CHAPTER THREE
CRETAN GORGES and OTHER MATTERS
Chania is an addictive sort of place with its ancient harbor front, the maze of streets behind, the constant varying of the light as one moves toward or away from the open water, the sense of long-established human presence, almost exuded from its walls. One can spend many days here, closely similar but never quite the same, in a sort of ruminative pottering. It is almost a shock to emerge from the town with its cafés and gift shops and kiosks with foreign newspapers, and find the unyielding Cretan landscape awaiting you.
Two hours by road—and a very tortuous and vertiginously winding road it is—southward from Chania into the White Mountains, brings you to the gorge of Samaria, which has been a national park since 1962. At eleven miles it is famous as the longest gorge in Europe, and it is perhaps the most spectacular on the island—though about this there are differences of opinion; Crete is home to a hundred gorges at least, all with their own distinctive qualities and their own advocates. However, Samaria is certainly the one most popular with visitors. Many thousands of people set off to walk the length of it, a mistake in some cases: It can be a taxing hike, steep in places, stony underfoot, and much of the way exposed to the sun. Broken limbs, heart attacks, cases of exhaustion are not uncommon.
The route to the gorge takes you past the village of Alikianos, in the heart of the district known as Portokalachoria, “The Orange Villages,” where the best oranges on Crete—and therefore, Cretans would say, the best in the world—are grown. These villages lie in the foothills on the western side of the range, where the mountains descend more gradually, stretching bony knuckles toward the Chania plain. In the valleys formed by the spreads between the knuckles, the orange groves are bunched thickly together, a separate, secret-seeming world of dark green and gleaming gold.
But one is never far, wherever one goes on Crete, from the island’s turbulent past. It was here at Alikianos, among what are now peaceful orange groves, that what came to be known as the Kandanoleon wedding massacre is believed to have taken place. The uprising against the Venetians headed by George Kandanoleon in 1527 is one of the great stories of Cretan resistance, the usual compound of fact and heroic legend. He had his base at Meskla and at the high point of his fortunes controlled most of western Crete. One day, for reasons which have remained obscure, he called in person at the house of a high Venetian official named Francesco Molino and proposed the marriage of his son Petros with Molino’s daughter. A harebrained proposal on the face of it, in view of the arrogance of the Venetian rulers and their detestation of this rebel chieftain and of the Greek Orthodox faith to which he belonged. However, the proposal was accepted with seeming pleasure. The wedding took place at the Molino house. Kandanoleon was accompanied by several hundred of his followers. Molino had invited fifty guests from Chania. A hundred sheep and oxen were slaughtered for the occasion. The Venetian plied his visitors with wine, and by sunset they were well on the way to being drunk and incapable. Then a rocket was fired, signal for the approach of a force of Venetian cavalry and infantry that had been waiting nearby. The Cretans by this time were too far gone either to resist or flee. They were overpowered, bound hand and foot, and kept captive through the night. At daybreak Molino hanged Kandanoleon and the bridegroom with his own hands. The members of the more prominent families were killed on the spot or marched off in chains to be galley slaves. The remaining captives were hanged in four separate groups in different regions of western Crete. The rebellion was then suppressed with utmost brutality by a man called Cavalli, who was sent from Venice with special powers. One of his initiatives was to offer a pardon to any who made a token submission by exhibiting to the authorities in Chania the head of his father or brother.
This was the last in the long chain of Cretan revolts against Venetian rule. Whether Kandanoleon was seeking to consolidate his own power base or—more idealistically—trying to bring an end to the suffering of his people are questions unlikely to be answered now. Xan Fielding, to whose account of the massacre I am indebted, inclines to set his action down to philodoxia, a word difficult to translate, a quality between ambition and vainglory, an excessive desire to cut a good figure, always a Greek—and Cretan—failing.
The ruins of the Molino mansion are still there, overgrown with weeds and long abandoned. On the lintel above the entrance the Latin motto can still be made out: Omnia Mundi Fumus et Umbra (All the Things of the World are Smoke and Shadow), a saying which was to apply with particular force, in the next century, to Venetian dreams of conquest and empire.
After Alikianos the road to the Samaria Gorge branches eastward and winds steeply up into the mountains. The scenery is stupendous, the sheer drops and precipitous bends amazing and alarming. One passes above the village of Laki, a mesh of white and green, overlooking the valley of the Vrisi. Laki is the birthplace of Micheli Yanneri, another famous Cretan hero and rebel who distinguished himself by his resistance to Turkish occupation in the nineteenth century.
Something of the wildness of those days still persists here. The intractable spirit that made these mountain people such difficult subjects for a succession of invaders still shows in their attitude to local regulation and control. The road signs have to be changed from time to time—they are used for target practice and get riddled with bullets.
Life has always been hard in these regions, and the inhabitants are reared in a tradition of independence and endurance. They are people of great spirit and generous hospitality and implacable vindictiveness. They make good friends but extremely bad enemies; injuries are neither forgiven nor forgotten—and the conditions of village life in these remote areas has always bred injuries, real or imagined. Disputes over grazing rights and sheep stealing and insults to womenfolk still go on, as they have for a thousand years at least. Not infrequently they lead to blood feuds, and these are not easy for the authorities to stop, first because the authorities themselves are not greatly trusted and second because fear of revenge keeps people from talking. Feuds of this kind can run through generations and on occasion in the past took the form of pitched battles. Villages were sometimes abandoned altogether as the population sought safety elsewhere. This is not the case now, of course, but deadly feuds still occur. One between two Sfakian families, which broke out in the 1940s, lasted half a century and claimed at least 150 lives before peace was made.
Last inhabited place before the entrance to the gorge, and last chance of getting anything to eat or drink for several hours, is the village of Omalos, at the center of the plateau which bears the same name. A desolate region this, getting on for four thousand feet above sea level, snowbound in winter, often marshy in spring, especially if the snows melt early. You are in the heart of the White Mountains here, with the high peaks rising all around you.
A mile or so farther on, at the edge of the plateau, the road ended, and the gorge opened before us. The sun had hardly risen, there were swirls of mist, and it was cold. For those who are set on the walk, it makes sense to arrive in early morning, to allow plenty of time for covering the distance. This means that the journey up is often done in half-light, a blessing for the more nervously inclined, as the hazards of the road are not fully realized. On arrival we found at least a dozen buses already there, with walkers clambering out, beginning the descent in a steady stream, without waiting for the sun to bless their enterprise. One of the many incongruities of mass tourism that Crete presents is that in this unlikely place, among these lonely and majestic mountains, many hundreds of people of all ages and conditions congregate each dawn throughout the summer months. The gorge is closed in winter, but by mid-May buses from all over the island converge here.
Better to wait for the sun. It should be numbered among the wonders of the world to stand here on this last piece of level ground and see the sun strike through the early mists, irradiate the peaks of Mt. Volakis to the south, and cast a glow on the sheer walls of the amazing chasm that yawns open before you. We stood for some time, full of wonder, I trying not to acknowledge to myself that I was cold, Aira—who has no time for stoical pretenses—openly shivering. Then the last of the mist thinned away and the sun came through—even thus early in the year and thus early in the morning, unmistakably a southern sun with an immediate, caressing warmth. As if this were somehow an invitation, we began our descent to levels the sun would not reach for some hours yet. With appalling abruptness the ground falls away—at our very feet, it seemed—and goes plunging down. You descend three thousand feet in the first hour of walking. Two million years it has taken to make this great slice in the land. Some remote convulsion, a buckling and heaving as the tectonic plates shifted and scraped together, and the first cracks were made. Then the long, infinitely slow process of forcing the edges apart, the acid rainwater, the splitting and fragmenting of rock as temperatures changed. Then the mountain torrent that found the cleft and cut it deeper and deeper.
As we follow the rough stone track down toward the bed of the stream—much shrunken in summer but still running and sounding—with the bare limestone mass of Volakis rising before and the looming bulk of Mt. Pachnes to the east, we progress from rugged isolation to a gentler climate, the result of warmth and shelter lower down and the presence of water. Instead of descending into the apocalyptic pit, we descend to birdsong and flowers. From the vulture to the chaffinch, from the riven pine with its limbs trammeled in rock to the graceful lines and spreading green of the Cretan maple and the vivid flowers of the oleander bushes growing above the stream.
The gorge of Samaria
Just before the descent begins to level out there is a small chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, and grouped around it are some of the most splendid cypresses one is ever likely to see. The cypress is the main woodland tree of these western mountains and quintessentially Cretan in its toughness and tenacity and the amazing variety of forms it can take in response to the widely differing climatic conditions on the island. It can root in a crack in the rocks in the driest and most torrid of places; it can stand the whipping of the wind and the scouring of the ice and endure for many hundreds of years. There are cypresses at the tree limit of the White Mountains growing at an altitude of over five thousand feet. They keep low to the ground, rarely exceeding two meters in height, and they live long—some of them are a thousand years old. Those surrounding the chapel have had shelter and water, and they are huge, among the biggest in Europe, with girths it would take six men to embrace. Some of them rise to heights of 160 feet and more. To get a full idea of this, bear in mind that the Colosseum of Rome is not much more than a dozen feet higher.
The path gradually levels out toward the streambed and the going gets easier. We were now more at liberty to study the walls of the chasm—sometimes looking as if they had been sliced with some unimaginably huge butcher’s cleaver—that rise on either side. Every layer of rock is delineated as precisely as if the lines had been drawn with a ruler, bands of green, purple, and gray limestone alternating with a whitish, flintlike rock known as chert. Perhaps a hundred million years of geological history here, from the time that the limestone mass that was someday to be Crete was thrust out of the sea.
At times on this walk a feeling akin to dread seizes one, the scale is so enormous, the stream that runs through the cleft so narrow and bubbling and innocuous-seeming. At this season, using stepping-stones, you can cross and recross it without getting your feet wet. Could such a streamlet really have made this mighty ravine? In winter, when few see its rages, it becomes a torrent, perilous to anyone caught between the walls.
The dread intensifies—or perhaps it could better be described as a feeling of intense wonder—when the sheer faces of the gorge draw together, a little past the halfway mark, at what are called the Sideresportes, the “Iron Gates.” The walls soar almost vertically on either side to a height of fifteen hundred feet and seem almost to meet overhead, shutting out the sun. There is less than twelve feet between them at the base. Some nineteenth-century travelers, more exalted in imagination than we tend to be now, claimed to have touched both walls at once with outstretched fingers. But this must be set down to the powerful atmosphere of the place: You would need the reach of an extremely well-developed gorilla, and then some.
The awe we feel is chipped away by the throngs of people close before and behind as we proceed along the track. Instructive, and a bit depressing, is the way so many of one’s fellow walkers approach what is, after all, a unique experience. They seem consumed with haste. Some spirit of competitiveness comes into play, the inveterate desire to get there first. Those who have come in groups scramble to keep up. Possessed by the wish to overtake, people slither and slide dangerously on the loose stones at the edges of the track. Where the track narrows and there is no space for overtaking, one is aware of audibly breathing presences, close behind, impatient to get past. Remarkably few people seem to pause, slow down, take time to look around them. Yet it is the passing impressions that are the great attraction: the mighty trees, the scalloped rocks, the tumbling stream, the great heights above, slowly hazing as the sun climbs. Almost four hundred species of birds have been recorded here, among them magnificent birds of prey, like the bearded vulture and the golden eagle. There is a chance of catching a glimpse of the Cretan ibex, a splendid kind of wild goat, rare now and protected by the Greek state. The tremendous variety of plant life, orchids, bellflowers, irises, rock plants, and herbs, is found nowhere else. But no; head down, they career onward, only coming to a halt in order to stand in line at one of the infrequent and woefully inadequate public lavatories. The thing is to do the walk, to have done it, to tick it off. Goals and aims and objectives, the culture of achievement, will be the ruin of the human race someday.
Samaria is the most famous of the Cretan gorges—hence the crowds. The numerous others are generally deserted and differ widely in character and constitution. Those who know them have their favorites, rather as is the case with Aegean islands or Roman fountains. For Rackham and Moody, the one best loved is the gorge of Therisso, a ten-mile drive from Chania into the northern fringes of the White Mountains, with its lush vegetation, its shaded, meandering course, and its walls like hanging gardens decked in a variety of endemic plants. For those with a taste for the bare and elemental, there is the gorge that lies behind the Kapsas Monastery in the coastal desert strip on the far southeast of the island, where the average annual rainfall is something like four hundred millimeters. (Compare this with an estimated two thousand millimeters at the highest points in the White Mountains to gain an idea of the range of rainfall from west to east, astonishing on such a small island.) This is a stark and arid landscape, one that the ascetic prophets of old might have felt at home in.
My own favorite is the gorge entered near the village of Zaros in the province of Iraklion. It offers a combination of effects which I think of as essentially Cretan. A little to the west of the village a signed track leads up to the monastery of Agios Nikolaos, a distance of about a mile—on foot from the village it’s much less. The entrance to the gorge is higher up, so you can rest in the tranquil, shaded courtyard of the monastery or view the fourteenth-century paintings in the church before setting off for the walk. A climb of half an hour by a steep path brings you to the hermitage of St. Euthymios, a cave with a tiny church built into it and two fine wall paintings still surviving. So you have a monastery, a cave hermitage, and a splendid walk. The gorge of Zaros is short by Cretan standards, perhaps two miles in length, with a good, well-defined path and marvelous views of the Psiloritis mountains continuously before you as you go. This is one of those times on the island—and they are many—when the print of humanity blends in harmony with the unspoiled wildness of the landscape to make an impression quite unforgettable.
However, Crete is rich in alternatives, and if the walk seems too strenuous or the weather too hot, a drive of a few miles west from Zaros, toward Kamares, brings you to another monastery, that of Vrondisi, one of the most beautiful on the island and one of the most important in the history of Cretan monasticism, a center of education and religious art in the period of creative vitality and renewal that took place in the final decades of the Venetian occupation.
The monastery is dedicated to St. Anthony, patron saint of hermits. The outer courtyard, before the main gates, is full of the sound of water falling from the mouths of lion heads sculpted in relief on the fountain, and a plane tree with the dimensions of a cathedral arches over the whole area. It was at Vrondisi that Damaskinos, one of the most important of Cretan religious painters, did some of his best work. Six of the icons he painted here are on permanent display in the gallery of the church of Agia Ekaterini in Iraklion.
On the day of our visit, one of the two remaining monks was sitting in the shade of the fig tree at the entrance, talking gravely to local people. He greeted us with a kind of dignified courtesy. There was no attempt to ask questions or sell us anything, no obtrusive presence making sure that we obeyed the prohibition about taking photographs inside the church, where the rows of frescoed apostles and the Christ of the Last Supper in the apse presented the same grave dignity as they regarded us in the dimness.
Coming back to gorges, that of Samaria has the distinction, together with some smaller ravines that run parallel to it, of giving access, at its southern end, to the sea. So having completed the long, hot walk, emerging at Agia Roumeli, you are presented with the prospect not only of a cold drink but also a refreshing plunge.
This, however, presents you also with a choice as to which first. To reach the shore you have first to pass the bars. We had been distinctly thirsty for quite some time, having foolishly neglected to bring anything to drink with us. Also, the idea of simply sitting down for a while was one that had considerable appeal. The struggle was of the briefest. The bar won hands down. I don’t think cold beer has ever tasted so good. By the time we had each had a liter of it, all desire for a refreshing plunge had left us. It was all we could do to make the walk to the boat.
The boats from here go in either direction along the coast. Generally, people take the one going westward to Souyia, thence returning to Chania by road. But going the other way, to Chora Sfakion, and using it as a base, one can see the mountain villages on the southern side of the White Mountains, the region known as Sfakia.
This is a wild and remote region where roads are few, the climate unrelenting, and the living conditions harsh. The atmosphere of abandonment and desolation one sometimes feels here is in a sense the price the people have paid for their indomitable spirit, their refusal to accept a foreign yoke. This has meant that their villages have been devastated again and again. Through all the centuries of occupation the Sfakians were never completely subdued, resisting Venetian and Turk and German from their mountain fastnesses, and, when for the moment these invaders did not threaten, turning on their own neighbors with equal ferocity. To give one example among many, the people of Zourva were attacked from the rear by the Sfakians in the revolution of 1866, thus saving the Turks from defeat—an attack due entirely to resentment against their fellow countrymen for assuming the leadership of the revolution, a privilege which the Sfakians regarded as exclusively their own. If ever scientists succeed in identifying a warrior gene, it will certainly be found in the people of Sfakia. Their lawless and rapacious spirit is illustrated in the local version of the Creation. This, as related by Adam Hopkins, begins with an account of the gifts bestowed by God on other parts of the island:
…olives to Ierapetra, Agios Vasilios and Selinou; wine to Malevisi and Kissamou; cherries to Mylopotamos and Amari. But when God got to Sfakia only rocks were left. So the Sfakiots appeared before Him armed to the teeth. “And us, Lord, how are we going to live on these rocks?” And the Almighty, looking at them with sympathy, replied in their own dialect (naturally): “Haven’t you got a scrap of brains in your head? Don’t you know that the lowlanders are cultivating all these riches for you?”
It is entirely appropriate that the most splendid of all Cretan heroic legends of resistance against the Turks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should center on the exploits of a Sfakian, Daskaloyiannis, who was born at Anopolis, a village in the foothills behind Chora Sfakion. Also appropriate, since the Sfakians are great singers and storytellers, that he should have found a chronicler from among them. Sixteen years after his death, his story was dictated in a thousand lines of epic verse by an illiterate bard named Pantzelios, a cheesemaker by trade. The scribe was a shepherd. He took down the story slowly and probably painfully—it is hard to believe that he was much accustomed to writing. Here is his description of the process, as translated by Michael Llewellyn Smith who includes an account of the Daskaloyiannis Revolt in his excellent study of the island:
I began, and wrote a little every day.
I held the paper and I held the pen
And he told me the story and I wrote it bit by bit.
To this poem, despite mistakes and heroic exaggerations, we owe most of what is known about the celebrated revolt of Yannis Vlachos, otherwise known as Daskaloyiannis, “John the Teacher,” a title of respect rather than a literal description, as in fact he was a ship owner and one of the wealthiest man on the island. It is difficult to imagine anyone less like the Cretan rebel chieftain of tradition. He dressed generally in European clothes, spoke several languages, and had traveled widely in the Mediterranean region. And his political aims went far beyond the usual narrowly territorial uprisings of the Sfakians. He dreamed of freeing Crete and all Greece from the Ottoman occupation and returning her to the comity of Christian nations.
Naturally enough, he turned to the Russians, his co-religionists, for help, and they found in him a useful ally. In fact, from the Russian point of view his appearance was providential. The Russo-Turkish war had just broken out, and it was the job of Count Orloff, Catherine the Great’s minister, to foment rebellion against the Turks wherever possible. He found in the enthusiastic and credulous Daskaloyiannis a perfect pawn.
The plans were laid. The Cretan uprising was to coincide with a revolt in the Peloponnese. Orloff undertook to support the rebels from the sea. Armed with this promise, Daskaloyiannis was able to carry the Cretans along with him. The flag of revolt was raised in March 1770. The Sfakian force, probably no more than a thousand men, marched on Chania, the idea being to keep the Turks bottled up inside the walls until the Russian fleet arrived. But the days passed, and no ships were sighted. Without the Russian guns the rebellion was doomed. By May the Turks had entered Sfakia with a force of twenty thousand troops. Heavily outnumbered, the rebels were compelled to retreat to their mountain fastnesses. Still no help came from the Russians.
The Sfakians fought with astonishing bravery and endurance, but by the following spring the situation was desperate, their last lines of defense had been crossed. At this point the pasha of Iraklion wrote to Daskaloyiannis inviting him to give himself up.
Trust my letter, whatever they may tell you,
And so leave Sfakia with men to live in her.
When you come and we talk together
All will be settled and we shall be friends.
With this letter another arrived, this one from Daskaloyiannis’s brother, who had already fallen into Turkish hands. In it he urged Daskaloyiannis to accept the pasha’s invitation. But he managed to insert into the letter a prearranged code signal indicating that his brother was to take no notice of either letter. In spite of this, Daskaloyiannis decided to surrender. He knew now, after his brother’s warning, that he had small chance of saving his life, but he thought he might get better terms for his followers. He made his farewell to wife and children:
Come to my arms, children, for me to kiss you,
And be wise until I return again.
Listen to your mother and to your own people—
You have my prayers.
He gave himself up and was taken to Iraklion. The pasha greeted him with every appearance of friendship, offered him food, wine, coffee, and tobacco, then began a polite interrogation. What was the cause of the revolt? Why didn’t you bring your complaints to me?
The cause—you are the cause, you lawless pashas.
That’s why I decided to raise Crete in revolt,
to free her from the claws of the Turk.
Hardly the most conciliatory of replies. But then, he hadn’t much hope of clemency. And when the pasha, still courteously, asked him for the names of the ring-leaders among the rebels of the Peloponnese, he proudly and angrily refused. You are wasting your breath, he said. Your net has a hole in it, do not hope to catch any fish. This defiance was the end of him. On the pasha’s orders, he was taken to the main square of Iraklion and flayed alive. According to the poem he endured this frightful punishment without uttering a sound. But his brother, tied up and obliged to watch the hideous spectacle, could not endure the sight and lost his senses. According to the traditional version of the story, he died mad. The remnants of the Sfakian force, after some years of captivity, returned to the desolation of their ruined villages.
It is difficult to associate the Anopolis of today, the village of the hero’s 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 don’t carry weapons anymore—not 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.