The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage by Jan Morris Page B

highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.
    Cretan history has matched its look, and its legend. The Minoan civilization of pre-history was destroyed by some suitably appalling catastrophe, and was followed by centuries of alien occupation – Roman, Arab, Byzantine. In the Cyclades one feels that the pagan gods survive all that geopolitics can do to them, and may easily be out there sunbathing, or twanging guitars on the upper decks of ferry-boats. Crete is not that kind of place. It is an island charged with power, but without tingle. I once went up to the birthplace of Zeus, the cavern called Idheon on the slopes of Mount Ida, when the dusk was falling on a grey winter evening, and found it a disturbingly sterile site. The mountain is very lonely up there, and the tipple of goats’ feet somewhere was the only sound upon the silence, but it was not the desertion of the scene that chilled me, or the ashen colour of it. It was the feeling that, though it had once been the holiest of holy places, where if not a god, at least a grand idea was born, not a shred of emotion lingered there. There was no numen to it, no magic. The Cretan wind had swept it all away, and the cave was just a hole in the mountain face.
    This awesome island inevitably became Venetian after the Fourth Crusade. It was allotted to Boniface of Montferrat but the Venetians bought the rights to it, cheaply enough, in an agreement resonantly entitled Refutatio Cretae. They had to dislodge the Genoese, though, who had already seized part of the island, and it was another decade before they were truly masters of it. Crete was called Candia then, and it became, especially after the loss of Euboea, the centrepiece of their eastern empire, to which their scattered settlements might look for protection, judgement or intervention, and through whose ports all their traffic to Egyptand the Levant might pass. Many another possession was considered ancillary to the Great Island, and the thirteenth-century Doge Renier Zeno declared that the whole strength of the Venetian Empire lay in its possession.
    Crete is one of the world’s junctions, equidistant from Europe, Asia and Africa. Even now, though it is an administrative region of Greece, it has an exotic feel, and parts of the capital, Iraklion, seem less like a European city than a bazaar town of Islam. Herb-scented, carcass-hung, brass-shining, hammer-ringing are the tumultuous alleys of its markets. Sizzling are the shish-kebabs of its backstreet restaurants. The haggle, the false retreat, even here and there the regurgitive hubble-bubble – all these symptoms of the east permeate the town, and give to its seedy lanes a consoling sense of caravanserai.
    Life in the countryside, too, is sometimes more oriental than Hellenic. Consider the little procession stumbling down the rocky track towards us now. It might be stumbling down from Damascus. First, like scouts, come the purposeful dogs, then the herdsman on his fine donkey, wearing a black beaded turban and swishing a stick. The wife comes next on her rather less majestic ass, half-veiled with a black scarf around her chin, and cluttered with pans, bags and baskets. A myriad sheep and goats mill all around, tousled and blunt-faced, frequently stopping to butt each other, or nibble something by the track, or simply stand stock-still to sniff the air. Finally the sheep-boy strides along behind, with two or three cows in tow too, and a crook over his shoulders, and a fine high wave of the hand that seems to come straight from the black tents of the desert.
    On a hot still day on the southern coast you may fancy you see dustclouds of Africa, sullenly blowing out of the Libyan Sea. Perhaps you do. It is only 200 miles from Crete to the African coast, and when the Romans built on the island they grouped it as a province with Cyrenaica. Bananas grow in Crete. Egyptians ruled it in the nineteenth century, and when in 1940 the Germans invaded the