A Road Trip Around Crete
The ancients believed that Hephaestus built a bronze giant taller than the mountains to be the patrolling protector of Crete. And as the overnight ferry pulled into the port of Heraklion, I kept expecting to see Talos, that giant, making his circuit. Even though the world of Minos has been gone for a long, long time.
My mom was visiting me during my studies in Greece, and we decided to spend a long weekend on Crete together, to explore a place that neither of us had been before, but that had always held my fascination.
We rented a car in Heraklion, a plucky red sedan, and took to the roads as soon as we could, each with a strong Greek coffee on ice.
The mountains loomed so high and so thick that they seemed like trees in a forest, and the few roads there were sat uneasily upon them, tracing their slopes, yielding to their size. So many roads that were only made in dirt and rock; treacherous terrain that could be washed away by the waters and winds in an instant, like the people that settled here could only leave the shallowest footprints to mark their way.
“Jesus Christ,” my mother sucked through gritted teeth, one hand on the gearshift, the other white-knuckled on the wheel. We both felt the engine struggle under our feet, and a jolt of fear at each splutter. A fear only matched by the fear to look beyond the edge of the road, as though even the shift of our pupils might be the force that sent us careening over the naked edge into the rocky gorges that plummeted down lower than the mountains were tall.
We took to chanting, “I think I can, I think I can,” whenever we were headed up. It didn’t really help.
Who needed Talos to guard the passes when there were no guardrails and blind turns every switchback?
We went on a different quest each day. Sometimes multiple quests a day, though after I took my mom by accident on mostly-dirt roads clear across the island towards the eastern shore, she second-guessed every piece of my plans.
In my defense, the map that the rental car company gave us did not let on that the route I picked took us through thirty miles of unpaved mountain dust and rock. And when I asked my mother if she wanted to take the main road or the “road less traveled,” she scoffed and chose the latter. In retrospect, I had spent enough time in Greece at that point to know that the “road less traveled” had a 99% chance of being a goat path, but hey. Live and learn.
There was a moment, as we chugged along criss-crossed dirt paths speckled with stones as large as the Plymouth rock, that an SUV on another path stopped in the red dust to watch us go. Our tiny stick-shift, sensible, European rental car. The Little Engine That Couldn’t Deal With Our Tourist Bullshit.
Crete was where the nymphs spirited baby Zeus away from Cronus as he grew. They hid him in secret caves, clanging shields to drown out the baby’s cries.
There were two caves theorized to be the locations of the myths, so I directed us to both.
Dictaion Cave was the first, a few hours south of Heraklion, and the more we crested mountain after mountain, no break in sight, the more I realized exactly why the ancients thought you could hide anything, even a god, here.
Tucked into the mountains, eventually, though, were wonders. Rings of mountain villages shared valleys, cultivated and prim. Gorges plunged into greenery and mazes of mysteries. Dictaion Cave, itself, was yawning maw, a gullet that descended hundreds of yards through a forest of razor-teethed stalactites, carved into the top of a substantial climb up the side of a valley, even with a path. And it was by no means the only, or even the grandest, of its like.
And I swore I could hear the nymphs inside.
After fighting through the dirt roads for hours, we ended our day in Vai, the northeastern-most tip of the island. We missed our chance to get into the Minoan palace of Zakros, the first archaeological site I had on the list, but we could still spy it through the chain link fence
But a beach lapped at the edge of the palace, and a forest of palm trees sprouted before us, so while we soaked tired feet in the crystal water of the Mediterranean and collected rocks to skip, the day did not feel remotely lost.
It took us hours to drive back, even though we were on the main road. But the dark and the mountains were still treacherous, and the exhaustion from hours coiled in fear of the cliffs and rocks wore us both.
It was peaceful, though. The mountains in the deep, deep dark. The empty roads that ran ahead. The silent call of secret places, hidden just ahead.
The second day we headed south, down to the second-most-famous Minoan palace on Crete (Zakros being the third). This time, the roads were paved, and the journey, though long, was not nearly as grueling.
There is something about standing before ruins of a palace older than history.
Phaistos was destroyed around 1,600 BC. Destroyed going on 4,000 years ago. There are courtyards and staircases, bedchambers and throne rooms. A plumbing system the likes of which would not be seen again in Europe, at least, until the 19th century.
After playing tour guide to my mother, we headed even further south to the town of Matala, which was situated on a cove with a cliff pockmarked by Roman burial caves, and a glittering white beach.
The taverna on the beach was just opening again for dinner when we entered it, and I took charge of the menu and ordered for us both dakos and dolmades and meatballs. Sitting by the open door in the late afternoon sun, sea breeze rolling in, fresh tomatoes and bread before us, we basked in the stillness after a hectic day and a half of madly dashing all over the island.
There was a famous beach outside the town, though there was a hike to get to it. We started a few hours before sunset, walking through the town where we briefly stopped to buy two cheap towels, which I shoved in my backpack.
We climbed up from the town over the tall face that separated one cove from the other. Blue arrows chalked onto the rock marked the way, and when I finally looked back, I lost my breath.
I was ahead of my mom, hopping from rock to rock fast, then taking long breaks in between. The descent was full of sliding rocks and sparse plant life, but the beach beneath us was deserted, and the sun was beginning to dip as low as the wall of the cove.
And looking out onto the sea, onto the curving coasts, beaches glittering in the wakes of waves that had been crashing doggedly into the mountainsides for so many thousands of years, I thought that I had never before seen a blue so blue.
My mom stripped off her clothes once we settled on a towel, and I followed her, jumping naked into the water to wash away the sweat and dust of the hike.
The water was cool and perfect, and as I stared out into the sea, the Libyan sea, before me, I realized that dead ahead, though I could not see it, was Egypt.
The sun started to set as I floated in the water, as I stared out onto the eerily calm waves in the distance, thinking to myself that this may have been the beach where people once thought Zeus brought Europa, a white cow galloping across the sea bearing upon it a maiden dressed in streaming garments, the maiden that may have been the mother of an entire civilization.
And as I stared out into the emptiness beyond, into the streaming sunlight, I felt that something important must be coming.
On our final day, we once again braved the mountains and gorges to find Mount Ida, standing tallest of them all with a crown of snow. There were so many switchbacks and hideaways, precipices and falls. Some part of me rounded every corner expecting to find magic, even though we were seeking out ruins.
The fear of the roads and the gorges and the mountains only slightly diminished the more we drove. And to breach the walls of mountains, to navigate the treacherous gorges, to find all of the secrets of this place? In a lifetime, it would not be possible.
We finished our visit with Knossos, the grandest, most famous of the ruined Minoan palaces. Sir Arthur Evans, known as “he of whom we do not speak,” among many Bronze Age scholars, encased much of the actual ruins in concrete, making them inseparable from his reconstruction.
But it did, at least, give some insight into just what this place might have looked like in its glory.
We ran to the archaeological museum in the hour before our ferry was supposed to leave to catch the last sliver of opening time. We paid the cab driver to idle outside for fifteen minutes.
Running through a museum in which sat almost the entire recovered material culture of the Minoan civilization, I felt more immersed than I ever thought I would be able to be. The snake goddess, the wall paintings, the square lettering of Linear A and B — the first Greek alphabet.
It was a time capsule, all of it. A capsule of a time before the Achaeans sailed for Troy, before the Indo-European people who spoke the early dialects of the language we now know as Ancient Greek ever traveled to the edge of the sea.
A capsule of a past so vivid and colorful that even after four millennia, it shines through the dust.
