The ruins at Gortyna also include the early Byzantine Church of Saint Titus. Saint Titus was the first Bishop of Crete and was a disciple and contemporary of the Apostle Paul in the first century AD. 

Incidentally, on the subject of Saint Titus (now there’s a phrase I never thought I’d use), in Heraklion there is another church dedicated to Saint Titus in which the 1,000 year-old remains of the saint’s skull are preserved. 

The church of Agios Titos in Heraklion was originally built in the 900’s as a Byzantine church meant to signify the island’s return to Christianity after 150 years of being controlled by Muslim pirates. It remained a Christian church under both the Byzantines and Venetians until the Ottomans succeeded in conquering Heraklion from the Venetians in 1669 after a twenty-two year siege of the city that left Heraklion destroyed. Just before the city fell to the Turks, the sacred relics from Gortyna and Heraklion were sent to Venice, where all of them remain to this day except Saint Titus’s skull which was returned in 1966. The Ottomans rebuilt the Saint Titus church as a mosque, which was then converted back to a church in the 1920’s. 

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Anyway, after three hours of filming in the fiercely strong Cretan sun, we were both sweat-stained and in dire need of an ice-cold beer. We hopped into the car and drove another 20 minutes to the seaside town of Matala on the south coast of Crete. 

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After a delicious meal, some chilled white wine, and a refreshing dip in Matala’s beautiful cove, we were feeling pretty proud. We smugly commended ourselves for balancing it all: we got some great footage in the morning, we had found a lovely beachside town, and we weren’t running around exhausting ourselves like we had been. We really began to feel we were nailing this “pursuing our dreams” thing.

Then we got greedy. 

We decided to drive back to Gortyna to film the ruins with the drone. When we stopped to grab a Greek coffee in a nearby taverna while we awaited the “golden hour,” we were greeted by the wonderfully friendly proprietor who delightedly told us we were her first tourists of the season. Alongside our coffees, she served us giant plates of fresh melon and strawberries from her brother’s garden and when we complimented the berries, she brought us spoonfuls of the ruby-bright jam she had just made. 

To Ángel’s delight, she also brought out a generous bottle of raki made by her father. Raki, a clear liquor made from grapes, is a staple in Crete and most restaurants will bring out a small bottle to aid digestion at the end of the meal. Since raki is often made very locally (as in, it’s usually made in the shed behind the restaurant or by the family or friends of the restaurant owner), it varies everywhere you go. Some is aromatic and complex, while some has all the delicacy of rubbing alcohol. Some touristy places water it down a bit, but places frequented by Cretans will serve the real, strong stuff. 

Tongue loosened by the strong raki, Ángel began doing what he does best: asking strangers endless questions. Luckily, our host was quite happy to share and she told us about how her brother found Roman ruins in his garden, about what it was like to be in lockdown during Greek Easter (something which had never happened in the history of this country even with its centuries of bitter wars and conflicts), and about which parts of Greece support which soccer teams. 

The conversation took an odd turn when we talked about the coronavirus situation and she said the government was mandating mask usage because the Prime Minister’s brother owns a mask company. She gave us a knowing nod, implying that the mask regulations were all a means of lining Mitsotakis’ pockets.  

At the time, I thought this was just some kooky conspiracy theory, but since then I’ve heard similar thoughts voiced by many different people in Crete. Because the virus has had virtually no impact here (other than decimating the tourist economy), people have trouble seeing it as real. As of the end of July, there have still been only ~4,000 infections and 201 COVID deaths in the entire country (and only a handful of total cases in Crete). Many people see the precautions as a way for the government to profit by fining people for breaking the rules or for politicians to get money because of nebulous ties to mask or hand sanitizer companies (yes, I have now heard both theories…). 

We have tried to share our perspectives from the U.S. that the virus is in fact very real and that Crete is incredibly fortunate to have avoided it thus far. But it’s understandably hard to change the mind of someone whose livelihood is being ruined in order to prevent the spread of a disease that just doesn’t exist here. Crete relies very heavily on tourism (and especially on summer tourism) so these few summer months are crucial, often providing the income needed for the rest of the year. It’s tough to know what the right balance is here, and we just keep hoping that things stay safe as tourism opens up.

When we finally left the taverna, fortified by the strong Greek coffee and equally strong Cretan raki, the light was already beginning to fade. We had gotten so caught up in talking that our golden hour was slipping away. We began scrambling up the hillside behind the ruins with our drone and camera. We found a clearing, and Ángel set the drone down and snapped my phone into the controller.

And then… nothing happened. The little drone just sat there, looking like a forlorn frog.

Instead of the eponymous droning sound and whirring propellers, the controller began to beep and a flashing red low-battery warning appeared onscreen. 

“Wait, I thought you charged the drone.”

Ángel looked sheepish. 

“I did. I forgot to charge the controller.” 

“Oh.”

Determined to make the best of our situation, we began running up the hillside with the camera, thinking that if we couldn’t get drone shots, perhaps we could at least film with the camera. We stood atop the hillside as the sun set, surrounded by olive groves, wildflowers, and the deafening call of cicadas and tried to capture the majestic scale of Crete’s mountainous tapestry. 

Did we succeed? Meh. Not really. But I’m glad we tried. 

However as the twilight began to darken into actual night, we realized we were at the top of a very steep, slippery, mountainside carrying hundreds of dollars of camera and filming gear and it was about to be DARK. After a couple slips and near-falls and with premonitions of shattered lenses flooding our minds, we developed a means of getting down the mountainside, holding hands and seesawing our way down, with one going a few steps down while the other kept a firm footing and then switching roles. 

We both breathed a sigh of relief when the ground finally levelled out and soon we began laughing. Looks like we still had a long way to go before we could count ourselves as film pros…

The following morning, we capped off our weekend of tourism with a truly unforgettable trip to the Minoan Palace at Knossos. (Sorry for overloading this blog entry with history, but Knossos is the site I have been most excited to visit since we originally began researching Crete so hang in there just a little longer!)

The Palace of Knossos is about 20 minutes south of Heraklion and was the most important palace in ancient Minoan times. Minoan palaces were enormous maze-like structures. At its height, Knossos had close to 1,000 rooms that had a wide variety of purposes: artisan workshops, grain and food store rooms, spaces for commerce, religious worship, administration of the kingdom, etc. 

Knossos was discovered in 1900 by Sir Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist and the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. In these times, archaeology was not the developed discipline that it is today and many of the “archaeologists” in the 1800s and early 1900s  were wealthy elites engaging in a kind of cultural treasure hunting. This was most exemplified by Heinrich Schliemann, the German businessman and amateur archaeologist who led the excavations of Ancient Troy in the 1870’s and discovered evidence of the Mycenaean Greeks that were the subject of Homer’s Iliad. 

But Schliemann was a far better businessman than archaeologist. He often misidentified artifacts and promoted them to the press as treasures from the Trojan War, claiming he had found the jewels of Helen or the mask of Agamemnon. While these were indeed treasures from the Mycenaean Greeks, archaeologists today agree that his linking these artifacts to Homeric heroes was nothing more than fanciful marketing. While in some ways he is to be commended for discovering Ancient Troy, Schliemann’s slap-dash, profit-driven motive (he literally used DYNAMITE to excavate this historic site!) mean that the site cannot now be studied layer by layer and many of the lessons that may have been learned from this site are lost forever. 

In the late 1890’s, Evans, inspired by Schliemann’s discovery of the Mycenaean artifacts, turned his attention to the Aegean and became convinced that Crete was the site of a culture even more ancient than the Mycenaean Greeks. He traced ancient sealing stones (stones used to imprint the wax seals that proved a sack of goods was unopened) through the Aegean to Crete where he began excavations at Knossos in 1900. 

Evans’s legacy is more mixed than Schliemann’s. Certainly a more talented and scrupulous archaeologist, Evans did a far better job of properly excavating the Knossos site, thus allowing for later research. But he also embarked on extensive restorations in which he used concrete to reinforce and rebuild parts of the structures. He made many stylistic choices that were far more shaped by early 1900’s aesthetics and his own theories about Minoan culture rather than actual analysis of the artifacts. He also engaged in extensive restoration of the frescoes, piecing together various snippets of paintings that may or may not originally have been from the same piece, and in other cases he extrapolated wildly from small pieces of remaining frescoes.  

Is some ways, when you visit Knossos, you are visiting Evan’s vision of Minoan culture. Very influenced by the horrors of WWI, Evans developed a vision that the Minoans were a predominantly pacifist, beauty-loving, women-centric culture. But the bold, dark red columns and the powerful imagery of bull’s heads also hearken to the brute strength and endurance of the people who have for millenia carved out a life here in Crete. 

Evans gave the name “Minoan” to this ancient culture based on the myth of King Minos, who is said to have ruled Knossos. In the myth, King Minos offended the god Poseidon by failing to sacrifice a white bull to him. To punish him, Poseidon caused King Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, to desire the bull and from her union with the bull, she birthed the monstrous Minotaur. King Minos, who kept the master craftsman Daedalus imprisoned in Crete where he forced him to create works of wonder for his palace, tasked Daedalus with creating an unsolvable maze that would house the Minotaur. It’s sometimes hard to see where the mythology ends and the real facts about the Minoans begin and it seems likely that classical Greeks recalled fragments from this ancient Cretan culture and wove them into their foundational myths. One can imagine that King Minos’s mythological maze grew out of fragmented memories of the labyrinthine palaces that had once thrived on Crete. And maybe the half-man, half-bull Minotaur had its genesis in the widespread imagery of bulls in Minoan art. Perhaps Greek mythology places Daedalus in Crete, because later Greeks recalled that the ancient people of Crete were were known for their delicate and advanced handicrafts.

For anyone who visits Crete, Knossos and the Archaeology Museum are the perfect complements. In the museum, we saw breathtaking artifacts that were unspoiled and not the subject of fanciful “restorations,” but they are now housed in a sterile, temperature-controlled museum, behind plates of glass. In Knossos, you see a bit of a fake reality: the concrete and bright paint are certainly not original, but the scope and the setting are breathtaking. You can feel the hot Cretan sun and hear the cicadas as you walk through labyrinthine rooms adorned with bright frescoes. The two experiences reinforce each other, and It was easier for me to understand the art when I saw the place in which it was created. 

I left this place feeling like my soul had been topped up with beauty and with good fortune. Not only were we lucky enough to be exploring Knossos, a place I’d read about for months, but we had the place almost totally to ourselves. It felt like some sort of karmic reward: that even though our trip to Greece had been delayed for months because of COVID, we were now getting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view one of the most fascinating sites in the world virtually alone. 

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When we arrived back in the marina Monday night, it was 11 p.m. and we were wiped out. But as soon as we got out of the car, we realized something had changed. While we were gone, the meltemi had arrived. 

The meltemi is a strong northerly wind pattern that blows through the Aegean Sea in July and August. Pre-COVID, we had planned to arrive in Crete in April so that we’d be far up the Turkish coast by now. But our late start puts us directly in the line of the meltemi, in the farthest south part of the Aegean with all our possible destinations pretty directly upwind from us.

Now, we had read about the meltemi. But reading about it and actually getting accustomed to your new floating house being buffeted by 35-40 knot gusts is completely different. There were constant, perplexing new noises: dock lines being jerked by sudden tension cause thuds and creaks that can sound disturbingly like footsteps on the deck (only I hear this; Ángel still claims he has no idea what I’m talking about); loose lines start thwacking into the mast; the plastic clips fastening the sunshade come undone and begin clacking against the cockpit sides, and all around, the wind whistles through the rigging of the hundred or so boats in the marina. Add to this the sloshing and slapping of the wind-whipped waves that are amplified by the hull into a kind of watery surround-sound, and you can imagine that this was not a great week sleep-wise. 

I spent that first night back blearily typing into Google “how much wind will blow your bimini away” (Answer: way, way more than what we’re dealing with here) and then tossing and turning as questions crept in and out of my half-conscious mind: “did I leave any laundry out on the line?”… “My flipflops are in the cockpit, but maybe they will still blow away?” and “BUT REALLY AREN’T THOSE FOOTSTEPS???” (Again: no and no and no). Turns out my quite active imagination is great for some things like making up ridiculous song lyrics to get Ángel out of bed in the morning, but it’s really not an asset when it comes to sleeping restfully in a boat full of new sounds. 

(Lest you worry, like all things about boat life, I’m finally starting to get used to the noises. They don’t spook me like they did at first. And we’ve come to an agreement that both of us will be far happier if I get some sleep so I’ve started using ear plugs and an eye mask. Angel still sleeps without ear plugs to be able to hear any issues that may arise on the boat during the night, and in exchange, I get up a few hours before him and let him catch up on sleep in the morning.)

But in that first week of the meltemi, I really wasn’t sleeping too much. I also was feeling more and more stretched and stressed as our (extremely) ambitious plan of leaving Crete by mid-July began approaching rapidly. 

Those were long days. We tackled boat projects and provisioning during the day, even as the sun blazed overhead, sapping all our energy. This was a rookie mistake. We’ve since learned that avoiding the sun from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m is basically essential. We probably should have known this, but we’ve had 10 years of living in San Francisco’s remarkably cool climate and I continue to be amazed at the strength of the sun here.

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In the evenings, Ángel had work calls sometimes lasting until late into the night and I would continue with our long task list, often using the marginally cooler evenings for more labor-intensive tasks like scrubbing our teak decks and polishing the stanchions, lifelines, and metal-ware on the deck. 

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After a week like this, our exhaustion was beginning to show- and not just on our faces. We more bicker-y, more prone to snap at each other, and less able to find the joy in the little things. I didn’t feel that I was burning the candle at both ends; more like I was just blowing up the candle. Or like the candle was playing a cruel joke on me. Here we were in paradise, and yet we had put such unrealistic expectations on ourselves that we were basically ruining our own lives.

I wish I could tell you that we had the foresight and maturity to stop, slow down, and adjust the plan. But this is Angel and me that I’m talking about. We had a spreadsheet, a task list, and a plan, and we were going to keep running at that goal until we reached it or imploded in the attempt. And since weeks later as I write this, we are still in Crete, I’m sure you can deduce that we imploded (and in pretty epic fashion, I must say).  But that story is for Chapter 5.