Seattle, Washington
Written Sunday, April 27, 2008

Christos Ahnesti! If you were a Greek Orthodox Christian, you would reply:
Alithos Ahnesti!! An exchange of greetings on Easter Sunday - Pascha - which this is, due to ecclesiastical calendar complexities.

For the first time in fifteen years I have not been in Crete for Easter. Having described the experience in detail on this website and in my recent book of essays, “What On Earth Have I Done,” I’ll not indulge in nostalgia here. Still, because close friends are staying in my house in Crete, talking with them this morning puts me in a Cretan state of mind.

And I am feeling vaguely holy on this Sunday morning. For a weird reason.
The Dalai Lama was in Seattle recently. A local company did all the staging for the events. They know what they are doing, since they handle the big Microsoft events, The Rolling Stones, and the like. Last night I was at a party where I met the man who was in charge of the Dalai Lama’s chair.

The same one had to be used and moved from event to event. He was surprised to learn that he could not just grab the chair and carry it out to the next venue. Many people wanted to come to touch it or put their hats or coats or scarves on it. The chair was considered holy. So I touched the hands of the man who was in charge of the chair in which the Dalai Lama sat.

Did this add anything to my life? Who can say? But just in case . . . .

But I digress. I am also in the last stages of the technical tinkering on the English version of the manuscript of my novel, “Third Wish,” and today’s work was on the section set in Crete. The good news, by the way, continues. The novel may be available in print as early as September. The illustrations, music, cover design, and text are very close to being ready for the printer. More details in a few weeks - as the project unfolds.

Meanwhile, since Crete is where my heart and mind are today, I will share with you a new taste of Easter in Crete from the novel. While this is from a work of fiction, it contains substantial experiential truth. The two main characters involved are Alexandros Xenopouloudakis - called Alex - an older Greek man - and Max-Pol Millay, a young American physician.

RODOPOS

Alex has a genius for making friends who, in turn, want to introduce him to their friends. His personality is an oasis of enthusiasm in the middle of the desert of daily dullness.

On one of his snooping, wandering walks through the back streets of Hania, he stopped into the smallest and oldest church of the city to admire its icons. He sought out the parish priest to get some explanations of the paintings. And met Father John, who, coincidentally, was a Welsh Greek who had studied at Cambridge.

“Cambridge! Well, then.” (Alex was himself a student there long ago.)

A five-minute visit became a two-hour lunch. Father John brought along to the meal his closest colleague, Father Anthony, who is the parish priest in the village of Rodopos, and one thing led to another. It is the story of Alex’s life - it could be chiseled on his tombstone:

“For him, one thing always led to another.”

And now Alex and Max-Pol and their friend, Kostas, are all invited to attend Sunday service in the village church, and to get a tour of the Rodopos peninsula. Afterward, there will be lunch with Father Anthony and his family, joined by Father John and his family and any other family that happens by.  Invitations to such impromptu feasts are typical of the seasonal run-up to Easter in Crete. 

*

The Rodopos peninsula is one of the two long horns jutting north into the Aegean Sea from Crete’s western end. Twenty kilometers long, with peaks up to eight hundred meters high, it is not an incidental piece of topography. It forms one side of the Bay of Kissamos, and is so commanding in height it almost cuts off the far west from the rest of Crete.

Once, millions of years ago, it was a separate island in its own right. There are rocks and fossils here not found on the lowlands on either side. Its high places are frequently above the cloud and fog banks that form down closer to the sea, giving the Rodopos highlands an aura of mystery.

On the other hand, olive groves, orchards, and vegetable farms fill the peninsula’s lower valleys all the way up to the centrally situated village. As the land rises beyond the village, the vineyards take over in the rocky, less arable soil of the shallow gorges.

Farther on, the peninsula is so high and barren and rocky that its thin pasturage is given over entirely to sheep and goats. Herds of the long-haired traditional breeds roam the treeless landscape. Snow is not unknown here in winter. And wild orchids bloom in the areas around its springs in summer. Altogether a startling, enchanting landscape.

The village of Rodopos is the focus of life for about a thousand people who still carry on a more or less traditional way of life. It seems like a long way from anywhere, and in its churchyard is a surprising reference to the length of Rodopos’s place in history.

Here stands a round marble monument that looks like nothing so much as the stump of a weathered gray telephone pole. It bears a faded Latin inscription. A modern marble tablet explains that this memorial marks the completion of a road built in the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan between this village and the temple of Diktyna - goddess of nets - at the far end of the peninsula. 112 A.D. The road was paid for from donations to the temple. The same roadway is still in use. 

When asked about the marker, the villagers reply offhandedly, “Oh, that.” The church gardener usually hangs his coat and hat on this, one of the smallest of Trajan’s many columns, while he works.

In modern history, Rodopos is famous for its heavy red wine, its wildflower honey, its part in the resistance to the German occupation, and for the several members of one of its families active in Cretan politics. A bronze bust of the patriarch, Polychronis Polychronitis, looks sternly across the village square opposite the kafenion - as craggy in his face as the hillsides around him. All of the life that survives and thrives here is fiercely resilient.  It must be.

Alex is excited to be here. In the spirit of his cheese experience of yesterday, he points around him and shouts, “Now this, this is Crete!”

*

The church service is in progress when the visitors arrive. Not until they find their standing places and begin to look around do they notice that three of the five men leading the liturgical chanting of the service are in army uniform. Not just army. The elite of the army. Greek Special Forces from the paratroops battalion stationed at Maleme.

The young men obviously know the service. They sing with passionate authority. With the addition of the deeper voices of two older men and the mellow baritone of the priest, the service is surprisingly beautiful - not what you’d expect in a remote village church. St. John Chrysostom would be pleased to know his liturgy survives in such a place and is well served and well sung after more than sixteen hundred years.

The church itself is plain - a working church for a living community, not a tourist attraction. In contrast with the high elegance of the service, there is a comfortable informality in the usual coming and going of the villagers during the ceremony. It is not required that one stay all the way through - only that one should pay one’s respects for some time during the service.

After receiving the blessed bread from the hands of its priest, Father Anthony, the small congregation greets visitors warmly, as if they were an early-arriving contingent of the Diaspora come home for Easter. Afterward, the men of the village move more or less en masse to the kafenion across the street for tsikoudia and coffee and talk. The women return home to prepare lunch.

Max-Pol wants to know about the participation of the soldiers.

They speak English and are surprised that he asks. All three are twenty, and have had two years at technical universities. Yes, they are Special Forces paratroopers - commando trained - the first to go if there is war with the Turks. But they are citizen-soldiers, with an emphasis on the citizen. Every Greek man must serve two years. Service is a responsibility and an obligation of citizenship, rarely a profession.

These young men are from east Crete. They’ve grown up assisting in the service in their village churches, and they like being off-base and back in a village like home. So - they volunteer. Their commanding officer is also a singer and feels the same way about his roots. He would have come along with them today except his wife is expecting a baby this weekend. Mixing church and state and armed forces and family - it is and always has been the Cretan way. About such things they have no doubts whatsoever. To keep these traditions they will sacrifice their lives - or take yours.

*

Since lunch would not be served until two o’clock, excursions were organized. Kostas and the soldiers went off in a pickup truck out to the far end of the peninsula to see where the Germans had built emplacements for their coastal artillery during the war.

The two priests and four of their children went to pick wildflowers in the hills above the village. The women were glad to have the kitchen to themselves. 

Alex wanted to wander around the village and look at donkeys and donkey saddles. He has a fondness for donkeys, having tended and worked them when he was a child. The personalities of donkeys appeal to him. They are the most bloody-minded of creatures. It has been a long time since a donkey was seen in the streets of Hania. And while some are still in active use here in Rodopos, their days are as numbered as those of the older generation of villagers who keep them.

Max-Pol went along with Alex.

“Well, then,” began Alex. “The donkey - the gaidaros, or gaidoura, if female - is called the Cretan Volkswagen. It will carry almost anything almost anywhere - twice its own weight is common. It is very tough, very easy to keep, usually gentle, and lives a long time. And look, here is the very creature.”

Tied to a tree on the far side of a ditch, a small, slatternly lady donkey solemnly ate grass, paying no attention to her audience. Alex continued, “Donkeys don’t ‘do’ anything to entertain you and they do not demand attention or affection. They are a beast of burden. They are a live-and-let-live animal. You don’t bother them - they don’t bother you. They work very hard with very little complaint for a very long time. An admirable creature.”

Alex and Max-Pol crossed the ditch, inspected the unpretentious gray-brown animal, stroked its back, and petted its head. The donkey ignored them.
Alex observed, “Odd that such a small member of the horse family should have such a large head in proportion to the rest of its body. You wouldn’t call them handsome, nor is their singing beautiful.” Unfazed by insult and uninterested in company, the donkey went on single-mindedly eating grass. Live and let live.

Getting no response from the donkey, Alex and Max-Pol ambled along on a dirt track, out toward the edge of Rodopos where the vineyards began.  As one more sure sign of spring, the vines had been trimmed and the trimmings stacked for burning.

Sheep were near the vineyards, browsing on the lush flowery undergrowth around the trunks of the vines. The soft tones of the bells around their necks punctuated the silent feeding of the sheep. Bong, bung, bingle bingle, bang, bong-bong, bunk, bunk. The bells were a collective musical instrument, and some shepherds still bought them in tuned sets for the pleasure of the distant harmony.

The two men sat down on a stone wall.
Looking, breathing, listening - consuming the ageless tranquility of the scene before them.

The Cretans say that when Jesus does come back - he will come first to Crete - to such a place as this in spring.