Soda Bay ( Crete )

Today we visited Crete. The island was settled during the Bronze Age bce 3000-1000.  Some call it point zero of western Civilization. In fact Europe was named for the Cretian woman   featured in Zeus’s Abduction of Europa. Oh, Zeus was hidden from his father here as well because Zeus’s father killed the 3 previous babies of his mom.  Oh and Zeus’s nurse maid was a long horned mountain goat called Cornucop.  And when the horn got broken  the horn continued to feed the baby. Thus the cornucopia and your Thanksgiving  tie in.   

https://share.google/images/z6OTAcGWsgsGT71Yj

 You are welcome. 

So leaving the ship we see an amazing port. Lot of people settled here - Minoans, Phoenicians. Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Venetians ( not necessarily in that order). The harbor where we docked was constructed by the Venetians - the lighthouse is on a Venetian base with an Ottoman addition of a Minarette style tower. 

The port and its buildings were subsequently redone by each subsequent society. 

Before the port there was a wall. Here is part of the wall from the Minoan period which separated the town from the shire. The current city actually had to buy some properties from residents so they could expose more of this 3000 year old wall.

Door from the Venetian period.  We saw how the art morphed depending on who was in power. 

The well dressed Cretian was always armed. 

Materials from old Greek temples were used in building walls- note the cylinders : parts of Greek columns.

And in the center of the old city was the fountain. Fed by a dug aqueduct which ran under the street bringing fresh water from the hills. 

This would have been the home of a well healed shopkeeper with the store on the street and the residence upstairs. Now repurposed for tourists. 

Going back to the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE0 of the Minoans they had devised a system of banking - banking goods rather than currency.  Below are some Bronze Age remains of the “banks’.  To validate ownership they used seals: could be rings, amulets etc to verify identity by pressing the seal into wax document. 

 

Below is believed to be the building (remains of) depicted in the seal above.  The man pictured was the ‘owner’ of the identity.  This one is quite integrate.  They could also be just a design. 

And to prevent the entire area from having no modern commercial purpose structures are often built over the sites. 

The Ventians had huge buildings on the water to do ship repair:

“The need for the Venetian fleet to maintain a constant presence on Crete led Venice to build new shipsheds arsenall), where ships could be repaired and their equipment maintained. In their initial for the shipsheds opened onto the sea which washed intd them so that ships could be hauled up. Most of them had vaulted roofs and were interlinked via arched openings in their side walls. The 17-shed complex was built from 1526 to 1599 and had two main entrances. Under Ottoman rule they were converted into military warehouses. Over time, nine of the seventeen shipsheds in the complex were demolished Today, one group of seven contiguous vaults are preserved, plus one more to the west: the Grand Arsenal, which houses the Centre for Mediterranean Architecture.”

These arches were originally open air so they could drag the ships in. When the Ottomans arrived, they converted them to warehouses.

And then we found the synagogue which is still active. 

A small local community of 30 Jews maintain the shul and volunteer as guides. There is evidence of Jewish presence from 2300 years ago. This building appears to be from the 1600s . A British rabbi comes in for the holidays but otherwise they self manage. They have what I think was said to be the only active Mikva  in Greece.  Recently they celebrated a Bar Mitzvah and last week a wedding. There are a total of about 130 Jews on the island.

This is the Mikva (ritual bath). There has been no rain as of late so water is low and it slated for cleaning when the rain comes.  

The shul also had its own ETROG TREE. 

And then, of course, we always like to check out the local stores. In contrast to Swedens wall of tonic waters, the grocery store here has quite a display of local honeys.

And of course there is always fish:

Oh, and ….

And so we sailed off into west. 

11/26 update at Kalamata

After a rough night at sea we arrived in Kalamata. We were to visit the palace of Nestor, a well preserved ruin. We chose to skip it, sleep late, have a nice breakfast, walk around town and then relax. Good choices.

Now we are leaving for  Corfu the Northern most of the Greek Isles.