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The only dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting the rent­ed car was hav­ing to hitch­hike to the near­est town (22 km) to make the arrange­ments, with­out yet being cer­tain that we would get it. But we made the trip in two rides. There was no has­sle. We got a lit­tle Nis­san man­u­al shift.

So we made for the remain­ing planned sites: Aghia Tri­a­da and Phaestos.

View from Phaestos. The val­ley would have been just as pro­duc­tive in Minoan times.

The West Plaza at Phaestos — clear­ly a place of assem­bly. The func­tion of raised path­ways is unknown.

Phaestos con­formed to the pat­tern set by Knos­sos, thought it had some dis­tinc­tive fea­tures, and the site has some lat­er intru­sions from the Hel­lenis­tic era. I was sur­prised by noth­ing. The site has much less visu­al dra­ma for the vis­i­tor, because of the absense of fan­ci­ful recon­struc­tions like those Evans made at Knos­sos. But to the archae­o­log­i­cal eye, it is very rich. The “the­atri­cal” area of the west­ern plaza is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to me. It looms much larg­er than it’s equiv­a­lent at Knos­sos, and the mason­ry is par­tic­u­lar­ly fine. It def­i­nite­ly sug­gests an assem­bly place much more than a mere pas­sage from one place to another.

But Aghia Tri­a­da was anoth­er ket­tle of dol­phins. Every­thing about the place is bizarre. Con­ven­tion has it that it was a “vil­la” rather than a “palace.” I don’t know what the hell it was, but it wasn’t a vil­la. Some of the struc­tures are so enig­mat­ic that I’ll be think­ing about them for a long time. I took lots of pho­tographs of all the sites, and I’ll prob­a­bly pore over them for a year before I real­ly under­stand the things I’ve seen in the last few days. [see the Phaestos and Aghia Tri­a­da gal­leries, following]

For exam­ple, there’s a build­ing with an immense stone bench fill­ing most of it, but fac­ing what are clear­ly two dou­ble doors. The hinge holes are clear­ly vis­i­ble, and they could be noth­ing oth­er than a set of “French doors,” but the room the open into is bare­ly wider than the bench it con­tains. The drainage tun­nels are very com­pli­cat­ed, and much fanci­er in con­struc­tion than I had imagined.

Right with­in the site of Aghia Tri­a­da, only a few meters from the main build­ings, there is the well-pre­served Byzan­tine church of Agios Geor­gios Galatas which was recon­struct­ed in 1302 and con­tains fres­coes of the four­teenth cen­tu­ry. The church is obvi­ous­ly still in use, since we saw recent votive offer­ings inside.

Church of Agios Geor­gios Galatas

But these things will bore most of my read­ers. This morning’s jaunts brought to a close the archae­o­log­i­cal part of my vis­it, except for a tho­los tomb that we came across acci­den­tal­ly while lost in the back roads. We devot­ed the rest of the day to dri­ving around the moun­tains. First we poked into the south cen­tral coastal range. It’s very rough coun­try, and we were forced to turn back when the roads turned into four-wheel-dri­ve grade. We then turned our atten­tion to the cen­tral range, com­ing as close as we could in a car to the high­est moun­tain in Crete, known to out­siders as Mt. Ida (but it isn’t the name used by Cre­tans). We drift­ed west­ward into a maze of deep val­leys, vol­canic plugs, and fold moun­tains. It would be hard to imag­ine roads more devi­ous, a land­scape more labyrinthine, views more spec­tac­u­lar, or vil­lages more pre­car­i­ous­ly perched upon crags and mountainsides.

Peo­ple are pleas­ant. Most Cre­tans can man­age a bit of Eng­lish, espe­cial­ly if you trou­ble to open with for­mal­i­ties in Greek. There is noth­ing vis­i­ble on the island of the creepy police state we wit­nessed in Athens. In fact, I don’t recall yet see­ing a sin­gle cop or police car.