CRETE IN BETWEEN
STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF A WINE-DARK SEA
Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.
A Lecture Delivered to the Platsis Conference
The University of Michigan
3 October 2004
At the very dawning of the twentieth century, modern psychoanalysis and modern Cretan
archaeology were born. It can be suggestive to consider these unlikely intellectual twins
together. Psychoanalysis and Cretan Archaeology.
Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his ideas about dream interpretation, his theories
of infantile sexuality, the whole Oedipal drama which he located at the very heart of the
nuclear family and its troubling ways of romancing the future. Drawn almost obsessively
to Greek mythology, Freud’s picture of the human psyche suggested the existence of
monstrous, seething depths. The Unconscious.
Sir Arthur Evans shocked part of this same world at precisely the same time. After
deliberate and carefully choreographed acquisition of the land surrounding the hillside at
Knossos, and after the troubles of 1898 which finally severed Crete's political ties to the
Ottoman Empire, signaling her eventual unification with Greece in 1912, Evans began
digging in 1900, the same year that saw publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
Evans, too, had dreams. The shock of his discoveries at Knossos, much like Freud's, lay in
the revelation of a world heretofore unknown and unimagined, the world he too, drawn
irresistibly to the interpretive power of ancient myth, called "Minoan."
This proved to be a powerful and seductive interpretive lens, inclining Evans in later years
to identify many of the rooms and other structures which he excavated as belonging to
King Minos, to Daidalos, to the Minotaur. Knossos itself he referred to as "the Labrynth."
He even named his excavation-house the "Villa Ariadne."
For anyone who knows his or her mythology, that made Knossos a rather disturbing sort
of place, home to a monster, the Minotaur. And so, Freud beckons us with the
Unconscious, Evans seduces us with the Cretan Labrynth, and we enter a century in which
"the ancients and the moderns" were deliberately jumbled and juxtaposed.
I want to think about the mysterious Cretan figure of Daidalos in light of this.
The myths of Daidalos, as Sarah Morris has demonstrated so clearly, were decisively
rewritten in Classical Athens, so that there is very little connection between the strange
figure whose dancing floor we hear about in Homer and the more elaborate stories about
statues so lifelike they moved and spoke, the stories Socrates preferred.
Myths of Daidalos are like Crete herself; they are today the sum total of everything they
have ever been, everything that has been said and done, all the additions, all the deletions,
all the changes. (This makes myths, especially Cretan myths, a lot like the human psyche,
by the way, at least as Freud imagined it).
As such, Cretan myths positively require excavation, with all the attendant parsing of
different historical layers that work entails. It is a forbidding task. And no one can hope to
do it in an hour...
There are strange repetitive themes in the stories about Daidalos, just as there were in
Odysseus's tall traveler's tales about Crete. There is the notable fascination with new
technologies, and the unexpected, destructive consequences they so often have.
A bronze (or wooden) bull leads to a monstrous perversion, and the literal creation of a
monster. A labrynth becomes the thing in which its owner is imprisoned. Wings designed
for escape unwittingly kill a child. Crete itself, intended as a sanctuary, becomes a prison.
Much like the USA in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bronze Age Crete was
a place where the very fluidity of cultural contact created an explosion of new
technologies and cultural creativity. The Greeks believed that writing, and sculpture, and
law, and even new forms of religious worship, were all invented on Crete.
Cretan stories also display a fascination with erotic passion, especially women’s passion,
and the ways in which it can create monsters as well as a miraculous mania. What these
themes all share--the interest in technology and the intrigues of erôs--is a fascination with
the strange consequences of mixing things up.
Mixed-up things... these are what psychoanalysts and archaeologists both study. And so
does anyone interested in multiculturalism, today. The interest in mixing and in flow got
the whole business of Greek philosophy started, if you think about it.
Clearly, Crete is a place where such mixing can be monstrous. That, I think, is one of the
most important tensions in trying to talk about, much less to celebrate, the island and its
rich modern landscape. I want to begin these reflections, then, by marking an important
distinction, the distinction between two sorts of Cretan mixing: syncretism and hybrids.
2
SYNCRETISM AND HYBRIDS
As my dear friend, and our convener, Vassilis Lambropoulos, has demonstrated, the now
rather loaded scholarly term, syncretism, has the name of Crete for a root. Krêtê simply
means "the mixed place." And syn-Cret-ism was a term referenced by Plutarch as
describing the sorts of political confederations of cities that existed on the island in his
own day.
In Religious Studies, which just so happens to be where I hang my scholarly hat,
syncretism names the sorts of complex religious landscapes where different religions and
different cultures coexist, gradually transforming each other, creating exciting new mixed
things. The Afro-Caribbean religions like Santeria on Cuba or Vodou as practiced in Haiti
and Jamaica, are prime examples of syncretistic religions.
(I suspect that it matters that these are all island religions, by the way, since islands are the
paradigmatic mixed-up places. Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, has made this point the
mainstay of his poetry, especially in Omeros, by comparing the Caribbean and the
Aegean. It is the case, in any event, that my work with Vodou practices on Haiti has
informed the way I think about Crete as a cultural and religious landscape of stunning
complexity and beauty.)
In recent years--and I confess that this has seemed more a matter of scholarly quibbling
than something serious--the term syncretism came into disfavor, with scholars suggesting
that terms like "creolization" or "hybridity" worked better as a description of these
Caribbean (and other) environments. Still, they rarely said what was gained with this new
term--which is odd.
What struck me when I heard the term, hybridity, is that it derives from another Greek
root: hybris, a highly charged word with a range of semantic meanings running from
prideful arrogance to rape.
Two words for mixing, then, syncretism and hybridity, gentle mixing and violent
juxtaposition. What is made by such a mixing? That is the preeminent question on Crete.
What is made by such a mixing? Wonderful, delicious, extraordinary things. And
monstrous things, too. If you wish to mix, on Crete, you must be careful.
I will try to heed that counsel in what follows here, try to attend to the various kinds of
mixing I will discuss.
And I will use the metaphor of archaeological excavation as a way to organize my rather
disordered thoughts about modern Crete.
For Crete is a palimpsest, the staggering sum total of everything that has been said and
done there since the Neolithic period.
3
It has been an in-between place, a place of meeting and a place of mixing, for a very long
time. How in the world to tell modern Crete's story, then? How to excavate a place with a
stratigraphy as complex as that?
In the brief time before me, I do not propose to excavate the entire site. Rather, I will
content myself with laying out the work for the season ahead. Only this.
The first decision in any archaeological season is where to place the trenches. In a site as
vast and diverse as Crete, what four or five locations will receive our loving scholarly
attention this year? I will suggest the following topics for my exploratory trenches, and
then we will see how far we can get, together. In less than an hour.
1st) I would like to think about Crete, with you, in terms other than "east and west." I
would like to excavate that taxonomy.
2nd) I want to think with you about the modern Cretan identity. I would like to analyze
that eminently psychological category, identity, and then explore how it applies or doesn't
apply on Crete.
3rd) I want to talk briefly about Cretan literature. And so I would like to contrast the work
of Nikos Kazantzakis and Odysseas Elytis, and explore how Crete functions as a literary
homeland for each of them.
4th) And finally, I want to discuss something which is not modern at all, but timeless:
Cretan wine and spirits.
Let's see what we can discover in those intellectual trenches, together.
4
EAST AND WEST AND MIDDLE
These are the five directions
according to the Mayan astronomers:
The red dawn of day (East).
The dying black of evening (West).
The white of the chilly North.
The yellow power of the South;
and in the center of the world
the intense blue-green
of the tropics.
How beautiful to see the world
through the Maya prism
with its five cardinal directions.
Can this be learned by Westerners
who see just two directions:
East and West?
Victor Montejo, "The Five Directions"
*****
Surprising as it must seem to we modern people, it was only in the nineteenth century
that "western" people began to orient themselves on the world map in a new way,
precisely by thinking in terms of "the east and the west."
It's not surprising, really, that these newly emerging "western" people came to define
the rest of the planet in relation to themselves and to the west, at just this time. They
had the power, after all. All those who were not "western" (which seemed to mean
European and North American and Australian, at the time) came to be viewed as
"eastern" people in one form or another.
When we gaze at the world map, however unwittingly, with this perspective in mind,
then we imagine that there are "Near Eastern" peoples in Turkey and the Anatolian
plateau, that there are "Middle Eastern" peoples in the old Mesopotamian heartlands of
Iran and Iraq, that there are "South-East Asian" peoples in the vast Indian
subcontinent, and that there are "Far Eastern" peoples in the mass of territories
encompassing China and its surroundings, extending all the way to the Korean
peninsula and the archipelago of Japan.
Most all of the world is "eastern," when gazed at with such western eyes.
5
As crucial tools for telling a story, the story of world history, the categories of "east
and west" gained something like their current importance when the first truly historical
thinker, in the modern sense of that term, Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), offered a
highly influential course of lectures at the University of Berlin in the 1820s. The
lecture-course was dedicated to a surprising new idea, "the philosophy of history."
What Hegel suggested there, with his own special flair and taste for high drama, was
that human history actually constituted a story, an historical movement which is going
somewhere, bringing something new and important into being. Human history is not a
course of random events or happenstance; it is rather an epic struggle, a theater in
which the definitive spiritual drama (of humanity? of God? of the world? it's not
always clear what the difference is) is unfolding.
In one of his prettiest metaphors, Hegel suggests that the human and divine spirit
follows the sun, moving from "the east" to "the west" as the day of human civilization
progresses. In short, Hegel helped to give the categories of "east and west" the raw
interpretive power they continue to have. It was almost impossible, after Hegel, to
think of the world and its history in any other terms.
Whereas a young architectural student named Charles Robert Cockerell--who traveled
to Greece at the same time as Lord Byron did, in 1810, and just missed making it to
Crete the following year--whereas he could publish a memoir of his trip with the title
Travels to Southern Europe and the Levant. By the time Hegel's categories had taken
hold just a decade or two later, Greece was no longer imagined as a "southern" or
Mediterranean place at all, but rather as a "western" one. Greece, in short, was now
conceived as the beginning of the story, the one most worth telling, the story of (the
rise of) the west.
Hegel never suggested that other, non-western cultures were unimportant. A great
many of his early lectures were devoted to the flourishing Bronze Age civilizations
around the world whose importance and sophistication he happily acknowledged.
Ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian, ancient Persian, ancient Chinese--all of these
cultures, and more, have a place in Hegel's story.
Significantly, Minoan Crete did not--except for King Minos's famous suppression of
Mediterranean pirates, and the creation of the world's first naval empire.
The Mayans of Central America also do not have a place in this lecture course, by the
way--because archaeologists had not discovered them, or the Minoans, yet.
In short, Hegel had to use myths, if he wanted to talk about Crete at all.
Now, scratch beneath the surface of most any Greek myth, and you will find a Cretan
origin. Neither eastern nor western, Crete lies in the center of that wine-dark sea, like
the fifth cardinal point on the Mayan compass.
6
The myth of clever eastern innovations making their triumphant way westward, the
story of the west's virtual seduction by the eastern world it then conquered has had a
very long subsequent life. But it cuts against a very different story, the modern story of
Greek exceptionalism.
This story, Hegel's story, is a very difficult story for us to get past. We imagine the
Greeks now as the ones who provided us with any number of the cultural innovations
which we tend to think of as distinctively "western." The Greeks wrote the first books
of history. The Greeks created the first participatory democracies. The Greeks were the
first people to comprehend the importance of tragedy in religion, and of comedy in
politics. The Greeks were the first natural scientists, the first philosophers, and so on.
There is a lot of Romanticism in this version of ancient Greece, of course. And this is
not the way the ancient Greeks talked about themselves, by and large. The looming
presence of the island of Crete on the collective Greek brainscape is the main reason
for this. Hegel's inability to discuss Bronze Age Crete in his lectures is thus a really
decisive omission.
For Hegel, Crete is important because it is the origin of Europe. But where does he get
this strange idea? Not from history, and not from archaeology, but rather from a Greek
myth. Zeus kidnaped Europa and brought her to Crete. They had two sons, Minos and
Rhadymanthus, and the dance of Greek mythology began.
7
THE QUEST FOR CRETAN IDENTITY
"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says
one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as
well in the most creative moments of my life.
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 45
*****
One thing we might have learned after more than a century of modern EuroAmerican
psychoanalysis: Ask too often about your identity, and you can only experience an
identity-crisis. I worry about that. A lot.
The elusive Cretan identity provides an intriguing alternative, a counterpoint, if you
will, to several other more recognizable, and more recognizably separatist, modern
identities.
Consider the Basques as a fascinating sort of Cretan counter-example. Euskal Herria,
the land of the Basque-speakers, is an island, figuratively speaking, ringed by
mountains and surrounded by Europeans, mostly Spanish and French, who do not
speak their language or share their culture. Overrun by a series of empires, the
Basques have fought ferociously to preserve their culture and their language,
negotiating their semi-autonomy with Romans, North African Muslims, and Franks,
even fighting them to the death where that was deemed necessary to defend their home
and their cultural identity.
There is far more to any such "identity" than separatist violence, of course, and this is
another important truth which a closer examination of Cretan history illustrates with
eloquent clarity. Here, perhaps, is another set of modern myths we may need to learn
to dig beneath.
Crete's reputation as a violent, piratical place tends to hide some of her truest colors,
some of the most vibrant aspects of Crete's cultural landscape--namely, the island's
remarkably casual and almost laissez faire attitude to cultural mixing and the perennial
influx of new arrivals.
Great storytellers, from Odysseus to Nikos Kazantzakis, have created memorable
images--from the Bronze Age pirate Odysseus claimed to be, to Zorba the Greek (he
was also originally from Crete), to the Cretan pallikari, a fiercely armed and
elaborately mustachioed guerilla-fighter who is also always a mountain-man.
This last image took on a whole new meaning during the especially repressive German
occupation of the island in 1941-1944. And this raises the only potentially
controversial thing I'll suggest today, I think.
8
During the Occupation--and, yes, when Modern Greeks say the Occupation, this is the
one they mean--villages were destroyed wholesale; reprisal killings were common; it
genuinely seemed less a military occupation than a fight to the death. But that is the
brief historical hiccup which suggests just how different things on Crete used to be.
Through most of her long history--and I would include the Turkish period in this,
because it seems so much like the Venetian period which preceded it--Crete was far
more cosmopolitan and far less conflictual than that. I think we tend to read Crete's
whole history now through the lens of what the Nazis did. Neither Franks, nor
Venetians, nor the Ottomans were like them, though.
Perhaps what I am suggesting was truer on the coast. Crete has as much coastline as
she does mountains, after all, and her port-cities have always been proverbial points of
meeting. Crete is a land of extreme contrasts, particularly in the southwest where the
White Mountains spill so dramatically into very deep seas.
Perhaps this landscape helps to explain the schizophrenic cultural mixture which is
Crete. The syncretism and the hybridity, the mixing and the monsters, the revelry and
the revolutions.
Pirates on her coasts and pallikari in the mountains, perhaps, but all of this is overlaid
with the particular hospitality of those who know beyond a shadow of doubt that there
is no such thing as an unambiguous homeland and that everyone is a visitor in the end.
With the glaring exception of Sphakia and the White Mountains in the southwest,
Crete seems to be the crucial cultural counterpoint to our contemporary Basquelands.
Crete is a literal, not a figurative, island, and as such she was always a crossroads for
different cultures. This was the whole point of Odysseus's stories, after all.
"Preserving" their culture would have made little sense among seafaring people on an
island who were forced to be multicultural and multilingual, even in their homes.
Mountains may divide peoples, but oceans connect them. Islands just are points of
cultural connection, and they presumably always have been.
The marvelous culture that has emerged on Crete today is quite literally the sum total
of virtually everything else that has been said or done on the island for the past three
millennia, and more. Crete is neither eastern nor western; it is central. Crete is not
home to one culture, so much as it is home to a rich cultural mixture. Crete does not
have one identity, but many--which is precisely why Odysseus found it so easy to
pretend to be from there. How could anyone ever prove him wrong?
9
CRETAN LETTERS: KAZANTZAKIS AND ELYTIS
After too much thoughtlessness and too little inspiration, time grew bold and
cast me into the Cretan Sea.
I aged thousands of years, and find myself using the Minoan script now with
such facility that people are at a loss and believe it to be a miracle.
The real blessing is that they can't read me.
Odysseas Elytis, Diary of an April, As Yet Unseen, last entry
*****
No one has done more to popularize the ferociousness of the Cretan mountain man, the
almost theatrical taste for bloodshed and violent cruelty among the pallikari, than
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1961).
There was a time when I admired the intensity of it all; it seems dated to me now, a
little bombastic, overly self-dramatizing and self-important.
I also can't for the life of me fathom how it could ever have been true.
Readers of his alternately autobiographical and self-inventing Report to Greco will
remember the horrifying scenes from early childhood where the young boy tastes his
first experience of night-massacre inside the walled city of Herakleion and reprisal
killings in the streets.
I am always especially horrified by the scene where his father takes this very young
boy to see the corpses of three hanged men and forces him to look (85-91)--"to do
obeisance," as he puts it, at this eminently Cretan form of Golgotha.
"Liberty," we are told, is what killed them. "God bless it."
This is a very hard code to live by.
According to Kazantzakis, it's also just in the Cretan blood. His story begins with his
grandfather, killed by the Turks, and then with his father, cool and expressionless in
the face of horror, calmly confronting the gaze of corpses and skulls alike.
It doesn't require full-blown psychoanalysis to see this writer, who eulogizes a strange
mixture of his grandfather and father in Freedom or Death (1951,1955), seeking the
ancestors' approval as he chooses a very different sort of life for himself, a literary life,
where all the struggles are spiritual.
10
Still, Report to Greco represents his last word on the subject, and I think his word was
changing. While I don't know what to make of this entirely, I believe that Kazantzakis
was trying to transform one of his most arresting images--the skull, which he referred
to as "life's truest face"--into something else, something vibrant and alive, something
he termed "the Cretan Glance."
He did not live to see that change bear fruit.
And in any case, Kazantzakis remained committed to the rhetoric of a previous
generation, one which could still speak with a straight face about the Cretan "identity"
as a matter of ancestry and the hard geography of the island. This is the very "blood
and soil" concept of ethnicity which the experience of fascism in the 20th century
rightly taught us all to suspect. Kazantzakis was also committed to drawing a clear line
between the east and the west.
We see a new trajectory, a new way of claiming the Cretan ancestry in the work of
Greece's last Nobel Laureate, Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996), who was born, like El
Greco and Kazantzakis, on Crete, but who, also like them, lived most of his adult life
elsewhere. For El Greco, it was Venice and Rome and Toledo. For Kazantzakis, it was
Naxos and Athens, Paris and Berlin, Moscow and Frankfurt. All this moving around
matters.
Elytis departed from Herakleion for Lesbos and Athens (with long stints in Paris and
elsewhere). His unique blending of French Surrealism and Classical Greek had only
one unshakeable poetic anchor, and it was not the soil of Crete, as it had been for
Kazantzakis. It was the sea.
As Elytis himself noted proudly, his three homes--Crete, and Lesbos, and Athens--
form the points of an isometric triangle which defined his true homeland: the Aegean
Sea. Nothing, I am suggesting, could be more authentically "Cretan" than this.
Homer's "island in the middle of a wine-dark sea" must ultimately be constituted by
that sea.
Cretan products, much like Cretan artists, were always conceived for export as well as
home consumption. This is why the movement matters so much.
The island of Sicily may have been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, but Crete,
which is even richer agriculturally in its way, was to become the vast warehouse of the
entire eastern Mediterranean in the Venetian period.
It is yet one more example, perhaps the most potent example, of how many good
things may happen when mixing and grafting are managed with sufficient care.
And that noble Cretan idea--that when things are mixed with love and attention, in the
absence of hybris, then beautiful new things may be created--this is the surprisingly
11
modern idea lying at the very heart of this not-entirely-modern lecture about a very
ancient-seeming place.
12
CRETAN WINE AND SPIRITS
Ancient myths suggest that the island had been a stepping-stone for the vine on
its way from Asia to Europe. The story of Zeus carrying off to Crete the
daughter of the king of Phoenicia, Europa, is usually illustrated, for example,
with the god in the form of a bull and Europa, on his back, carrying a branch
heavy with grapes. And then there is the legend of Dionysus, the god
associated with wine, choosing as his bride Ariadne, daughter of king Minos of
Crete. The huge wine crocks built into underground chambers at Knossos and
Phaestos confirm the importance of wine implicit in the myths; one of the
Minoan buildings excavated at Vathipetro, south of Archanes, revealed
numerous wine jars and a press--clearly it had been a winery.
What had that ancient wine been like?
Gerald Asher, Vineyard Tales, 16-17
I was surrounded by olive groves and vineyards…
Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 147
*****
In the psychedelic ending of Report to Greco, where Kazantzakis is visited by the
ghosts of Odysseus and El Greco, he mentions Malvesi wine and mantinades three
times in the last five pages (506-512). I want to conclude with that authorial nod to
Cretan wine and music.
Olives and grapes both hail originally from the western coast of the Caspian Sea, in
what today are the northern highlands of Iran. They are similar plants in many ways;
exceptionally hardy, they travel extremely well.
They also seem to thrive on mixing. All of this moving around, the endless grafting
and cross-pollenation, has resulted in the extraordinary variety of grapes and olives we
see around the world today. We humans have been at it for over 6000 years, after all.
The experimenting began in the inland steppes of Persia, at the very dawn of human
civilization. Shiraz is not French; it is Persian. When nomadic groups first settled
tentatively in the area, they would have come into contact with these delicious new
fruits. Wine and oil presumably followed in short order, among hungry and thirsty
people.
But the making of wine and oil takes time, and that sort of leisure requires permanent
dwellings and the elaborate equipment for pressing the yield. Before wine and oil
could be made, then, human settlements had to become more permanent.
13
They did so first in the Mesopotamian valley, and if you pay attention to the
horticultural side of the story told in the biblical book of Genesis, they make their way,
slowly but surely, to the Mediterranean Sea.
If the Bible insists on anything in these early stories, it is that second homes can often
be superior to first homes, that second plantings may be even more productive and
prolific. This goes for grapes and olives; it goes for people, too.
When human beings brought these things to the shores of the Mediterranean, the
plants discovered a climate and a terrain which seemed to suit them even better than
their first homes had. And when they came to the center of that Sea, on Crete, then the
moment of true crystallization occurred. It arguably makes for the finest oil and wine
in all the world.
Italians first came in contact with Cretan produce after the notorious Fourth Crusade in
1204, when a largely Frankish and German army was transported on a Venetian fleet
nominally bound for the Holy Land. They ended up in Constantinople, instead.
Under the Venetians, Cretan wine was known as Malvasia, or Malmsey, or Malvoisie,
"a wine that made Venice rich and England happy," in the words of Gerald Asher. The
wine was named for the Venetian port on the southern Greek mainland, Monemvasia,
where most Cretan produce passed through on its way back to the imperial city.
It eventually gave its name to the region southwest of Herakleion, which became
known as Malevisi, especially noted for its strong, sweet wines. That's the wine
Kazantzakis was talking about, and it is dark, much like the surrounding Homeric sea.
By the mid-1400s, with Venetian control of the island relatively secure, the wine trade
was secured as well, and soon thereafter it positively exploded.
As French wines are today, so Cretan wines were in the Renaissance. English royal
families ordered casks of the stuff for their weddings. There were shrieks of outrage
when it was taxed in London. It was virtually the house wine at the Vatican. Martin
Luther, who disagreed with the Papacy about so much else, agreed about what he
called Malmosier; in a justly famous metaphor, he suggests that the blessings of peace
can make bread crust taste like sugar, and water like Malmosier wine.
The Cretan wine market may be linked to the earliest period of which we have any
record, the Bronze Age Minoan world. Archaeological evidence suggests that the
Minoans were already extraordinarily sophisticated in these sacred arts.
There is even some surprising new evidence that they had discovered the art of
distillation, a remarkable advance in the arts and crafts of tippling which we normally
assign to the Irish in the High Middle Ages.
14
But the archaeological evidence suggests that the Minoans may already have been
distilling the fermented must and grape leavings after their harvest and first pressing,
in order to make what is still the national Cretan drink, tsikoudia. Two such Bronze
Age distilleries (at Monastiraki and Phaestos) have recently been excavated, according
to Athanasia Kanta, of the University of Rethymnon. She experimented with the
ancient equipment and made some potables which she deemed... well, let's just say
they were "passable."
Where there is tsikoudia, there will be mantinades. Clearly, they are related to the rich
tradition of Classical Greek drinking songs. So they are related to wine and tsikoudia.
Mantinades are pretty little four-line poems which, despite their air of casual grace,
are carefully choreographed (13 syllables, with 14 on the third) and rhymed (always
on the second and fourth lines). They may be sung acapella or accompanied by simple
strings, like the lyre or lute or guitar. They can be endlessly expanded, too--as we see
in the Erotocritos, as well as the contemporary music of Ludovico of Anoyia.
Mantinades cover an amazing array of topics, from God and Beauty, to the richness
of Crete, to the almost inevitable topic of good love gone bad. Comparisons with the
Blues are not so far-fetched as they might seem at first glance. Predictably enough,
given the performative setting of most mantinades, eating and drinking are fairly
constant preoccupations:
Natan ê thalassa krasi
kai ta karabia koupes
kai t'arboura tôn karabiôn
têganismenes voupes
---
Would that the sea were wine
and all the ships were dishes
and all the masts of all the ships
were tasty oil-fried fishes!
Wine, the poets know, can easily lead to stolen kisses, another major theme of the
mantinada.
T'axeili sou to kokkino
êthela na philêsô
ma keino stasei to krasi
phoboumai mê methysô.
---
Your little lips, ripe and red
15
oh, how I wanted them to kiss
but the drunken wine that drips from them,
I fear, might make me miss.
Especially touching is the emphasis on the endless deferment of lovers who are
separated, and the special agony of waiting for love letters which never arrive.
Perhaps most surprising is the frank admission of what Juliet first dared to boast:
namely, that passionate love is a necessary and happy sin, that the lover in love
worships only "the god of [his] idolatry." Mantinades actually celebrate that heresy.
These remarkably anti-ecclesial remarks appear over and over again, whatever the
alleged topic that originally inspired the poem. Tsikoudia and wine inspire truth-
telling, whatever the cost, even if it means flirting with the pagan residue lying behind
such poetry. The Greco-Pagan roots to Christianity are well known in Orthodoxy, and
especially clear on Crete. The heady danger of mixing again.
Mia n' hê agapê p'agapô
enas ein' o Theos mou,
me ts' alles paizô kai gelô,
yia na diaskedazô.
---
The love I love is one
My God is one as well
with others I simply laugh and play
just to flirt with hell.
If you can blur the line between one god and many, if you can actually make heresy
seem humorous... well now, that is a strong drink.
Or is it the still more powerful magic of Crete herself, the mysterious place of mixing,
where things you didn't think could possibly co-exist, do.
There are lines which do not appear on any modern maps. The line separating Europe
from the Mediterranean is such a line. You only become aware of its existence when
you have crossed over it. In the Mediterranean, people eat olives and oil, and they
drink wine. In Europe, this all turns slowly to butter and beer. Such a culinary change
marks a far more profound difference, draws a far sharper line than modern maps can
tell. It requires acknowledging a fifth point: the center.
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This lecture, true to the spirit of the place, I hope, wants to be about that difference,
about olives and grapes, about oil and wine, about the sacred center of the sea where
they first were mixed, and how that mixing subtly changed them. That alternately
magical and mythical, mixed-up center, that just is the island of Crete.
Thank You Very Much.
Copyright Louis Ruprecht 2004
Posted with permission of the author.
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