Crete by Barry Unsworth Page A

landing—and the last—was that of the Saracens in A.D. 825. In accordance with their general policy throughout the island, they visited the city with fire and sword, and it was never rebuilt.
    Legendary beginnings, a period of glory, total devastation—it is a familiar paradigm in the history of Crete. There is an abiding desolation in the remains of Gortyn that I have not felt elsewhere among the ruined cities of Crete, probably due to the huge area over which the ruins are spread. They extend on either side of the road, acre after acre of them, through thickets of bramble and choked ditches and plowed fields and olive groves. The local people have used the marble of temples and the granite of churches to repair their walls. Gortyn, especially on the south side of the road in the area bordering the River Mitropolitanos, provides a striking example of a universal process: the reversion of buildings to ruins and ruins to rubble and rubble to dust. This feeling gives a melancholy to the place and seems to rub away the distinctions of time and period: The ruins of the Roman governor’s palace, or of the Greek temple to Pythian Apollo, seem no older than the broken walls of an abandoned sheep pen. It is the same with people: The dead belong to one state and one period only.
    To rescue one from melancholy, there is always the vitality and warmth of the people and the unfailing charm of the landscape, which can turn the accidental or unplanned into memorable experience. The region northwest of Gortyn is spectacularly beautiful. One day, in an attempt to go on foot from the village of Vorizia to the Valsamonero Monastery, we took a wrong turn. We realized our mistake after a while, but continued along the track we were on, impelled by the wildness and purity of the light among these hills—like the first light of the world—and by the play of shadow on the mountain peaks to the north, still capped with snow. The olive trees were in flower and the air was full of birdsong. Incredibly ancient, these olives, the trunks twisted and gnarled into tormented shapes. Seeing them, it is easy to understand the pervasive stories of metamorphosis found in Greek myths and in the Latin poets who inherited them. Poems of escape from death or ravishment, last-minute rescues by some suddenly compassionate god, plants struggling to turn into humans, humans striving to find escape in plants.
    The olive was already cultivated on this island two thousand years before Christ. It is easy to believe, seeing these time-wrenched shapes, that some of the present trees go back that far. They don’t, of course, not quite, but one of the oldest olive trees in Europe is on Crete, at Loutro in Sfakia, with annual rings that date to well over two thousand years ago. Any olive with a diameter of seven feet or so will go back to the Middle Ages.
    The path climbed up into the hills and there were ravens nesting in the crags above us and a kestrel circling below and, above the olives, great spreads of the splendid Greek fir, which you rarely see at altitudes of less than two thousand feet. This tree is dedicated to Pan, god of shepherds. He and Vorias (the North Wind) were both in love with a nymph called Pitys. She chose Pan as being less blustering and turbulent. In revenge Vorias blew her off a cliff. Pan found her dying and transformed her into his sacred tree, the fir, which was called Pitys in memory of her. Since then she cries every time the north wind blows, and her tears are the drops of resin that drip from her cones in autumn.
    We tramped for a good many miles that day and were given a handful of oranges when we came to lower ground by gravely courteous people who quite clearly thought we were out of our minds to be clambering about when there was no need. I thanked them in Greek, which may at least have served to reassure them that we were not from some altogether different planet. Dusk fell, there was no time, we didn’t see