“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”
Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)
Go-Date: Days 48 & 49, Monday & Tuesday. March 11 & 12
Lesson Learned: Buy sunscreen in America. No, this isn’t a Buy USA ad, its just a warning that sunscreen is expensive when you buy it here. I don’t know why, it just is. We checked about 4 places before biting the bullet and shelling out $19 bucks for a tube of SPF 30. Maybe its because most Greeks have that olive complexion, and turn golden brown. They sure have enough olives here to justify that assumption. So, fork out the $6 at CVS and save yourself a few Euros.
Clean Monday
No meat? Crap. Who thought up this holiday? Are they serious? Asking a Cretan to give up meat is somewhat like telling them to buy Spanish olive oil. It really must be traumatic.
Clean Monday is also known as Pure Monday, Ash Monday, Monday of Lent or Green Monday (there has got to be a song title in there). It’s the first day of Great Lent throughout Eastern Christianity and is a moveable feast, falling on the 7th Monday before Pascha. I just know you shouldn’t linger in front of a fish monger you will be trampled by the crowd.
The term “Clean Monday”, means to the leave behind of sinful attitudes and non-fasting foods. It is sometimes called “Ash Monday”, by analogy with Ash Wednesday (the day when the Western Churches begin Lent). All I know is all the businesses are closed, you can’t get meat in cafés, and the streets are crowded, really crowded. Oh, and you get to fly kites.
So, in honor of the day, and on the advice of the Air B&B host we headed off to a beach on the west end of Chiana Old Town where we may best watch the exhibition of Clean Monday. The beach was packed, windy (very windy), and every 100 meters (62 feet) there was a kite stand, typically a 1971 Datsun mini van, or other such vintage vehicle/kite kiosk. We walked about the beach a bit, but found that to be hazardous with kids of all ages running around without watching for course/trajectory/obstacles, and errant kites imitating German Stuka dive bombers during the battle of Souda Bay. We chose the safe option to find a beach-side bar from which to watch the activities and enjoy my new favorite beer, Mythos (in the economical 500 ml bottle).
Clean Monday is a public holiday in Greece and Cyprus, where it is celebrated with outdoor excursions, the consumption of shellfish and other fasting foods (I never knew there was such a designation as a fasting or non-fasting food), a special kind of bread, baked only on that day, named “lagana”(which is really pretty good), and the widespread custom of flying kites. Eating meat, eggs and dairy products is traditionally forbidden to Orthodox Christians throughout Lent, with fish being eaten only on major feast days, but shellfish is permitted (who writes these rules and what the hell is the logic?). I also noticed the holiday didn’t slow down the consumption of alcohol at all, so I’m kind of OK with it.
I don’t get it (not eating meat), but the shellfish were great. You don’t need a holiday to convince me to eat calamari or mussels. I don’t know where the kite flying came from, I guess it was a favorite past time of Jesus, and I think I recall which book of the Bible that it was in.
Isaiah 40:28-31
28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth and he is out flying a HOLY kite. He will not grow tired or weary (of course not, he is God after all), and his understanding no one can fathom. He taketh these strengths to craft his skill in flying. 29 He gives strength to the weary and shows them the way of the kite. 30 Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall, but through HIM they shall not break their strings; for the LORD has promised long tails, fair winds, blue skies, and seafood for those who believe; 31 and those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. Their kites will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint, and behold their Spiderman kites will be as a lamp to the glory.
OK, I made that up, and so what if it’s the Old Testament….but it kinda works, don’t you think?
Aptera. The Ancient Site Nobody Knows
After a day of peril and prawns dodging and watching dozens of kites crash into the Sea of Crete, Ellen and I decided we needed to get out of the city, stretch our legs and look at real estate developed by people before the ages dark, when people thought the world was flat. Fortunately, we’d been researching western Crete on the Internet and thought we had a likely candidate. What’s even better, I’d never heard of the place. Aptera.
Now, I always had an interest in ancient Greece, and I thought I knew quite a bit about it until we arrived in Athens and I found that I knew little more than what you would expect from a Texas public school education. Not much at all. I’d heard of Homer, and the Odyssy, Iliad, Zeus, Hermes, Aristotle, Athena and all that, but my understanding of the real Greece before the arrival of the Romans was terribly limited. Fortunately, its been expanding rapidly since our arrival. Now I know enough to be considered dangerously limited.
Aptera was one of the most important city-states of Crete. The site is located on a plateau high above Souda Bay, about 15 km away from Chania east on the road towards Rethymno. The two city ports of Minoa (today’s Marathi) and Kisamo (current Kalives) made Aptera one of the most important commercial centers of Crete. Its inhabitants were skilled soldiers, especially in archery and often sold their services to other countries as mercenaries which was a pretty profitable export for Aptera. What a deal it was….diddle the women, make babies, give the babies bows for their first birthday, raise them up, ship them off to war, but make sure their paychecks come to the city-state treasury. Quite the marketing plan.
The site’s history begins way back in the Minoan Period (3500- 1070 BC), however there are traces dating back even further. It was an active settlement throughout the Geometric Period (1000- 685 BC), the Hellenistic Period (323- 67 BC) and the Roman Empire (67 BC – 324 AD). So, these guys had been around for a long, long time. I mean 3500 BC, that’s 5,500 years ago. Its mind boggling to me. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas and to us a building built in the 1920’s was really old. Things older than that were probably sod huts or buffalo hide Teepees. It seems the hay-day for Aptera was between 400 to 200 BC.
Of course, the day we chose to visit Aptera was projected to be cold, windy, with scattered showers beginning around 2PM. So, yeah let’s trek up the side of an escarpment to an ancient acropolis on roads meant to carry mopeds and mule carts. Sounds like a well-thought-out idea. So, yeah that’s what we did. We had no problem going to the village below the site, but as we wound our way up the hill we saw a problem. No, 5 problems. Tour busses. Honest, we haven’t encountered these so far, but there they were….busses, heading down hill on a road 13 feet wide.
Obviously, the tour groups knew it was going to rain today. So, they all got up early and drove to Aptera so each bus of 40 octogenarians could creep down the stairs, grab their walkers and do a 20-minute tour of a 25 acre archeological site. Well, that makes sense to me. As we drove up the hill and spied the caravan of behemoths moving slowly down the road, Ellen and I took the sensible approach and pulled off the road and looked at our phone to find out where the nearest Starbucks was to our location (Athens, I think). So, we just sat there for 10 minutes waiting for them to move on down the road. It was better than dodging them on the way up.
Clever as we are, a couple of kilometers up the way we ran head on into another land barge of German explorers. I pulled off to the right, but the bus driver wanted me to move up a driveway on the left. So, we did, Ellen gets loudly irritated with me when I get into road rage encounters, especially with large vehicles. So, we patiently waited in someone’s driveway until the last charter moved by us and down the hill. Two more kilometers up and at the site parking lot we found only two more busses. And they were loading….Yea! Five minutes later and we were alone at Aptera. We paid our 1 Euro each fare and began to explore.
The city rose to it’s peak prosperity during the Hellenistic times (end of the 4th – 3rd centuries BC) when it began to cut its own coins becoming economically and politically stronger. Evidently, Aptera was named after the god Artemis (who’s middle name was Aptera). On the minted coins, one side of the coin depicted the goddess Artemis and the other the king of Aptera, Apollo or Hera along with a torch, a bee or a bow (which I found pretty strange…you mean a bee is as important to these people as Apollo? Might that not piss him off?).
In Greek mythology, Aptera was the scene of the legendary contest between the Sirens and the Muses. When the Muses were victorious, the Sirens lost the feathers from their wings. Now naked and white, the Sirens cast themselves into the sea, whence the name of the city Aptera (literally meaning “without wings”), and of the neighboring islands Leucae (meaning “white”) came to be known. The Greeks have no problem mixing history with legend, so pick and choose what you will believe.
The remains of this site span so many periods it gets rather confusing. You can see the old acropolis walls, an ancient theater, the ancient Roman cisterens, an old Roman house, a Byzantine monastery (St. Johns), and a fort on the edge of the plateau which I’m not sure who built (but I suspect the Venetians or Turks), and German machine gun bunkers (WWII). Looking over the edge of the bluff down towards Marathi harbor you can see the old Ottoman fortress of Intzedin, which looks fascinating, but is closed to the public.
During the Pax Romana period of the Roman Domination the city of Aptera started to shrink economically and politically while agriculture started to flourish. While its occupation continued during the Byzantine years it didn’t prosper. Agriculture is still flourishing. The olive groves are amazing and you can’t take 10 steps without bumping into a sheep or goat. In our opinion, the most fascinating ruins were the Roman cisterns. The scale and condition are remarkable, and the acoustics inside were amazing.
Archaeologists continue to work at the site, and in January of 2016 found two statues that are remarkably preserved. These small statues are of Artemis (made of copper) and Apollo (made of marble) and were most likely used to decorate the altar at a luxurious Roman villa. It’s easy to tell that much of this site is yet to be explored.
Most people probably spend an hour or so here, but we burned half a day and totally enjoyed the visit. Pack a lunch and have a picnic on the walls of the Roman villa, and think that you are eating a meal in the same location ancient people did almost 2,000 years ago. It was a great visit.