The Minoan Legacy

Often, I found myself giving a glimpse of thoughts of where I would move on this world in order to acquire at least a little bit better life compared to what we currently have. Or when. Has there ever been a time in history when there was a civilization with a more dignified style of living? With society built with a more honest foundation toward themselves and their neighbors. With equality among people, genders, colors, skin, and different cultures. With not at all or just a hint of superstition and religiosity. With no temples higher than schools and people's homes. With cities without strong police keeping order and without military of any kind. Was there a country without fortifications, both real and metaphorical? With no or just a bearable hostility toward others...

There is definitely no such idealistic settlement in this world. Not now. But there was one before. More than three thousand years ago on the island of Crete. The first civilization in Europe and perhaps the first and last one that fits this description. The place where I would time travel without hesitation if I could.

We know them in our history books as the Minoans, but that wasn't their real name. What they called themselves we don't know. We don't understand their letters and can't read their tablets. They built marvelous settlements with almost all the modern infrastructure we are familiar with today. Glorious city-palaces with paved roads between them. With main squares where they preferred practicing sports and arts instead of going into temples to pray. They were people who invented and lived one idealistic, peaceful life and based their wealth on trades among themselves and all the others across the sea.

Unfortunately, after several attempts throughout eons, human nature and natural catastrophes destroyed Minoan civilization, and these people at the end dispersed fully, and their way of life faded away for good. Among neighboring civilizations and their saved documents, as well as with the Bible, their names were probably either Keftiu, Kaptarians, Caphtor, or Kabturi. Or if you like, we can even call them Atlanteans if we connect Plato's story with the Minoan volcanic eruption that reshaped the island of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC. Perhaps we should wait for their Linear A script to be revealed by maybe another Rosetta Stone, but until then, Sir Evan's label for Minoans based on the old Greek mythology is the best we've got. Nevertheless, this blog post is not really history research, and more stories about related old times I tried to list below in the references, but one thing is for sure. The end of Minoan culture, which started with earthquakes and at least one cataclysmic volcanic eruption, faded and dispersed during the final couple of centuries of the second millennium with hostile raids and occupations over time from both directions: mainland Greece in the face of old Mycenaeans and ancient invaders from the direction of the Middle East.

However, their life based solely on manufacturing goods and food, honest trade, sports, arts, and all the non-hostile human activities was once indeed possible and flourishing. Unfortunately, their legacy is, as it seems, lost for good, and after more than three and a half thousand years, we are living in a world filled with fear of self-destruction with little hope for humanity to survive the next three millennia. Anyhow, the road, or to better say, the airplane, took us this summer to the island of Crete, and we landed at the Chania airport, which is also the military base that hosts both air and nearby naval forces. The sight of supersonic fighters constantly flying above the beaches, heavy military aircraft parked next to the civilian runway, and large destroyer ships anchored in Souda Bay was definitely not something old Minoans would evolve into if history played the cards differently. After visiting the Knossos archeological site and the wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated to these ancient people, I am certain of it.

Caused by the city's amazing scope and Minoan fascination for bulls, centuries after the fall of civilization, Greek mythology created one of the most famous stories with characters as strong as Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Theseus, and, of course, the Minotaur captured in the center of the labyrinth. On the other side, the most plausible truth of why Knossos was built the way it was built is simply because Crete was positioned on top of the movement of the African tectonic plate under the Eurasian plate. This is causing lots of earthquakes, small and big, and results from the complex geological process; the entire eastern side of the island is sinking while the western part is rising. The ancient builders purposely made the palace in this way in order to sustain constant ground shake, with buildings and chambers literally supporting each other from all directions.

It probably goes without saying that I am fascinated with Greece and the Greeks. Their amazing history and all the contributions their ancestors gave to the rest of the world are enormous. With this summer trip, I rounded out walking the lands of all three main stages of ancient Greek times. Classical Greece that belongs to the mainland north of Sparta, the Mycenaean epoch that precedes them in the time of Agamemnon, and now the ancient civilization of Minoans that precedes them all. Surely, there are many more sites to see, but somehow I felt today that I fulfilled the genuine urge to visit all the main places and to walk the same paths where stories from history (and mythology) took place.

Our prime vacation time this summer was in Agia Marina, a cute little place several kilometers west of Chania, where we spent a wonderful ten days exploring local beaches and took an excursion to the old Venetian harbor in the old city and its nautical museum with an exact replica of the Bronze Age Minoan ship. The second trip to Heraklion and Knossos completed our travel through the history of the island, and the following day-by-day travel video clip Viktor and I made hopefully will show you more than still images could, especially if you have never visited Crete before.

Surely, summer vacations are never about visiting museums and the history of the area. It is also about the present, and in the most hedonistic fashion, we also visited the Balos Lagoon, one of the greatest beaches in Europe, and, most of all, tried to enjoy the time by meeting local people and visiting local sites and the neighborhood. It is hard to say what we liked the most, and I guess the best thing is to say that Crete is an exceptional place to visit. Something we will definitely try to do again. Many thanks to all the good people we met this July, especially to the crew of Fly Fly Travel and their great guides, Nebojša and Dobrivoje, for all their super-professional work and help.

Image and video refs:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tp8ugeNBg07zE9q52
https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/greece/

Refs:
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/knossos/articleKnossos01.html
http://paleoglot.blogspot.rs/2010/01/minoan-name-for-minoa.html
http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Science.php
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos
https://www.timemaps.com/civilizations/minoan-civilization/
http://ancient-greece.org/history/minoan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/.../HIST101-2.3.2-MinoanCrete-FINAL.pdf
http://www.ancient.eu/Minoan_Civilization/

Aegean Sea

Before I start writing about this amazing sea, first of all, I have to say that this story is equally about Greece, the oldest European country and the first known civilization in Europe. Surrounded by three seas, Greece is probably the most interesting place in the Mediterranean basin ever since it was formed and filled with water many millenniums ago. The Aegean Sea keeps the most important part in the history of mankind, being a natural barrier between civilizations independently developed over the west, east, and south. Once in those past times, today known as B.C., this was the center of the world. It was also the place where many amazing things were born that we know today as science, democracy, philosophy, mathematics, culture, and sport, along with all those "other inventions" like modern armies and wars, dictatorships, religion, divine beings...

Aegean Sea

Today, after two millenniums, looking at this part of the world from my point of view and my own relations to the Aegean Sea, it is all about geography, really. I actually live in southern Serbia, where four different seas are more or less equally distant from my current location, and in the past four decades, in one way or another, I visited all of them. Before, with my parents, and now with my own family, every summer vacation is reserved for spending up to two weeks at the zero-level elevation of the nearby seaside. After I spent several vacations on the Black, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, I decided that those simply are not comparable to the Aegean. Don't get me wrong here, all those three seas have their good sides and charm, but the Aegean is something special for me. Who knows why? Maybe my inner being is somehow attuned to it, or I am simply connected with it on some lower level of understanding, but whatever it is, I calculated that when I sum up all the time I was there, I got about 400 days of vacation time spent in Greece. If I spent all those days in a row, you would probably read this post in Greek instead, but the truth is, due to my perforated time spent there, I only have a basic understanding of probably the most beautiful written language in all of Europe. I can't be sure, but I think my first vacation in Macedonian Greece was at about the age of 2, more than 40 years ago, and until today I have probably visited about the same amount of different towns, fishermen villages, and tourist settlements all around the northern Aegean. I literally watched Macedonian Greece grow from a modest, unexplored country to the prestige destination for anyone expecting a great time for a short vacation during summer break. I might have spent lots of days in Greece, but my son already reached one "Greek" record—his first encounter with Greece was a couple of miles under the Olympus mountain when he was only a couple of cells old, if you know what I mean. He was also learning to walk and swim there, and I am sure you would agree that those are pretty big milestones in anybody's life.

The history of Greece is one of the most colorful tales of them all. Not many nations in the world survived and built their history for that long period of time, starting millenniums before Christ. The ancient Greeks came to Europe almost three millenniums B.C., but maybe the common origin point when it all started is back in the 8th century B.C., when they started to build a civilization known today as a cradle of Western civilization or the world we live in today. This post is too small to carry all the history of the region, so I will let you browse them all in the below links, and instead I will focus on just one period of time known as Classical Greece that flourished for a couple of hundred years, starting somewhere in the 5th century B.C.

Alexander the Great

It was the time when artistic and scientific thought rapidly evolved and shaped humanity as we know it today. If you ask me, this was the period of time relatively free of violence and conservative influences like religion or politics. It started after the fall of the last Athenian tyrant, or, if you will, after a series of dictatorships ruled the ancient Greek cities back in the 6th and 7th centuries before Christ. Aristotle defined the tyrant as "one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others". Looks familiar? Hmm, it seems to me that ancient Greeks gave dictatorships in heritage as well. It also looks like Classical Greece is just a period of time where Greeks tried to recover from hundreds of wasted years, and it was the time that they really wanted to change their society for the better. In a way they did just that, and in a whole period of the next 200 years, they created a foundation of modern society and planted scientific thought deep into future generations. Sadly, this period ended with the rise of military societies shaped in the form of the Macedonian empire and Alexander the Great (and his father, Phillip II, before him), who suddenly decided that their land was too small in size and the best way to defend it was to conquer the neighbors, and by neighbors, sometimes this meant thousands of miles away from Greece, as far as India. Sounds familiar again? It definitely resembles some of today's governments that defend their countries far away from their borders. Military societies are a direct product of development in science and engineering, and it was not much of a surprise that the rise of the Macedonian and later Roman empires were byproducts of inventions of new state-of-the-art armory and transportation in both land and sea. The better an army is armored and organized, the more dangerous it becomes for the region. Same as today, only with different actors and more lethal weapons.

Carl Sagan, in his famous COSMOS series, in episode VII, "The Backbone of Night", described the birth of science in these Classical Greece times in the northern Aegean by telling a story of Democritus and his understanding of atoms and matter. Democritus posted his atomic theory somewhere in the 5th century B.C., and like many other famous scientists of the time, he is a direct descendant of the Ionian School founded by Thales, establishing critical thinking as a foundation in modern scientific thought.


History is always fun, and not because it teaches us about ourselves and how to fix errors from the past, but sadly, it also shows us the future. Nothing changes overnight, especially human behavior, and although we are living in a modern, technologically superior time, the inner core of our social being remains the same. We still have wars, dictatorships, bullies, cold wars, and borders of many kinds. Well, it is time to stop with all that, at least in this post, so let's continue the main story and see how the Aegean Sea survived the centuries.

Geographically and also touristically speaking, the northern and southern parts of the sea look very different, and it is caused by one large cataclysmic event. It was the late Bronze Age, a couple of millennia before Christ, when one of the most powerful volcanoes literally exploded under the island of Thera, nowadays Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. It is now well known as a Minoan eruption, and by recent study, seismologists tend to classify this explosion as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa Island. This eruption probably caused the volcanic winter in the 17th century B.C. recorded in China by the "Bamboo Chronicles" with "yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals". It also caused the devastation of Minoan civilization, the complete reshaping of Aegean geography, and the birth of many myths, including the one of sinking the entire island of Atlantis "in a single day and night of misfortune", recorded by Plato.

Reconstruction of the Santorini Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

Whatever happened, the Aegean is filled with many islands south of Athens compared to its northern counterpart. Our vacations are always targeting the northern part simply because it is located less than 1000 km from southern Serbia, and it is cheaper and easier to get there by car in less than 10 hours of driving. If it is a family vacation, this is also the best route. However, spending vacation on some Greek island is a completely different experience. There are only two major (in size) islands on the north, Thassos and Corcyra. I visited both of them several times, and their crystal-clear beaches, small fisherman villages, and unique people are simply totally different from the coastline where the tourism over the years almost destroyed small towns and turned them into hotels, clubs, discos, and loud streets. Don't get me wrong here, they also have their unique charm, but the vacation for me is more book-reading silence, wave sounds, and seagulls and less loud music and football match atmosphere. However, there are lots of islands in the southern Aegean left for me to explore. Plenty of time. I also need one thing to confirm there: once we indeed visited the southern Aegean, but from the eastern, Turkish side of the sea, and we felt a couple of small tremors that originated from the middle of the sea, according to our Turkish guide. I am wondering if this is really the truth, and if it is, how bothersome this is on the Greek islands lying exactly there in the "Santorini" area. After all, there are no dead volcanoes, just dormant ones, and we are still living on a very live planet, especially here where African and Eurasian tectonic plates are kissing each other at regular intervals.

Today, Greece is facing a big economic crisis, affecting millions of people, especially in large cities. Greece is probably on top of several European countries affected by the world's recession(s) initiated after the 9/11 event a decade ago. Greek misfortune mainly happened because of the organization of the Olympic Games back in 2004. The extremely large cost of this giant event forced Greece to take many credits and loans in order to fix infrastructure and build new arenas. The Olympics went well, but now, almost a decade after, Greece is facing bankruptcy and an empty state treasury. To be completely honest, I am not very good when it comes to understanding world economics. I am also not good at reading between the lines, so I am not sure what really is at stake here, but speculatively speaking, the major loans happened after the world's recession could be easily predicted, and I can only state a big amount of skepticism that bankers and international fund keepers who actually financed Greece at the time couldn't predict the world economy in the next decade. I mean, if there was even a shadow of doubt that something would happen, why provide credits in the first place? I am really not one of those who believe in conspiracy theories, but something is not really right here. Whether or not the world crisis is manufactured or this is just one natural financial wave of recessions, I am sure Greece will survive, just like in the previous three or so millenniums. Elegant bankers who loaned the money in the first place will survive too, and I am sure there will be no need to exclude caviar and champagne from their menus. After all, this is just another man-made crisis, not a natural disaster. It will pass.

Aegean Sea - Marble beach, Thassos

You know what else will survive? Aegean Sea. It doesn't care for all human stupidities. It ironically smiled two and a change millenniums ago when Alexander the Great fought Persians in wooden galleys, and I am sure it is smiling today when EU officials debate on excluding Greece from the monetary eurozone.

It will stay crystal clear, perfectly reflecting the mother star from sunrise till sunset.

Image ref:
* https://www.7reasons.net/?dt_portfolio=der-supervulkan-von-akrotiri&lang=en

Refs:
http://www.egeonet.gr/index_en.html
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/greekorg/greekorg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/democritus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Annals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/santorini/eruption.html
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/118706-Ye-gods-Ancient
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alexander_the_great.shtml

Childhood

I am watching my son grow up every day, and from time to time I can't stop thinking about how childhood occupies a special place within all memories acquired in everybody's life. I tend to think that this is not because we memorized childhood better than any other period of life; it's more that, compared to adolescence and later times, those moments are pure and clean, with not much tension, conflict, or seriousness of adult life. This is all about playing, learning new things, and enjoying pleasurable moments and events, and we are simply programmed to maintain nice memories better, while others not so pleasurable are stored deep in remote regions of our brains with a tendency to be quickly forgotten.

Hairdresser Shop

Today one small visit to the hairdresser triggered the extraction of some really nice memories from my childhood. This morning I took a walk downtown for some errands and decided to take some shortcuts through a couple of blocks where we lived most of my childhood. It was an old house my grandfather and his father built a decade or so after the Second World War, where we lived in a ground-floor apartment while my grandparents were situated a floor up. It was a house with a very nice front yard full of trees and flowers, and in the back were small ancillary buildings, garages, a workshop, and a miniaturized chicken roost where my grandmother produced nice, fresh, domesticated eggs. Chickens too. She was a master of preparing chicken soup from prime ingredients, meaning killing the bird, taking off all the feathers, taking out all the inner organs, and cooking the dish at the end. I remember once I had to catch a runaway chicken that slipped out of my grandmother's hands and escaped to the front yard—all that without its head. Ok, that wasn't one of those nice memories I wanted to share in the first place, but still a proud boy's experience not everybody can share. That said, let's get back to the main story. Our house was, not so long ago, torn down, and a new residential building was built on its foundation. This morning, following my route to downtown, I walked into the street where our house was and saw a new hairdresser shop in front of a new building along with a new bakery shop next to it. My hair doesn't require much maintenance, but yesterday was also the summer solstice, also known as the day when I cut my hair to summer length, so after little hesitation, I decided to stop by.

The main room was located (coordinately speaking) in the same spot where our living room was 40 years ago when I was the age of my son now. All the memories all of a sudden started to emerge, even those vivid images of the room back in time. I was the only customer, and I sat on the chair in the same spot where our old black and white TV set was placed, and perhaps one of the immediate emotions was created by the memory of the day when my parents bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art color TV set. I remember it barely fitting the old TV spot in the large living room cabinet. This was a change comparable with nowadays switch from old small CRT television sets to large flat LCDs, only with more enthusiasm simply because today we take modern innovative gadgets for granted more than was the case in the past.

Then and Now

In the middle of the haircut, the hairdresser was interrupted for a couple of minutes, and instinctively I glimpsed the rest of the room in all directions, and maybe even for a moment I was able to see the past. All the mirrors, the hairdresser gear and tools, chairs, waiting room, and photos on the wall started and faded out in front of my eyes and morphed into our small table, two armchairs, and a couch my father made along with many other pieces of furniture in other rooms. I also saw the kitchen, the big dining table, the old big telephone in the corner of the hallway, and the iron bunk bed for my sister and me, positioned exactly 5 meters away from my current position and located in the bedroom or within the next-door bakery shop, as in today. I was proud of my upper bed, where I spent lots of time as a boy, especially during winter times. This was also the playground for us kids, where we were doing homework and also performing Johnny Weissmuller's jumps from the upper bed down to my parents double. Summers were different; almost every suitable moment we spent outside in the front yard garden, where we used to have dinners and meals at the big round stone table under the cherry tree higher than the house itself. I was able to cross from one tree to another like a small monkey, and later, when I got a little older, this was my clubhouse where I used to read comics and magazines. I remember once I twisted my ankle in school and got myself a leg immobilizer for three weeks, which I spent entirely under the cherry tree in the special temporary bed my mother made for me. I was deeply touched when my complete class from school came to visit me the first day of my school absence.

We moved to a new house when I was about 11 years old, but that first decade of my life will always stay the most memorable of them all so far. The plot where the front yard was located is still intact next to the new building, but all the trees are long gone along with all the magic I experienced in there. One of the events I also remembered today was a night we spent in the open in that very front yard after a big earthquake happened in Romania back in the year 1977. There are lots more memories of that period in time, but I will stop here. After all, this is not a book of memories or anything; just a small flashback popped out of my head today. I also didn't include many covering photographs in order not to spoil the words, just these three portraying the place now and then. The first image above is the hairdresser shop taken by my smartphone, and I am sorry you can't see my state-of-the-art and ultra-fashionable haircut because of the flashlight, but I kind of did that on purpose. However, I will be returning here and not just for memories from my past but also because of great service, and I mean it fully when I let somebody carry scissors and sharp tools so close to my head. Seriously, I once had a bad experience with a sharp razor having a close encounter with my right ear, and from that time I am always having chills and goosebumps when I need a haircut. The second photo I made out of two images of the same spot. Left is me around the year of 1972 (perhaps a year or two later, but I can't be sure), and in the background you can see part of the house with two windows that are now hairdresser and bakery shops (shown on the right).

Batteries not included

So there you go, I might have been a little bit emotional in this post, but having a public journal like this is maybe why I started this blog in the first place so I could be able to remember and write about interesting events in my life I stumble upon from time to time.