Category Archives: Cult

Cretan Religious Identity

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The Late Minoan I town of Gournia

Crete, as we have certainly seen, has a complex religious history. From the Mycenaean introduction of early Greek deity names, Crete saw a devotional shift with each foreign occupation. Wednesday we visited three sites – Gournia, Panagia Kera, and Lato – where we saw three examples of devotional spaces wherein these fluctuations are manifest.
Gournia was originally excavated by Harriet Boyd Hawes, a Boston native and Smith College graduate, in May 1901; Boyd, having been blocked from participating in pre-existing major excavations on Crete, used her fellowship to fund her own excavations, and thus became the first woman to direct a major field project in Greece as well as the first to speak before the Archaeological Institute of America. Boyd’s excavation of Gournia uncovered both a Goddess with Upraised Arms and a sacred stone, or baetyl.

A short drive away we reached a monastery that some have called the most important Christian monument on Crete, Panagia Kera. Built in the late 12th century, the façade is unassuming, straightforward, making the interior frescos all the more impressive. Each aisle has its own decorative programme: the south aisle is dedicated to Saint Ann and illustrates her and Joachim’s apocryphal story as Mary’s parents; the north is dedicated to Saint Antony and illustrates the second coming; the central is dedicated to the assumption and illustrates, among other scenes, the last supper, Herod’s feast, and men and women in hell.

The frescos date to the mid and late 13th century, which makes the presence of Saint Francis of Assisi rather remarkable, particularly because he hold such a prominent position on the east-facing pillar, visible immediately upon entering. It is easy enough to attribute this oddity to Crete’s contemporary occupation by Venice, but that all these frescos survived intact throughout the long period of Ottoman rule is not so easily explained. Molly Greene says of the occupation:

By the time the Ottoman navy appeared off the island’s northwestern coast in the spring of 1645, Catholic and Orthodox Cretans had lived together for almost five hundred years in a relationship whose complexity had no rival in the Greek East. The Ottoman conquest added another layer to this already complicated past by setting off a process of conversion to Islam that resulted in one of the largest Muslim communities in the Greek world. (A Shared World, 2002, Princeton University Press)

Maybe it’s survival is evidence of lenience, or maybe simply of Ottoman priority on prominent monuments in large cities, such as Chania and Heraklion.

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The “Large Temple” at Lato

At Lato (the Dorian form of the more recognizable “Leto,” mother of Apollo and Artemis), we saw a prytaneion, an agora, and an Hellenistic temple, which for us is a canonical example of a “Greek temple,” unlike most of the benched temples with central hearths we’ve seen before. Lato’s inhabitation, however, dates as early as the LMIIIC on the acropolis, indicating, perhaps, that this site was sacred well before developments such as cut-stone altars and massive cult-statue bases, visible today.

From these three close-together sites we saw and felt the development and inter cultural exchange of devotional practices through Crete’s immense and equally rich history. We will likely never fully understand the identity of a G.U.A. or the function of a lustral basin, the reason Panagia Kera was left untouched, or to which deity Lato’s temple was dedicated, but these open questions add up to a distinct Cretan identity that we were lucky enough to taste.

 

Archaeolgical Museum of Sitia and Petsofas

Today’s visit to the Archaeological Museum of Sitia was an opportunity to view the amazing finds from archaeological sites in Eastern Crete such as Mochlos and Palaikastro. The Palaikastro Kouros is an ivory figurine found burned and in fragments in a shrine room at the Minoan town settlement of Palaikastro. The discoloration of the burning makes it clear the Kouros was burned after being broken, perhaps deliberately. This intricate and exquisite object has fascinated archaeologists and art historians due to to its aesthetic virtuosity. Some archaeologists even speculate it may have been a cult statue of a young Zeus, who, according to myth, was born on the island of Crete.

Not only modern archaeologists speculate about the usage of unusual found objects. The Archaeological Museum of Sitia also displays pygmy hippopotamus skulls and a pygmy elephant tooth found on the island from approximately 80,000-50,000 BCE. Some archaeologists believe that ancient people who saw these unusual skulls may have misinterpreted the hole where the elephants tusk would go as something else entirely: a single eye socket, thus explaining the origins of the mythological Cyclops.

We ourselves were archaeologists today when hiking up to the Peak Sanctuary of Petsofas, where thousands of pottery fragments serve as visual evidence for the many ancient pilgrimages to this sacred site. Investigating and imagining what the sherds originally belonged to, for example a human figurine or a vase, was a fun and exciting exercise!

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Relaxing after our investigation of the Peak Sanctuary at Petsofas

Arkoudospilios Cave

Just beyond the walls of the Gouvernatou Monastery is a paved path that zig-zags down one side of the Avlaki gorge of Akrotiri. The path ends (or so we thought) at the Katholikou Monastery, but its first major landmark is the Arkoudospilios Cave. This large cave seems to have been sacred to Artemis, but now houses a very small chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The cave’s association with Artemis seems to originate from the bear-shaped stalagmite at the centre of the largest area of the cave, and is appropriate on Crete, where Artemis is especially venerated. Local myth claims that the bear was petrified by Mary when the local monks of Gouvernatou were plagued by thirst. Thus, the small chapel was dedicated to her.
Caves like this one are interesting to me for their manipulation of the senses for the purpose of ritual. The distinct brand of sensory deprivation and exhaustion offered by caves like this and that at Eleusis inspires an epiphanic experience and devotional bond to the deity. For the modern uninitiated student, these shadowy rites come closest, even in their mystery, to explaining a religious system that can seem merely accessory in light of contemporary advances in social, political, and technological sciences, not to mention a timeless cultural mosaic of theatre, music, and visual arts.
The most exciting part of the cave complex, though, was a small icon within the modern chapel. Beside the obligatory Mary and Jesus icons was a depiction of two saints wearing the traditional Cretan garb that Alex, the secretary of Etz Hayyim, told us about yesterday. The outfit includes deep indigo harem pants, a needle-point head scarf, a distinct 4-5 meter red belt, and a special knife with a triangular hilt, whose shape has gruesome utility.

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Alex described this distinctive Cretan order only when we asked him how he saw the Cretan identity functioning discretely from a larger Greek identity. It was in Arkoudospilios that we saw the first echoes of the island identity imagined and described by one Cretan reappear kilometers away in the deserted hillside of Akrotiri.