At the end of last week, we took the circus to Crete, which is officially the only Greek island the program gets to during the semester (though folks are free to go to others when they have time). We began our trip in Heraklion with a visit to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which has amassed a wonderful collection of artifacts, most of which focus on the Minoan civilization.
I loved looking through the museum at all of the physical evidence from Minoan society and setting that alongside what I know mythologically about Minos, Knossos, the minotaur, and so on. I can see how someone might come looking for myth and walk away disappointed, but for me it’s the opposite. I don’t want to eliminate myth through scientific evidence; I want the tension between the two to lead me somewhere else. I want the synthesis of these things, and that synthesis happens inside me and it happens in art I produce. In a lot of ways, a museum visit like this is a recharge.
While we were based in Heraklion, we also visited the ancient site of Knossos and the Minoan palace there. Knossos is a site that has a number of sections reconstructed and decorated so that the visitor can try to have some sense of what the architecture looked like in its day. This is a somewhat contentious practice, because reconstructions are inevitably interpretations, but they are interpretations that are quite literally written in stone (and cement and stucco), but our knowledge of ancient societies and sites is considerably more malleable. It makes you wonder whether these beautiful mock ups are hindering current work in the field. But it also offered our students a perfect opportunity to think in earnest about those ethical questions.
From Heraklion we moved to Chania on the western end of the island, near Souda Bay and the NATO naval base there. Our hotel was quite close to the Crete National Stadium, which was the start and finish line of the 2025 Crete Marathon. Christina and I stumbled upon it while we were out for a walk one morning. I’m actually kind of glad we didn’t know about it, but we’re crazy kids, and we would have registered for one of the races, no doubt about it.
Chania is absolutely charming. Architecturally, it’s mostly a Venetian town with the remains of the Byzantine city bastions and fortifications ringing the Old Town, all of which protects the picturesque bay.
Chania also has its own fairly new archaeological museum with a very nice collection, including the Mitsotakis (yes, that Mitsotakis) collection. This collection includes a small sealstone with a Minotaur figure carved on it. The sealstone is dated to 1350 BCE, which is exceptionally early for depictions of the Minotaur, and this raises questions about the reliability of archaeological evidence that comes from private collections.
The trip to Crete also included a trip to the utterly gorgeous Elafonisos Beach. This beach has just this year been rated the #1 beach in the world according to Tripadvisor. This wasn’t the reason we went, but it was in accord with the general philosophy. This beach sports enchantingly pink sand, which is the result of micro-organisms that have a symbiotic relationship with the seaweed. What we hear is that during the summer you can’t see the sand for all the bodies reclining on the beach. While we were there, just before the start of the season, there were only scattered visitors and one kite surfer.
On our way back from the beach, we took the opportunity to stop our enormous tour bus next to a cliff so that we could climb 257 steps to visit the Cave of Agia Sofia. I enjoy caves quite a bit, and this one might even be a good one for folks who are usually uneasy in them. The cave mouth is big enough that the vast majority of the space has natural light.
Finally, before we left Chania for Athens, we stopped at both Eliftherios Venizelos’s tomb and the Venizelos mansion museum. Venizelos is a towering figure in modern Greek history (the Athens airport is named after him), and he came from Chania, so there are more than a few sites of interest connected with him in the area.
We’re happy to be back in Athens for a week or so before Easter comes and we head back down to the Peloponnese to spend time with family. Next time I’ll tell you a bit more about the film project I’m working on while we’re in Greece!