In the morning we were ready to meet George when he arrived at the appointed time of 8:30. We were starting early (for us) because we had to cover some ground to get to the sites on our itinerary. Even in October, it was advisable to beat as many tour buses as we could. But first we needed to get some cash. Since the previous day was Sunday, I hadn’t been able to find a bank that was open, and I was still leery of dealing with an ATM.
I walked with George down the few blocks to 25 Avgoústo street, where we went into the first open bank we came to, and George translated my sad tale to explain to the manager why I wanted to deal with him directly, instead of the mechanical teller outside the door. The manager offered to accompany us outside, where I could try my bank card, and assured me (by way of George) that if the ATM swallowed the card it could be retrieved immediately.
So we did that, and of course the card worked perfectly; I acquired €500 as easily as I could have done on Sunday from any of the many cash machines on that busy street. As we walked back, George assured me that I could use my card without fear if I always went to an ATM at a bank that was open for business. This reduced my anxiety a good deal, and for the rest of the trip I made withdrawals at ATMs—always at banks that were open—and never ran into another problem.
We walked back to the hotel to meet Dorothea, and all three of us got into George’s car. He drove out of the city, on a straight road south-southwest across the island. It passed through some fairly high country, the eastern end of the Psilorítis massif, but the high peaks were well to the west. In a little less than an hour, we were approaching the Messará Plain near the south coast. Crete’s largest and most fertile agricultural area, it's a long, narrow triangular strip that runs east and west, with the broad end at the west. The plain is sheltered by Psilorítis and lesser mountains to the north and some low costal hills to the south. Instead of going down to the plain, we turned west on a road that ran parallel to it on higher ground, and soon reached the site of ancient Gortýs.
I walked with George down the few blocks to 25 Avgoústo street, where we went into the first open bank we came to, and George translated my sad tale to explain to the manager why I wanted to deal with him directly, instead of the mechanical teller outside the door. The manager offered to accompany us outside, where I could try my bank card, and assured me (by way of George) that if the ATM swallowed the card it could be retrieved immediately.
So we did that, and of course the card worked perfectly; I acquired €500 as easily as I could have done on Sunday from any of the many cash machines on that busy street. As we walked back, George assured me that I could use my card without fear if I always went to an ATM at a bank that was open for business. This reduced my anxiety a good deal, and for the rest of the trip I made withdrawals at ATMs—always at banks that were open—and never ran into another problem.
We walked back to the hotel to meet Dorothea, and all three of us got into George’s car. He drove out of the city, on a straight road south-southwest across the island. It passed through some fairly high country, the eastern end of the Psilorítis massif, but the high peaks were well to the west. In a little less than an hour, we were approaching the Messará Plain near the south coast. Crete’s largest and most fertile agricultural area, it's a long, narrow triangular strip that runs east and west, with the broad end at the west. The plain is sheltered by Psilorítis and lesser mountains to the north and some low costal hills to the south. Instead of going down to the plain, we turned west on a road that ran parallel to it on higher ground, and soon reached the site of ancient Gortýs.
Although a Minoan past hasn’t been clearly established, Górtys was, by the time of the Roman conquest (completed in 67 BCE), among the most powerful of Crete’s many Greek city-states. Fortunately for the city, it had chosen to join the Romans rather than resist them, and when the fighting was over, the conquerors made it their administrative center. Later, when Augustus Caesar organized the empire, he combined Crete and Cyrenaica (which is now Libya, more or less) into a single province, and made Gortina the capital of it.
By the time the Arabs devastated the city in the late 820s, the Christian cathedral, dedicated to St. Títos, had been replaced more than once. The last one was built in the 5th century, and part of it still stands. Church authorities have put a modern icon of saints Paul (Pávlos) and Títos inside. The ruins aren’t extensive enough to serve as a church now, but I suppose it’s possible that the liturgy may be celebrated there on such special occasions as the patron saint’s feast day.
Behind the benches, a modern brick structure protects a relic of the Greek past: a series of stone tablets on which the city’s laws were inscribed so that citizens could read them. They were carved around 450–500 BCE in what the Rough Guide describes as “a very rough Doric Cretan dialect.” The stonecarvers followed a very old Greek practice in carving lines that read in alternate directions. Here's an example in English. Can you read it all the way through?
Here's a picture that shows some of the carving on the wall at Górtys. Even if you aren't fluent in Archaic Greek—I'm certainly not—you can confirm the direction of the lines by looking for asymmetric letters like C, E, F, K, N and S. (This is an archaic form of the Greek alphabet that contains some letters or letter forms that later disappeared in Greece, but made it into the alphabet that the Romans copied from the Etruscans—who had copied theirs from an old Greek alphabet somewhat like this one.)
Other examples of boustrophedon inscriptions can be found in the Greek world, but this one is unique for the extent of its legal contents; nothing else of that kind exists from what historians call the Archaic Period of Greek history. The tablets had apparently been reused in a later Greek building and then incorporated into the structure of the Roman odeon, although apparently in a way that paid some respect to their inscribed contents. Not all the tablets are still on the site—at least one has found its way into the Louvre—but most of them are sheltered now in a modern brick structure, and scholars have managed to reconstruct a good deal of the text. To go to a page with information about the laws they deciphered, click the button below.
We had found the site nearly empty of tourists when we arrived. A few were beginning to come in by the time we were leaving; one was a French group led by a woman whom George greeted as a colleague, and they exchanged a few words of shop talk while her tourists were looking around the cathedral.
The builders of the second palace used the ruined first palace as a foundation, and in some places where the two didn't quite overlap the excavators uncovered the older palace's remains. This can, as the Rough Guide remarks, make the runs “confusing for casual visitors to interpret.” George’s guidance was a great help, and it was also good to have seen Knossós first, because Evans’s reconstructions, even though they may incorporate errors of interpretation, helped us to imagine how the palace might have looked when it was occupied.
Before leaving Phaistós, we sat down in the visitor center’s café for coffee (George) and cold drinks (us)—then we set off for our third destination of the day: Agía Triáda.
‘Holy Trinity’ is of course not an ancient Greek name, let alone a Minoan one, but the site is supposed to have been named for a nearby chapel (apparently gone now, because I couldn't find it on any map). The site is only four kilometers from Phaistós, but is much less visited—mainly, George told us, because the road there is too narrow and winding for tourist buses, but also because it’s on a steep hillside that can be hard to get around, and perhaps because for many visitors, it’s just “more of the same.” In his years of guiding, we were only the second set of visitors who asked to be taken there. We saw no more than three or four other people at the site, and by the time we were ready to leave, we were the only ones.
On the drive back to Iráklio, George and I talked about the Indo-European languages. Although his university degree is in physics, language study is a hobby for him (and a hobby-horse for me—it’s much easier to start me talking on the subject than it is to stop me). George also told us about his family’s several acres of olive trees, in the fertile country outside Iráklio. Every year they engage an olive processor to harvest and press the olives and return the oil to the family, keeping a portion for himself—the way millers (of grain, apples, and other things as well as olives)—have traditionally earned their living. The family’s three or four households have enough oil to last them until the next year’s harvest.
We were back at our hotel by 3:00 or 3:30, where we said goodbye to George and went up to spend the next few hours in our room, during which Dorothea ate some bread and cheese she’d saved from the breakfast room, we shared three tiny díples and some water, counted our money, checked bus schedules for Sitía, and rested.
At 7:45 we ventured out in search of dinner. We had three restaurants in mind, all of them in the same small area beyond the pedestrian street, 25th Avgoustou. The streets over there were narrow and open to automobile traffic. Sidewalk space was limited, and we had to squeeze past parked and sometimes moving cars as we followed our map. We located all three restaurants, and chose one named I Avlí tou Defkalíona—‘The Courtyard of Deucalion.’ The restaurant’s eponym, Deucalion, was a mythological character, a kind of Greek Noah.
The waitresses were friendly and the food delicious. We made a meal of mezedákia: soutzoukákia (Smyrna-style meatballs like those Dorothea had had in Réthymno), dákos, chórta pies, graviéra, saganáki, and grilled mushrooms—and, of course, a half-liter of house white wine. The restaurant filled up as we ate, nearly all the diners Greek. I assume that we were offered the usual sweets and rakí to conclude the meal. Dorothea’s notes don’t mention that, but (except in Réthymno) not getting it would have been unusual, and thus more likely to be chronicled.