Read Online Crete by Barry Unsworth - Free Book Online Page B

Anthemoessa, off the Italian coast. The Muses, left in the possession of the field, decked themselves in the feathers to celebrate their victory. The literal translation of “Aptera” is “Wingless” or “Featherless,” and there was a temple to Artemis in the city, the remains of which are still there, where the goddess was worshiped as Aptera, “Wingless Artemis.”
    Aptera does not go back so very far as human societies are counted in Crete. When the Dorian Greeks with their iron weapons and warrior cult came down from the north and began to colonize the island, the Bronze Age civilization they replaced had already gone through two thousand years of achievement and decline. But these ruins have everything that can make a Cretan classical site fascinating to visit. Lying on an upland plain, well above sea level, it gives superb views of the high mountains to the south and the great sweep of Souda Bay, with Chania in the distance and the heights of the Akrotiri peninsula jutting out to the north. Recent excavations have revealed, among the tangles of ancient stone and spreading scrub, Doric columns lying where the cataclysm of the earthquake left them, the vestigial walls of a Roman street, the ruins of a Byzantine church, brick-vaulted underground cisterns, dark water still standing in one, and no sound but pigeons’ wings.
    One can wander at will here, sea on one side, mountain on the other. In spring and early summer the whole area is spread with wildflowers—hollyhock, rockroses, great clusters of dark blue vetch—and alive with the linnets and stonechats and pipits that are the present tenants. For lovers of old stones like us, the wilderness that is left after the fall of ancient cities—which is not like any other kind of wilderness—this place could hardly be better. In those addicted, the attention becomes in a curious way impartial, evenly distributed but without loss of sharpness: The eroded basins of a Roman bathhouse, and the extraordinary vividness of the poppies that blaze in the sun among them, have the same interest and the same age.

    Aptera: a Roman cistern
    We searched for traces of fresco painting on the patches of plaster still remaining on the ruinous walls of the Byzantine monastery dedicated to St. John the Theologian. There seemed to be an orangey or ochreous streak here and there, some configuration that might indicate human likeness, human intention. Inveterate, this habit of seeking our own image everywhere. But it is time and decay that have made these marks; they have beauty but no design—or none that we could recognize.
    Rethymnon, capital of the province of the same name, is the next town of any size eastward on the road that runs practically the whole length of the island from Kissamou to Sitia, linking all the coastal areas. The principal cities and most of the beach resorts are situated on this north coast.
    It’s a good road, a lot of it of recent construction, well marked and well surfaced, easily the best road on the island. All the same, we drove warily along it. On Cretan roads the incongruous and unexpected—elements generally present—require a high level of alertness. Someone might be dragging a handcart loaded with oranges, or crossing the road with buckets in a quest for water. Bypass roads are almost nonexistent, and you shift abruptly from the speed and freedom of the open road to a seaside street with shops and bars and parked cars and people in beach dress wandering about, then out again, just as abruptly, with ranks of mountains on one side and the glittering reaches of the Aegean on the other. Also slightly unnerving is the general use of the hard shoulder as a second lane. There should be two lanes, really, on either side, to cope with the volume of traffic, which increases dramatically in the summer. Perhaps the money was lacking for such a large-scale project; the cliffs come down sheer in many places,