Offerings to the Labyrinth on Papoura Hill
words for Crete
Rhea, mother of Demeter, is coming down upon the seven mountain ranges of her Crete, and Ariadne, granddaughter of Rhea, is coming up from her ten thousand perfect caverns inside those mountains with clear water in her arms. They have been quiet a long time, but they are not quiet now. Between them comes Demeter across the wide plateaus where her stones and soil are being stripped for profit, where her bees are dying from pesticide use in their hives, where her grain and oil are sold out from under her, the farmers who grew them cheated by countries with fatter economies and shinier marketing schemes.
They are gathering on Mt. Juktas and Mt. Dikte and Mt. Ida and on Papoura Hill, on all the old holy mountain places where nereids and kouretes were born, where midwives danced, and the dead were buried, and the priests and queens held night-long vigils to take divinations from the procession of the stars, and from those divinations turned the wheel of Crete’s festivals so that they continued year by year as precisely as Earth turned around her axis, so that Earth knew that she and her gifts were respectfully received, and truly loved.
The goddesses pour out cool water where there is conflagration, and they call out for their sisters, the swallows and falcons and martens, the snakes and honeybees and dolphins, and they call out for their long-lost lovers, and they call out for their sons, and they call out for their daughters, and their sisters and lovers and daughters and sons are coming to kneel with them again, and dance with them again, and sing with them again in defiance of the greed that is trying to swallow the world.
For several years now, it has seemed to me that Crete herself is protesting the construction of the new Kasteli airport. On google maps, it’s a horrible, enormous barren gash, right at the base of the sacred Dikte mountains . The toll on trees, soil, birds and water has been immense. The deep bedrock drilling required to create its foundations very possibly caused the strangely shallow 2021 earthquakes at Arkalochori which almost entirely leveled the village. I was nearby, and have never experienced anything like it in my life, with aftershocks persisting for more than 24 hours almost without cease. (I wrote about it in this essay.)
Last summer, more land-leveling on Papoura Hill to build the airport’s radio tower lead to the discovery of one of the most extraordinary Minoan archaeological sites yet uncovered. My watercolor above shows you the shape of this site from a bird’s eye (swallow’s eye) view— it’s the closest to an actual labyrinth ever discovered on Crete, and shows clear signs of having been a communal site of ritual, feasting and offerings from around 2000 BCE.
Just this past week, despite huge protests on the island and in Athens from both ordinary citizens and archaeologists, the construction of the radio-tower was given the green light. Crete revealed one of her longest-held archaeological secrets, only for it to be sacrificed on the altar of mass tourism and a bigger airport that I can promise you, most of the people I know who live and work in Crete, and are from Crete for generations, do not want.
Here, Crete said, let me show you something of unspeakable beauty, age, and holiness, so that you might think again about what you intend to build upon me. Let me show you how my people have always loved and honored me. Let me show you what Ariadne knew.
But the money behind the airport will not listen.
I am praying for a miracle, not just because of the precious Cretan heritage in the earth there at Papoura that should be honored, studied and preserved, but because of what decisions like these mean more broadly. Papoura is an emblem of all of this, to me. There are other devastating plans currently being pushed through by big German companies to fill most of Crete’s western and central mountain ranges with windmills and electricity pylons to produce green energy for much of Europe. There are ten thousand reasons why the people of Crete and the mountains of Crete and the waters of Crete and the birds and animals of Crete do not want to bear the burden of Europe’s need for more electricity, even under the banner of “green energy”— it’s not green if it decapitates whole ecosystems. We are missing the point when we think that this is the way forward. That this is virtuous energy. Maybe we can’t, after all, have everything we want, every new AI scheme and bot, every shiny new upgrade to our machines. Maybe green energy means less energy. Maybe Crete never wanted a new airport, but slower and deeper ways for foreigners to visit, and her people to be supported in their work and lives.
Every time the interests of big business win over the wild beauty of Earth, and our souls, and our souls love for this Earth and Earth’s love for us, it breaks my heart. I feel almost like blood has been drained from my veins. But what I find happens next is that from that break, out come the love-words. I have to believe that such words matter, and are heard by life itself, and every last bird, and that one day all our words and prayers and offerings will weave spells strong enough to make the businessmen go crazy, and lay down their wallet and their contracts, and run outside naked to watch the swallows arrive in spring.
And so right now I can hear Crete saying, please, sing love words to me1. Do not take more from me, but sing to me of how you love me. Bring vessels full of honey and wool, milk and grain, clear water and truth to all of my mountains and miraculous underground springs. If you cannot bring them physically, bring them with your words. If you do not know me, Crete says to those of you reading, bring those love gifts and love words to the place you do know and care for— to forgotten marshes or paved over burial grounds, to mountains and hills and mounds and woodland places that have made you happy. All of them are lonely for our love. Go tell them, go show them, go tell the creek that’s full of chemical run-off that you know their beauty, and remember them, and are listening. It matters. It really, really does. It matters mutually. I’m not certain about very many things, but this is one thing I know for sure.
I have so many words I want to pour out of my vessel of milk and honey upon Papoura Hill, on the big scar in Crete’s earth where the airport is being carved, on all the places slated for the construction of electricity pylons, and into so many other scars left by millennia of conquest and occupation, but for today what follows is only one song to her. Words not full of fighting rage or defiance, but of praise, and softness, and memory. Of motherlines that cannot die. The start of a story that I write, and write, and write again.
A Moonrise Over Old Crete
The earth tilted toward dusk.
Along the shores of Crete, the Aegean turned for a moment to gold.
Women flocked down to the sea like dark birds to pour jugs of oil and wine into the water. Amphitrite of the cockle crown, they murmured, Aphrodite mother of vessels, mother of the foam and deep, bring our men home safe. The sun lowered under the edge of the world, leaving the last light along the coast. Threads of it pooled in sea-caves and in the inlets where fishermen kept their summer boats. The old storytellers said that in lost times, when the queen was called the Ariadne and her king the Bull, the women of Crete could gather up the last light from the sea onto their distaffs and take it home to spin golden thread for their skirt hems and finest vests.