Figure 3.1 Map of Crete with an inset of the Amari Valley
As important as the Theodorakis notebook is as late evidence of a long iatrosophic tradition, its special value derives from the fact that it is a signed, dated family document coming from a known, specific locale. The book is a product both of the traditional and the personal, and viewing it through this dual lens gives it historical substance.1 The craft of iatrosophia, especially its use of medicinal plants, has a complex inter-relationship with the local landscape. Each jointly influences the other in many ways.2 Healer, healing knowledge and landscape are best understood together, and the geographical and social details which follow in the next two chapters are designed to provide a broader understanding of Theodorakis and his work. First, a brief sketch of the Amari valley will allow us to see the notebook more clearly in its home environment and to enjoy a more informed imaginative response to it.
The island of Crete has been noted since the Bronze Age for its plentiful, richly varied flora. The landscapes of Minoan art abound with depictions of plants whose healing properties are now acknowledged.3 Crete was a prime botanical resource for ancient Greek physicians and pharmacologists and was recognized as such by the Romans: the Elder Pliny notes the superiority of numerous Cretan medicinal herbs and Roman emperors maintained a staff of Cretan ‘root-cutters’ who harvested medicinal plants and sent them to storehouses in Rome.4 The botanical importance of Crete was maintained throughout succeeding centuries and waves of foreign occupations.
Crete received renewed attention in the Renaissance when plants were sought by collectors for private gardens, as dried specimens and as important contributions to the new botanical gardens developing during the sixteenth century at Italian universities such as Pisa, Padua, Florence and Bologna. These were soon followed by Montpelier, Leiden and Heidelberg. The Venetian aristocrat Pietro Antonio Michiel (born 1510), through contacts with Venetian ambassadors, received plants from all over the Mediterranean, including Crete, for his private garden on the island of San Trovaso.5 Luca Ghini (1490–1556), founder of the botanical garden at Pisa, received plant specimens from his brother, Ottavian, a lawyer in Crete.6 Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577), in his commentary on Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, notes Crete among the many exotic lands visited by those of his correspondents engaged in plant collecting.7 Charles de l’Écluse, or L’Éscluse (1526–1609) (known to his contemporaries as Carolus Clusius), the praefectus at Leiden’ s botanical garden, also received Cretan plants from the then director of Pisa’s botanic garden, Jodocus De Goethuysen of Flanders (1535–1595), a fellow countryman.8 Known also by his Italian name Giuseppe Casabona, De Goethuysen had made an expedition in 1590 to Crete in order to collect the plants of the classical medical and botanical texts, especially Theophrastus.9 The Venetian doctor Onorio Belli (1550–1604), who went to Crete in 1594 for a two-year visit, during his stay sent ten letters to Clusius, informing him about 43 of the plants of the island, including a list of their popular names and seed samples. Many travellers over these centuries were physicians, some were botanists too, but as with the traveller Pierre Belon (1517–1564), an interest in collecting was paramount. Belon visited the Mt. Ida and Amari region in 1548, compiled 96 plants and listed them with their Cretan names.10 Other travellers collected seeds and sent them back to Europe where they were catalogued with the taxonomy of the period and given the toponym Creticus.11
Of the several areas in Crete which offer ideal loci for studying the interrelationship between landscape, plants and medical traditions, the Amari valley in the Prefecture of Rethymnon has long been a Mecca for travellers and botanists. It lies in the centre of the island, right up against the sunlit foothills of the highest mountain on Crete: Mount Ida to the early travellers, today Psiloritis (‘the tall one’).12 (See Fig. 3.1)
… nous descendîmes par des précipices horribles, tournés presque en limaçon jusques au pied du mont Ida, dont la vue était toujours affreuse; ensuite le contraste nous ravit tout d’un coup. On entra dans une grande vallée, entre le mont Ida et le mont Kentro, toute plantée d’oliviers, d’orangers, de grenadiers, de mûriers, de cyprès, de noyers, de myrtes, de lauriers, et de toutes sortes d’arbres fruitiers; les villages y sont fréquents, et les eaux admirables; le mont Ida est un grand alambic, qui fournit de l’eau à tout le voisinage, c’est-à-dire à près d’un tiers de l’île; la vallée dont nous parlons se perd insensiblement dans la plus belle et la plus fertile plaine de Candie… .
[We descended by dreadful precipices, turning almost in spirals right to the foot of Mount Ida, where the view was always frightful; then suddenly we were enchanted by the contrast. We entered a great valley between Mount Ida and Mount Kentro, full of olive, orange, pomegranate, mulberry, cypress, walnut, myrtle, laurel and all kinds of fruit trees. The villages there are populous and the waters very fine. Mount Ida is a great fountainhead which provides water to the whole vicinity, that is, close to one third of the island. The valley we are describing gently fans out into the loveliest and most fertile plain of Candie (Crete) … .]13
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s enchantment with the Amari valley has been echoed over the centuries by travellers, who still today find refreshment in its cool green profusion. In every Cretan guidebook Amari is, without exception, ‘the enchanting …, the lovely …, the beautiful …’. During the German occupation of Crete in the Second World War, the mountains of this region were key centres for the Andartes (Cretan resistance fighters), and British undercover officers fighting alongside them looked forward to their times of refuge in the Amari valley:
The Amari. An area south of Mt. Ida which, besides having an intensely patriotic and pro-British population, was by comparison to the rest of Crete a land of plenty. It was known among us as ‘Lotus Land’ for there we should always be sure of finding food, wine, and the comfort of security.14
The Amari is especially lovely in Spring (February through May), when a carpet of wild flowers makes the valley a paradise – an impression not only affecting the visitor, for the local toponym of the leafy groves and fields lining the river below Monastiraki is ‘Paradise’ (Παράδεισος; see Fig. 3.2).15 But the bucolic fertility of the valley floor is only one aspect of a geographical region with many resources for the practitioner of traditional medicine. The rough cliffs Tournefort descended, the steep mountain flanks – barren only from a distance – are equally important resources in Crete’s therapeutic landscape. Coupled with its relative isolation in the heart of central Crete, the rich biodiversity of the Amari makes it like Epiros, Thrace, the Mani or Arcadia, a region where iatrosophic knowledge flourishes.16
Figure 3.2 View across the Amari valley to Mount Ida, or Psiloritis, with the village of Kalogerou in the foreground
Continuously since the Bronze Age this valley has sustained a sometimes considerable population. As Tournefort commented, ‘les villages y sont fréquents’, and with them through the ages the valley has seen small Minoan palace centres, a thriving Dorian and later Byzantine city, Sybritos, a Roman town with extensive country villas, Christian basilicas and Bishopric seats, a prosperous monastery, the substantial homes and tiny churches of wealthy Venetian households and Turkish settlements with their fortified outposts.17 The villages encircle the valley, most at the level of the many springs.18 The inhabitants have traditionally cultivated mixed crops and orchards in the protected fields below them, olives and vines on the lower slopes, along with apiculture, and pursued their pastoral activities (goat and sheep herding, cheese making) up the craggy foothills, in summer reaching the topmost mountain pastures. The massif of Mount Ida covers 359 square kilometres and for millennia has maintained a rich herding culture. A microcosm of Crete itself, Amari’s diverse topography and agricultural activities mean that Amariotes are familiar with and traditionally use a whole gamut of wild plants both as food stuffs and as medicines.19
Medicine and healing have always played an important role in the life of the villages of Amari. We have noted the presence there of a ‘field hospital’ in the nineteenth century during the wars for Cretan independence. The natural environment has encouraged generations of healers to develop their skills. Many of the springs are thought to be therapeutic for specific disorders and people come to them still to fill containers of water to treat ‘the stone’ or other ailments.20 Amariotes who have left the region for employment in Athens or the more prosperous urban centres of Crete return to their villages when they can to gather herbs and collect honey, or write and ask for these to be sent to them by relatives. In addition to its flourishing traditions of laïki iatriki, Amari has produced its own share of professional physicians. In 1903, the names of three physicians are recorded for this region, among them the famous Georgios Andredakis of Fourfouras (1860–1933).21 Andredakis, resistance fighter, medical graduate of the University of Athens, diplomat and member of the first Cretan parliament, was also the son of a praktikos. It is said that he conducted his practice using many of his father’s recipes and continued his traditional policy of treating those in need free of charge. He also carried out pharmacological experiments and reputedly applied the beneficial uses of moulds prior to Fleming’s isolation of the penicillin antibiotic in 1928.22 By the early twentieth century the number of physicians had grown in the Amari.23 Anecdotal evidence suggests that there was a harmonious working relationship between the professionals and the more knowledgeable of the praktiki of the region, and that there was no dearth of work for all.24 As we shall see in the following chapter, professional physicians were not averse to augmenting their pharmacological resources with specialized plant information from such local experts.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, when slow postwar recovery was making some impact on public health in Crete, a system of travelling general practitioners was instituted for the benefit of people in the villages.25 These professionals, many of them newly out of medical school, visited villages on a weekly rota. In Amari it was not until the early 1990s that a small clinic was constructed at Aghia Photini. Located at the intersection of the four main roads serving the valley, the clinic was immediately well attended and increased its size and facilities over the next decade. Although the Amari villages are steadily depopulating, their inhabitants are ageing and the clinic and new compounding pharmacy which quickly followed have become popular meeting places for villagers from miles around. The waiting room conversations as well as the follow-up ones in the nearby kafenion are wonderful sources for learning about medical lore. Here you will hear discussed the latest in modern therapeutic ideas and here too are the memories: stories of what used to be done – and what is still good to do – from the old days. It is here too that the people can still recount the impressive achievements of Nikolaos Konstantinos Theodorakis, praktikos iatros from Meronas, Amari.
1 If background and context are important for understanding the significance of a single iatrosophic text, they are even more vital when they are studied as a group. Alain Touwaide 2007: 160–65 proposes a programme for future research involving a comprehensive collection of iatrosophia, provided to the fullest extent possible with their historical and cultural context. Such a corpus would provide a fund of information on therapeutics, epidemiology, pharmaceutical techniques and materia medica; it could be used to trace ‘practical adaptations to changing circumstances’ (160) and ‘to indicate the historical processes from which they [the texts] result and which they reflect’ (164).
2 For example, plants occurring naturally in a region may be explored and adopted for use (with all that this implies in terms of collecting practices and conservation), while plants coming into a region, whether by deliberate import or accident, might be added to the local knowledge base and perhaps even cultivated for medicinal purposes (with all that this implies in terms of displacement and degradation of indigenous species).
3 C. P. W. Warren 1970 and P. M. Warren 2002, 2003; Georgiou 1973; Milani and Carruba 1986: 32–6; Shaw 1993; Arnott 1996 and 2003; Sarpaki 2001 passim; Ferrence 2004.
4 On root cutters see Gal. 15. 211 K. and Nutton1985: 142. On Roman interest in Cretan plants: Rouanet-Liesenfelt 1992; Harrison 1993: 109–18.
5 Ambrosoli 1997 [1992]: 116–17 and Pavord 2005: 17.
6 Keller 1972: 383–4 (see especially 384 for Crete); Meschini 1999: 53: 767–71 and Pavord 2005: 221–8.
7 Mattioli’ ‘s Cretan connections appear in the Epistola [nuncupatoria], Mattioli 1557: folio β, recto, 11.4–12 and compare 18–22 for a (possibly Cretan) connection with Ghini. See also Zanobio 1974: 178–80 and Pavord 2005: 243–251 and passim.
8 On Clusius, see Politos 1932: 1, Jovet and Mallet 1974: 120–21, Ogilvie 1996 passim and Pavord 2005: 320.
9 For Casabona, see Bacchelli 2001: 517–19 and especially 518 for his voyage to Crete.
10 See Politos 1932: 1 on Clusius, Belli and Belon and Ogilvie 2006: 58 and n. 193, 62.
11 On Byzantine plant exports from Crete, see Tsoungrakis 1988: 385 and on Renaissance interest and trade in plants to and from Crete, Maltezos 1988: 139; Ambrosoli 1997 [1992]: 105, Pavord 2005: 17; 320 and Ogilvie 2006: 58 and n. 193, 62. For good discussion of early travellers to Crete, see Warren 1972 and 2000 and for those with botanical interests, Politos 1932: 1–7. For travellers to the Amari valley specifically, see the list in Generalis 1940: 86. Renewed interest in the twentieth century is discussed in Clark 2002: 357. Noteworthy are the active research programmes of Dr Christos Lionis at the School of Social Medicine, University of Crete (see, for example, Lionis et al. 1994; Lionis 1998; Lionis et al. 1998) and those undertaken by the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute at Chania who also make available a website data base where traditional uses of Cretan medicinal plants may be accessed via a system of queries (medusa.maich.gr/network/).
12 Mount Ida (Psiloritis) is the highest mountain on Crete at 2456 metres. Kentro, mentioned in the quotation which follows, is Mount Kedros (sometimes called Chedros), height 1777 metres.
13 Tournefort 1982 [1717]: 90, trans. Joan Noble. Tournefort (1656–1708) toured the Greek islands in the years 1700–1702.
14 Moss 1999 [1950]: 191; see also Merillees 2000: 36.
15 Generalis 1940: 1, n. 1. Generalis quotes lines from a Cretan poet of the revolutionary period, Bountialis, showing that the whole of the Mount Kedros region, because of its ‘one hundred springs’ was called ‘Paradise’: Τὸ Κέντρος, ποὖχεν ἑκατὸν βρύσες στὰ τρίγυρά του, / Παράδεισον ἐτύχαινε νὰ λέσιν τὄνομά του. According to Aristides Koutakis, local historian, today the toponym παράδεισος is used for the lands lying between Mount Kedros and Mount Samitos, which rises above Monastiraki.
16 For Epiros, see Gkaniatsas 1972; Oikonomidis 1953; Oikonomos 1978; Vokou et al.1993. For the Mani, see Clark 1997. For Arcadia, see Konstantinopoulos 1987–88 and Troupis 2004. For Thrace, see Papachristodoulou 1951; Oikonomidis 1951; Bimbi-Papaspiropoulou 1989.
17 Rocchetti 1994 and D’Agata 1999 for Bronze to Iron Age settlement; Pendlebury 1939 is still fundamental with Dunbabin 1947, as is Sanders 1982 for Roman and early Byzantine remains; see also Kalokiris 1959 and especially Volanakis 1997 for Amari history.
18 Tsoungarakis 1987: 391 cites Amari as one of the three areas of Crete in which setttlement and cultivation remained vigorous and continuous throughout all fluctuating periods of economic prosperity. Census figures for 1832–33 preserved in the journal of the British traveller Robert Pashley (1805–1859), who visited Crete in 1834, suggest a total population on Crete of 21,535 families or 129,000 individuals (counting four persons per family). For the Amari region 497 Christian families and 246 Turkish families are listed (total 743); this means that the Amari district population was roughly 2,972; see Th. Detorakis 1988: 417–19; Pashley 1837.
19 Clark 2002: 342–3; one of several Amari villages with important literary and medical traditions is Apodoulou; see Volanakis 2003.
20 The most well-known spring is το νερό τις πέτρες near Thronos (ancient Sybritos).
21 Kokonas 1987: 38–9 lists among doctors for the Rethymnon region the following for Amari villages: Roloi in Nefs Amari; Psaroudakis in Apodoulou; Andredakis in Fourfouras.
22 On Andredakis, see his own memoirs: Andredakis 1932; M. Detorakis 1987 and 2010: 101; and now especially the recent biography by his granddaughter Roubi Andredakis 2004. On the use of moulds in popular medicine, see Kritikos 1959.
23 Riginiotis 2003: 511–12, n. 3 lists epistimones iatri for Amari for the first half of the twentieth century up to the end of the 1960s. He names six practitioners in various villages throughout the valley, and in addition to these one ophthalmologist, one gynaecologist, and a further physician who operated a clinic at Monastiraki throughout the German occupation, Stilianos Skordilis.
24 Ioannis Neonakis of Apostoli, whose aunt was a praktiki in Meronas, could list three midwives, two or three praktiki and one physician for his small village in the years before the Second World War. He could also remember the names of eight physicians of the next generation after Andredakis (his Godfather). He noted that one village in particular, Vizari, had ‘many’ doctors. These families, many of whom had ancestors who were praktiki, continue to produce physicians of note today.
25 Allbaugh 1953: 136–78 gives a comprehensive analysis of the postwar health-care infrastructure on Crete.
