Niokhóri

When I was 12 years old, I was torn between being an actor or an archeologist. My parents gave me a large coffee table book about Crete and Mycenae and I pored over it for hours, dreaming of Knossos. Today that dream came true, and didn’t disappoint. To reach for a metaphor to grasp the phenomenon of the Minoans: they were the Anasazi of Europe (2600 years earlier). They built a sophisticated culture distinguished by terraced living communities, astronomical and geographical literacy, extended trade networks to other continents; they surveyed and built long straight roads (in the case of the Minoans, paved ones), created and played organized sports, and designed and built multi-story structures. They dwindled and disappeared for mysterious reasons, and those
structures baffled and intrigued the cultures that discovered them. The native Americans who
came upon Chaco Canyon named the disappeared “the ancient ones” and adopted their building style, while never equalling its masonic mastery, The Mycenaeans and other seafaring Greeks filled the empty palaces and open questions with prodigious Greek imagination, creating stories, stories so compelling they would come to be almost believed. They invented a king, and named the lost civilization after him: Minos, cuckolded “stepfathers” of the Minotaur, and later and judge in Hades of the worthiness of souls. What was lost was a civilization that treated women at least equal to men, if not exalting them: women appear to have been major players in sports like bull dancing, and priests in a religion that was a self-aware animism, revering the natural world and insisting that human authority live in balance with it. As our bus returned to Heraklion, we couldn’t help but mourn their loss and speculate what the world might be like now if their enlightenment and “eudaimonia” had survivedRead more