Anopolis of today, the village of the heroâs birth, with those desperate and sanguinary days. The thriving village rests quietly in its fertile upland plain, surrounded by fruit trees and fields of wheat. Sfakia as a whole has changed a great deal. The people speak the same language and wear the same style of dress as other Cretans. They are more prosperous now, generally speaking, and more peaceable. They are not always very communicative, but they donât carry weapons anymoreânot openly, at least. Communications are better, but the mountains on this part of the south coast plunge abruptly down into the sea, the coastal strip is extremely narrow, hardly more, in many places, than a rocky foreshore. From east to west there are no good roads, and often no roads at all. Those that run north to Chania skirt the White Mountains on either side; there is no way through the heart of the range. And one does not need to wander far from what few roads there are in Sfakia to encounter a landscape that in its bleakness and remoteness recalls the savage past.
CHAPTER FOUR
Â
The MUTABLE FORTRESS
Eastward along the coast from Chania, the main road keeps close to the shoreline of Souda Bay until it reaches Kalami, then veers south, turning away from the sea for a while, joining it again as one approaches Rethymnon. Near where this change of direction occurs, on a plateau overlooking the bay, a mile or two inland, lie the ruins of Aptera, once one of the strongest Greek city-states on the island. Of very ancient foundation, going back to at least 1000 B.C. , its time of greatest splendor was during the Hellenistic period, from about 500 B.C. onward. The city was severely damaged by earthquake early in the eighth century A.D., and in 823 it was sacked and more or less completely destroyed by Arab invaders, an event from which it seems never to have recovered. Excavationâwhich still continues on the siteâhas uncovered the remains of massive stone walls, nearly three miles in length, enclosing a wide area, evidence of the importance the city once enjoyed.
After thirteen centuries the evidence of violent events is half buried, grassed over, softened out of recognition, whether it is the violence of natural forces or the savagery of human beings. We had the site to ourselves; in the two hours that we spent there we saw almost no one. We felt a great sense of peace, though we didnât talk about it until later, in this place of ancient battles and dead passions. Perhaps, in my case at least, a kind of acceptance or resignation: All the works of man will in the end be a wide plain, empty of all but stones and flowers, like this one.
Violence and the fear of it are still in evidence, however; it is the single unifying factor in the ruins of this once mighty and prosperous city that has seen so many tenants. All those who came here, having established their power, lived in fear of having that power taken from them and sought in one way or another to guard against attack. The remains of German machine-gun emplacements lie not far from a Turkish fortâor what is left of itâlooking out over Souda Bay, and over another fortress lower down with its cannon still in place, and, still lower, over the island fortresses which guard the approaches to this superb natural anchorage, surely one of the finest in the world. Below the German redoubts and the Turkish bastions, Greek naval vessels, guns mounted, pass to and fro.
The city itself was named to commemorate a kind of battleâor so the legend goes. Somewhere among the nearby mountains the Muses challenged the Sirens to a musical contest, and the Sirens lost. In their mortification they stripped off their wings and flung themselves down from the cliffs into the bay, where they were transformed into islands. Another case of Cretan myth stealing: The island of the Sirens, which Odysseus passed on his journey home to Ithaka, is held by everyone else to have been
CHAPTER FOUR
Â
The MUTABLE FORTRESS
Eastward along the coast from Chania, the main road keeps close to the shoreline of Souda Bay until it reaches Kalami, then veers south, turning away from the sea for a while, joining it again as one approaches Rethymnon. Near where this change of direction occurs, on a plateau overlooking the bay, a mile or two inland, lie the ruins of Aptera, once one of the strongest Greek city-states on the island. Of very ancient foundation, going back to at least 1000 B.C. , its time of greatest splendor was during the Hellenistic period, from about 500 B.C. onward. The city was severely damaged by earthquake early in the eighth century A.D., and in 823 it was sacked and more or less completely destroyed by Arab invaders, an event from which it seems never to have recovered. Excavationâwhich still continues on the siteâhas uncovered the remains of massive stone walls, nearly three miles in length, enclosing a wide area, evidence of the importance the city once enjoyed.
After thirteen centuries the evidence of violent events is half buried, grassed over, softened out of recognition, whether it is the violence of natural forces or the savagery of human beings. We had the site to ourselves; in the two hours that we spent there we saw almost no one. We felt a great sense of peace, though we didnât talk about it until later, in this place of ancient battles and dead passions. Perhaps, in my case at least, a kind of acceptance or resignation: All the works of man will in the end be a wide plain, empty of all but stones and flowers, like this one.
Violence and the fear of it are still in evidence, however; it is the single unifying factor in the ruins of this once mighty and prosperous city that has seen so many tenants. All those who came here, having established their power, lived in fear of having that power taken from them and sought in one way or another to guard against attack. The remains of German machine-gun emplacements lie not far from a Turkish fortâor what is left of itâlooking out over Souda Bay, and over another fortress lower down with its cannon still in place, and, still lower, over the island fortresses which guard the approaches to this superb natural anchorage, surely one of the finest in the world. Below the German redoubts and the Turkish bastions, Greek naval vessels, guns mounted, pass to and fro.
The city itself was named to commemorate a kind of battleâor so the legend goes. Somewhere among the nearby mountains the Muses challenged the Sirens to a musical contest, and the Sirens lost. In their mortification they stripped off their wings and flung themselves down from the cliffs into the bay, where they were transformed into islands. Another case of Cretan myth stealing: The island of the Sirens, which Odysseus passed on his journey home to Ithaka, is held by everyone else to have been
Similar Books
