The Argo and Tim Severin

In 1984 I was working on the South coast of Crete at Kommos Excavations during the summer dig season.

The dig team, comprised of Canadian and American archaeologists and graduate students, had breakfast all together early in the morning before work began, and then dinner all together in the evening after the day’s work was over (and after our requisite gin and tonic time).

We sat at a long set of tables in the narrow, treed courtyard of the dig building that housed the dig kitchen. There were two full-time, local women who cooked for the team. They were  an institution there, despite being very screachy, and irritable. They always had a handy spray-can of ByGone  (a DDT laced insecticide) in the kitchen, that they used to keep the flies away. They used it regularly on our food, particularly the butter/margarine.

The food wasn’t always the best (I remember one goat stew that still had fur attached to the meat, and another night we ate small snails that were gritty with sand) but dinners were always accompanied by lots of local wine and lots of laughter.

Tim Severin, center.

One night we were all having our dinner when a couple of tall bearded men showed up and asked to talk to the Director of the dig. They were ushered to the head of the table and introduced themselves. One of the men was Tim Severin, a noted British explorer and historical researcher.

I had read a couple of Severin’s books and knew about what he did. He followed in the steps of Thor Heyerdahl by recreating ancient sea vessels and then sailing them along ancient routes that were known from myths and legends.

He and his crew had just arrived at Kommos bay with a replica Bronze Age ship, and they wanted to invite all of us to visit on-board, and to talk about the local archaeological sites and their connection to Homer’s Odyssey.

Kommos has a beautiful natural harbor that was used for millennia. The ruins that we were working on dated from ca. 1800 B.C. to ca. 200  AD. During the Minoan period (ca. 1800 B.C. – 1200 B.C.),  the site was an active port and even had a wide paved road that connected the site to a network of palaces on Crete.

On one occasion, several of us went out with the Director of the dig to snorkel and dive in the sea just off-shore from the excavation, to locate an ancient anchor * that was known to exist. It lay there on the sandy bottom and was easily visible, once it was located.

The ship decorated for the Ulysses journey.

The ancient anchor was very near to the same spot that the replica ship was now anchored.

It was a glorious site to see a Bronze Age style ship floating on the “wine dark” sea (an epithet from Homer describing the sea: οἶνοψ πόντος, oinops pontos) in the natural harbor.

The replica boat was made proportionally smaller than the ones that sailed during the Bronze Age, and therefore also had a smaller crew. Severin had built this ship and had named it The Argo for a previous voyage that followed the path of the mythic Jason to Colchis, an ancient land located on the Black Sea. There, according to legend, Jason found the golden fleece and the princess Medea, and brought them back to Greece.

The ship decorated for the Jason journey.

The ship was now being re-purposed to retrace the journey of Ulysses (the latin name for Odysseus) from ancient Troy back to Greece. In Homer’s great saga The Odyssey, Odysseus encounters many obstacles along his way home to Ithaca, including being ensnared by a witch, Sirens, a Cyclops, and lotus eaters.

Severin used this boat to follow the natural currents and shorelines of the Mediterranean to hypothesize where Odysseus and his crew met with adventures along their journey home from the Trojan War.

The modern crew was comprised of men from all over Europe. Many were Scandinavian and didn’t speak English. All of us, from the Kommos crew, went out in our bathing suits to the boat, and sat on the deck of the small ship and shared some wine with the crew, while the dig Director and his wife (also a noted archaeologist) spoke with Tim Severin.

Severin believed that Kommos was the harbor that Ulysses (Odysseus) came to after his time in the land of the Lotus Eaters. He believed that the Lotus Eaters were located in what is known today as Libya – just south of us, across the Libyan Sea. And that is where they had just sailed from.

Severin and his crew only stayed a couple of days and then were off to trace the rest of the mythical journey, and we went back to our routines at work. Severin’s voyage may not have been the most scientific of projects, but it captured the romance of the Homeric texts and stirred the imagination.

I used to love swimming in the waters of Kommos bay, after our work hours were over.  I especially enjoyed floating with my toes pointing towards Africa and letting the even waves wash over me. It was easy to let go of everything when I was floating there with nothing but the deep blue waters, the huge blue sky and the rugged cliffs and rocks of the coast. I was easily swayed to believe that Odysseus visited Kommos during the Bronze Age – why not?

The Siren Vase, showing Odysseus tied to the mast while the Sirens call to him, Red Figured Stamos, 480-470 BC British Museum

A Late Geometric Krater showing a ship dated to 730-710 BC, several generations later than Homer’s Odyssey

* the anchor was published in 1995. “Two Three-holed Stone Anchors from Kommos, Crete: their Context, Type, and Origin,” IJNA 24: 279-291.

My Adventures on Crete 1981

Partial restoration of the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete.

In 1981 a fellow student and I were fortunate enough to work at the Athenian Agora on an analytical study of several pottery deposits that summer.

Me working in the Apotheke (storage area) of the Athenian Agora 1981.

When our work at the Agora was completed at the end of August, we took a few days to travel to the Greek islands of Crete and Santorini. We especially wanted to see Minoan archaeological sites and finds.

We traveled from Pireas to Heraklion by ferry. It was a luxury to have bunks to sleep on when night came, even though they were in a tiny metal cabin and we were sharing it with an entire Greek family.

The two adults and three children squeezed into the two bunks on the left side of the cabin and eyed us suspiciously while my friend and I suspiciously eyed them back from our two bunks on the right side – until someone finally turned off the lights and we all fell asleep.

The harbour of Heraklion with its Venetian Fortress.

In the morning we docked in Heraklion and walked up the hill to the center of the city and found ourselves a cheap hotel. It had been a beautiful 19th century mansion, but it was now run down and rented out room by room to poor tourists like ourselves. It seemed like we were the only guests staying there.

We were given a huge faded room with two narrow beds, a sink, and tall shuttered windows that looked out over the roof tops behind the main street. Once we opened the windows, the room echoed with the sounds of everyday life – church bells, chickens, kids, motorbikes, dogs, people yelling, sizzling meat.

Minoan gold seal depicting bull leaping, Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

The bathroom we had access to was a floor up, and the tub was plugged with a thick wad of long, green stringy algae. We were desperate to wash so we worked together to clean the tub and make it bearable for use. (We didn’t have very high standards.)

We spent the first day in Heraklion filling ourselves with the amazing collection of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, eating enormous ice cream sundaes at a cafe on the main square, and wandering around the market and waterfront.

Beautiful Minoan pottery covered with sea life motifs.

The next day we took a local bus to Knossos. We were used to taking transit in Athens, but Crete is predominantly rural and we had not yet experienced that side of life up close and personal.

For instance, there were at least two chicken passengers that got on the bus ahead of us, as well as a huge, hairy,  mustachioed man in a dirty undershirt who smelled like he’d never bathed in his life, except in raw garlic. He squeezed onto the full bus cradling an entire goat’s head against his chest and took the seat in front of us. He held one curved horn with a giant meaty hand and balanced the weight of the head on the other. The goat’s dead eyes stared at us til we got off at Knossos.

We had a great time at Knossos, but it was the end of August and it was HOT.

Plan of Knossos – a huge palace complex dating to the Bronze Age.

The kind of hot when there are waves in the air and everything loses its color – when what you see is reduced to a kind of shimmering black and white.

It was very exciting to see the ruins. We saw every inch of the Palace and walked until we couldn’t walk anymore.

Then we went for a cold Coca (Coca Cola) and waited for the next bus headed south across the Messara.

We decided to spend the night in Matala, a small fishing village and tourist destination located on the south coast of Crete. Matala is perhaps most famous from the Joni Mitchell song Carey in which she sings about the Matala moon.

Matala is also famous for its myriad caves that were once used to house lepers, but were lived in most recently by hippies.

The caves at Matala were carved out during the Neolithic period.

 

Matala has a beautiful natural harbor.

That summer there was a nice little bar located on the tip of the opposite cliff of the bay. To get to it you had to climb carefully along a rocky ledge. It was a beautiful spot to sit and watch the moon rise over the Libyan Sea. But after a couple of beers the walk back across the rocks in the dark wasn’t so great.

(When I returned to Matala in 1983, the bar had been closed and the area roped off – someone had no doubt had a really bad fall onto the jagged rocks below, after a few too many μπύραs* )

The next day we wanted to visit the Canadian/American archaeological dig at Kommos but we had no idea where it was. We were told it was somewhere near Matala, but no one in Matala could help us.

(I later worked at Kommos Excavations for two seasons, and it was located very close to Matala on the next bay over, with the dig house in Pitsidia, the next village up the road from Matala – if we’d known we could have walked.)

This is the Messara, the largest illuvial plain on Crete. Its very lush with many olive groves. This photograph was taken from the site of the ancient Minoan Palace of Phaistos, by George Messaritakis http://www.panoramio.com/photo/6218698

So we got on the local bus that was heading north and asked the bus driver in our broken Greek, to let us off at  Kommos excavations. The bus driver only understood that we wanted to go to an archaeological dig, and instead of Kommos he dropped us about 30 kilometers farther up the road, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere.

A view of some of the Roman ruins at Gortyn, Crete.

Next to a dingy little sign on a crooked pole that said GORTYN, was a guard sitting on a stool. He sat there by the dusty road alone in the heat, swatting flies away. No one else was in sight for miles.

(We had no idea at the time that Gortyn was a significant archaeological site that we could have visited instead.)

We asked him in our awful modern Greek where Kommos was – was it here? was it there? The poor man had no idea what we were talking about and ended up gesturing to my friend to stay put on his little stool, while he gestured for me to get on the back of a little motorbike he had parked nearby.

Gortyn is famous for being the setting of the mythological story of the Rape of Europa – in the story Zeus takes the form of a pretty bull and seduces the maiden Europa. He then takes her off to Gortyn to fool around under a tree (that supposedly still survives). The story is a favorite of artists throughout history. I love this picture of a bull looking at the painting by Rubens at the Prado. Photograph: Pedro Martinez De Albornoz/Prado http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/prado-animals-natural-history-museum-roots

The guard got on in front of me, and started up the bike with a loud roar and a smoky cloud of exhaust, and we were on our way…

This depiction of Europa makes her look pretty annoyed with the whole deal. Votive plaque – painted terracotta, second quarter of the 5th century BC, Princeton University Art Museum.

Here’s another great example of art through the ages showing Europa and the Bull. This painting was too good to pass up – I love the goofy expression on the the bull’s face and how chubby he is. And Europa just seems to be idly hanging on while he whisks her off to Gortyn. The Rape of Europa by Gillis Coignet, Flemish, 16th century.

We puttered along dusty back roads and for just a second I accidentally touched the inside of my calf against the tail pipe and got a nasty burn about 2 inches round. It blistered immediately and the pain was awful, but I didn’t want to make a fuss so I clenched my teeth and held on.

We finally went down an overgrown drive to a beautiful house that had a flagstone paved courtyard. The courtyard was shaded by grape vines hanging from an arbor above. There were several very elegant looking people working there on long tables and it turned out that it was the Italian School of Archaeology’s dig house for Gortyn. The elegant people were Italian archaeologists.

There was a great deal of fast fire Italian going on once I made my mission clear, and a map was pulled out to show me the island of Crete and the location of Kommos. They argued for a long time in Italian about whether the archaeologists were still on site or if the dig had closed for the season – and after a phone call or two it turned out that the dig was closed and our quest was at an end.

They insisted on tending to my oozing burn, and then had the guard take me back to my waiting friend who was still sitting on the side of the road by the crooked sign.

My Canadian Mediterranean Institute of Archaeology membership cards.

The guard had by this time had enough of me and my friend, and told us to walk up the road (gestured) to catch the bus back to Heraklion.

So my friend and I hiked up the long, winding, searing hot, paved road to the top of a high ridge where there was a battered bus-stop sign, and we waited, and waited, and waited for the bus to come. It seemed like hours that we stood there on the road. We were starting to bicker and despair as the sun slowly went down, when a bus trundled to a stop and the door opened and we got on and rode back in silence to our dingy hotel in the city.

The next day we set off by ferry for Santorini.

Map of Minoan Crete

 

 

(click on this link for a close up, contemporary map of central Crete – you can find all the places that I mention)

* μπύραs  means ‘beers’ in English