What's Missing in Minoan Art?

The Minoans didn't need Title IX to ensure equality in athletics. Their culture radiated female power and presence as shown in frescos from the palace walls of Knossos, Crete. Here are three bull dancers: the woman (always light-skinned in Minoan art and often bare-chested) on the left about to launch herself over the bull's horns, the man in mid-somersault over the bull's back, and the woman on the right, landing after her vault.

It has taken 4,000 years for the Western world to begin to catch up.

The Minoan civilization thrived on Crete from 3400 BCE to 1450 BCE, when Santorini's volcanic explosion and the subsequent earthquakes and tsunamis devastated the islands, leading to the collapse of the Minoan culture. What remains is the ghost town at Akrotiri, Santorini (only 3% excavated) and the ruins on Crete, the most famous being Knossos because of Sir Arthur Evans's partial reconstruction.
One of the remnants of this amazing culture, so unlike the patariarchal culture of the last four millenia, is the subject of their artwork. The frescos show dolphins cavorting in the sea, blue monkeys picking fruit, an octopus waving its tenacles, a young man stepping through a lilly field, tall papyrus plants bursting with color.

Even the pendants and seals show a remarkable gift for precision and beauty, with representations of bees and deer so finely crafted that I have to wonder if the artisans had magnifying glasses.

What is missing in Minoan art? Scenes of war, of the abduction and rape of women, of torture (on the cross or otherwise), of dour church patriarachs and saints devoid of joy.

The Minoans flourished centuries before the Trojan War, an epic event in the early days of patriarchal hegemony that became a touchstone for art of the Classical and Hellenestic periods. Later, with the rise of Christianity, art has focused for centuries on the passion of Christ and matyred saints. I remember a few years back leaving a museum in Florence feeling queasy because of all the horrific scenes of crucifixion and torture.

Nancy and I leave for Paris within a week. We will, of course, wander through museums during our five days there. But really, do I need to see one more rendering of Zeus taking a woman by force or of a bloody Christ suffering on the cross, or a martyr being beheaded, stoned, flayed, or set ablaze?

Give me the Minoan world of light and sensuality, where the joy of being alive in this glorious world pulses through each brush stroke.

Becky

Our Mediterranean Diet

Here on Crete, Nancy and I have been enjoying the "Mediterranean diet."
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For example, yesterday for lunch we fixed the above plate and savored by the swimming pool: green salad, fava beans, olives, bread soaked in olive oil, and feta cheese.
Basically, the diet emphasizes plants: fresh fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Moderate amounts of cheese and yogurt, fish, and poultry. A little red meat, mostly lamb. Olive oil is important, and we love the Cretan tradition of drizzling it on rusk, the whole grain hard-as-rock bread.

We have been carrying a tin of Cretan olive oil with us since our first weeks on Crete. The olive oil of this island is renowned for its "lightness." I don't know if that's true, but it certainly is delicious enough that when I return home I will look for Cretan olive oil at the market.

A glass or two of wine also is part of the Mediterranean diet, and here we have all sorts of delicious wines in even the smallest grocery store. On Santorini we tried some local bulk wine in a plastic bottle. Not great, but satisfying. Right now we're enjoying a bottle of dry red from the Boutari vineyards, one of the most prominent vineyards on Crete and Santorini.

The produce here is also reputed to be more flavorful than elsewhere because of the volcanic soil and climate. Nancy praises the eggplant. We have noticed that the egg yolks are the rich, almost orange color we see in the eggs from our Minnesota brother-in-law's free-range chickens.

I don't want to give the impression that we are dietary angels. We have enjoyed plenty of gyros-- spicy shaved pork with thin-sliced onions and tomatoes, tzatziki (yogurt-cucumber sauce), and a few French fries, all tightly rolled in grilled pita bread.

And the baklava! Crispy filo dough, chopped nuts, honey, and cloves wins out everytime over a piece of fresh fruit. Anyone in Athens who is looking for the best baklava, head for the Plaka and Benethe Bakery. Their version is made with pistachios and abundant cloves, a generous piece for only one euro 20 cents that we eat standing at one of the tiny tables on the pedestrian Adrianou St. and people-watch.

Socrates once said, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." That goes for the Mediterranean diet, too. Bring on the baklava!

Becky

May Day Bacchanelia

Agreco, an organic farm a few kilometers south of Rethymnon, Crete, puts on a special tour and lunch every May Day. (It's a variation of their regular evening dinner.)

Located on a slope overlooking the Sea of Crete, the 40,000 square meter farm provides produce for select hotels in the area. This re-creation of a 17th century farm also operates as a sort of working museum with stations showing traditional Cretan methods of agricultural production.

At the olive press, a donkey (now retired) would move stone wheels that crush olives as the oil runs off through a drain hole. The tailings are dried and put down as floor covering, much as we use sawdust or gravel. We sampled two Agreco olive oils dipped in fresh crusty bread and in Cretan whole grain rusk, a hard crunchy bread that takes a strong set of molars to chew.

We saw spits of lamb roasting on open-air wood fires and bread baking in the outdoor wood-fired oven. All the aromas mingled with the smell of fresh herbs and blooming flowers--many had been picked and woven into wreaths to adorn the heads of the many French, German, and Russian girls -- and boys -- at Agreco that day.

The wine tasting station offered red and white farm-produced wine and next to it, a wood-burning still, where the fermented must from the wine press was boiled. The steam escaped though a tube that passed through an urn of cool water and emerged as 70% proof Cretan raki. Nancy and I tossed back three half-shots of the delicious tequilla-like liquor that the tradionally-dressed workers kept handing us.

"Yamas!" they'd exclaim as they clicked their glasses to ours. This traditional Greek toast is a contraction of “Stin ygeia mas” (Στην υγεία μας), which means “to our health!”

Happily we moved on up the hill to our open-air lunch overlooking vineyards and fields of artichokes and out to the sea.

Course after course of delicious Cretan appetizers, crusty bread, rice pilaf, lamb, chicken, roasted potatoes and eggplant, salad, more lamb, more potatoes, fruits, goat cheese, creamy yogurt, and desserts. Oh, and a pitcher of house wine.

And that's all I remember...except for a vague memory of Nancy and me holding hands and dancing Greek-style in a large circle . . . .

Becky

Note: For more info about the farm, go to www.leoniki.com/agrecofarm/.

Fire in a Greek Synagogue

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The old synagogue in Chania, Crete, suffered two arson attacks in 2010.

Our guide Alexander smiled sadly. "The police caught the men who set the fires. Two British, two Americans, and a Greek."

"What was their motive?" Amy, a school counselor, asked.

"We don't know," the handsome young Greek said in almost unaccented English.

“What was done with them?" asked Amy’s partner Terry, a criminal justice teacher.

Alexander smiled sadly again. "They were released. There were no charges. We installed a security system, something we never wanted."

Amy, Terry, Becky, and I were visiting Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Crete, where Jews have lived for over 2400 years. The synagogue, originally a Venetian Catholic church, was given to the Jewish Community by the Ottomans when they took over Crete in the 16th century. It remained a place of worship until the Germans occupied the Greek island four centuries later.

On June 8, 1944, the Nazis obliterated the Jewish community on Crete by putting all Jewish families on a ship for the first leg of their journey to Auschwitz. A British submarine sank the ship, killing everyone on board, including many children. The synagogue was destroyed and remained virtually a ruin until the World Monuments Fund named it a most endangered site in 1996, and Nikos Stavroulakis completed the restoration in 1999.

Last January, this exquisite little restored synagogue was broken into and set on fire. Although there was damage, the Torahs were unharmed. Two weeks later, with the synagogue's interior cleaned and repainted, the arsonists struck again. This time the fires completely gutted both floors, destroying the main archive, and burning many of the library's 1000 sacred texts and reference books, valuable 16th century Ottoman textiles, and the synagogue's data base. In the Mikvah, the ritual bathing room, we spotted boxes of charred books. Again, the fires spared the Torahs.

As we four sat silently on the wooden benches, I recalled the monument Amy had discovered in the square beside Athens' cathedral a few days earlier. It depicts the archbishop who opposed persecution of Greek Jews during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation. When arrested in 1943, Archbishop Damaskinos told the Nazis, "Members of the clergy of Greece may not be shot, they may only be hanged. I beg you to respect this tradition. . . ." His life spared, he lived another six years.

Anti-Semitism runs like poison through the centuries. It is inspiring to see people like the Archbishop and Jewish Greeks like Alexander and other members of Etz Hayyim Synagogue face down bigots and affirm their place in Crete, where a long Jewish history came very close to being obliterated.

Information about the Chania synogogue and the story of Crete's Jewish community can be found at http://www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/welcome.html. If you want to contribute to the restoration of the synagogue, contact Alexander Phoundoulakis at info@etz-hayyim-hania.org.

Nancy

Becky's Sinister Paradise

Becky's first novel, Sinister Paradise, was published in the spring of 1993. We re-met and fell in love that fall, a time of delirious happiness for me.

One night before bed in my apartment in Rochester, MN, I picked up her book. Since I had to teach an 8am English class, and since I don't read mysteries, I intended to skim the three-page prologue so I could say I had at least looked at the book.

But from the first sentence, I was hooked, transported to Santorini, Greece. I couldn't stop reading. Would Britt and Cassie admit their love for each other? Would Britt survive the "accidents" at the archeological site? Would she uncover the smuggling operation? I finished the book at 3am.

I'd had no idea Becky could write so well. Good writing touches me deeply. If I hadn't already been completely smitten, this intense lesbian mystery/love story would have toppled me into the caldera.

I soon learned more about Becky's connections to Greece and other ancient cultures.

When she was 27, for her first trip abroad, she backpacked alone through Greece for six weeks. Four years later, she returned to gather material for Sinister Paradise. She stayed nearly a month.

Becky's idea of a good read is The Iliad. She re-reads it or The Odyssey almost every year. She pores over The Aeneid, Herodotus, and descriptions of Minoan culture. Our Kindle contains, among her books for this trip, Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, The Oracle: Ancient Delphi, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, published in 431BCE! One day a few years ago, we rounded a corner in a museum in Torino, Italy to a huge breath-taking statue of the goddess Athena. Becky burst into tears.

She often said that she wanted to take me to the Acropolis, Santorini, Delphi, Knossos, and other places she loves, but Greece got bumped to the back burner by other more pressing travel.

Finally we are here, in a land where history is measured in millennia, where huge temples to Athena dominate contemporary cities' high ground, and where Becky believes she lived in one or perhaps many past lives.

Last week our ferry sailed into Santorini's extraordinary caldera, created around 1450BCE, when a volcano exploded and collapsed. We hopped a local bus to Kamari Beach, the site of some of the novel's most intense action. Although it was so cold that we were the only people on the long black beach, I could imagine Britt and Cassie's sailboards blazing through the sun-drenched blue-green Aegean waves.

I had been re-reading Sinister Paradise for the first time since 1993, restricting myself to 3 or 4 chapters a day to prolong the pleasure. That night, I picked up Sinister Paradise to read a chapter near the end. Mistake! Gripped by the action and impressed all over again by the sheer skill of the writing, I couldn't stop until I had reached the nerve-shattering conclusion.

If you haven't read Sinister Paradise, there are several copies on Amazon for one cent plus shipping. Or, even better, you can reduce our attic inventory and get a personally autographed copy directly from the author!

Nancy

Lindos, Rhodes

The town of Lindos, on the east coast of Rhodes, is a popular resort town with tens of thousands of Europeans flowing to its beaches in the summer. The high season hasn't started yet, so the crowds are thin. Strolling along the narrow streets, many with pavement and floor designs made of colored stones, is easy. We hear a lot of French, German, Danish and Swedish being spoken by tourists. No English, though.

The town is a World Heritage site, its sugar cube buildings dating from medieval times. No cars are allowed--only scooters, donkeys, and pedestrians.

Above the town soars the 4th century BCE Acropolis. It's built on a promontory that separates the two main bays, both with beautiful blue-green water and sweet, though rocky, beaches.



The Acropolis's main temple, built to honor Athena, is mostly a ruin, with only a few columns standing. A female deity named Lindia was being worshipped here thousands of years before Athena showed up.

The Romans built on this site, as did the Knights of St. John, who constructed a medieval fortress around the Acropolis using blocks from the ancient temples. This 12th century religious order, also called Knights Hospitallers, came from European Catholic countries to care for wounded and sick crusaders. They arrived in Rhodes in 1309, built a huge hospital that Nancy and I saw in Rhodes' Old Town, and defended the island against capture by the Turks for the next 200 years.
The morning was rainy as we ascended the winding stairway to the Acropolis. When we reached the top, thunder rolled from the thick dark clouds, and lightning flashed above the sea. It was thrilling. I felt close to the ancient deities who once filled people with awe...and occasionally still do!

Becky

Acropolis Museum and Noble Athena

The new Acropolis Museum, opened in 2008, is brilliant and innovative. As Nancy and I walked toward the entrance we were startled to have the pavement turn to plexiglass, exposing an archaeological dig below our feet. There are outlines of buildings, vases halfway exposed, and tables and chairs for the workers. Inside the museum, sections of the flooring reveal more excavations.
The Acropolis with its magnificent Parthenon (Athena's temple), towering high above the museum, is visible through the glass walls. The museum's second story sits at an angle to the first floor, purposefully skewed to parallel the Parthenon. Inside steel columns mimic those of the ancient temple in a 1:1 proportion so you get an idea of the size. All around the museum recreation of the Parthenon are beautiful works of art. The inner row displays the friezes, another shows the metropes, and the third contains pediment sculptures, all at a level where we can see details--something the ancients could not do. Most of these pieces are place holders, waiting for the authentic marbles housed in the British Museum, to be repatriated to Greece.

The museum continuously plays a wonderful movie showing the history of the Acropolis and how it was originally decorated (the marble sculptures were painted). It also shows the painful history of how parts of this mighty structure were destroyed, including the desecration by early Christian zealots and the explosion of a Turkish armory.

One of the most interesting facts that I learned was that the Myceneans had erected a temple to Athena over 3,500 years ago--a thousand years before Pericles built the grand temple whose remains we see today.

It is awe-inspiring to see a temple and its statuary devoted to a goddess. The representations of the female denote strength, in such stark contrast to the churches and religions of the "modern" era where women have been disempowered for millenia.
Each depiction of Athena, from the broken marble figure on the pediment to the 1/12th scale model of the 40-foot statue that used to tower over worshippers inside the Parthenon, radiates serene, dignified power. She is no delicate, subservient girl. Her gaze is calm and direct; her breasts are full; her strong neck supports a noble head; powerful thighs show clearly through her robes. She is comfortable with her mature, womanly body.

I am grateful for such a splendid image of female strength, thankful that her people, the Athenians, have preserved her temple as best they could for nearly 25 centuries. May this beautiful new museum continue to honor her memory far into the future.

Becky

Note: Picture of inner museum is from Wikipedia, Tilemahos Efthimiadi photographer.