![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Down to the well-built house
Dec. 11th, 2018 07:04 pmWe've been flitting, no two nights in the same beds. But I seem to have come into energy again, through the part of the cold where I felt trembly-tired - and through the part of the trip (or a part of it) where I couldn't find enthusiasm for another bus ride to another set of walls, as well.
Someone I met a few years ago went on this field trip and broke both her wrists falling into a tomb. I went into that tomb today, safely over the uneven bit of slippery stone its upper steps have become, and into others, stark slots in the earth their entranceways, spiders spinning over the mouths of their dark single-room chambers. On the Hill of the Wild Oaks, at Armenoi, and from the deep bottoms of the slots you could look up at the twisted branches of those oaks. Horror-movie conventions are never going to get a better straight line from me than that. There are generations of burials in some of the tombs, which were made to be buried and re-opened, the old bones shoved aside to give new bodies space. We felt merry there, as naive students are meant to at the start of horror movies. Complete structures you can go inside, after a week of nothing but walls!
Yesterday we went to the museum in Heraklion, and to Knossos. The museum lays out an incredible sweep of time. I'm used to thinking of Archaic Greece as the borderland of my antiquity, but now I've seen ceramic diningware which was already older to Archaic Greece than Archaic Greece is to me. Knossos, meanwhile... doesn't have that kind of effect, because Sir Arthur Evans scorned such pedantic principles of archaeology as 'Before you tear down a wall you aren't interested in, make a note of where it was', and 'Try to make your reconstructions distinguishable from the originals, especially when you are not using evidence to make them.'
Two days ago, Palaikastro, a Minoan city only a fraction of which has been excavated, with a centrally-designed street plan, drains which received not just repairs but regular maintenance, and one drain which was notably mismade, too steep to not flood, with a great big ornamented outlet from it to cope with the problem. Early excavators looked at the ornament and said, "Hmm. Probably ritual functions," until someone thought of actually pouring a lot of water into the drain to see what would happen.
Today, from Armenoi, we drove into modern history: to Souda Bay, where we spent half an hour walking between the tombstones of Allied soldiers dead in the Battle of Crete, many of them New Zealanders. I felt as distant from that history as I'm used to feeling at war memorials, although I'm not, very. This here is an island on which the Second World War was fought; something that hadn't come into my head as we drove through mainland Greece. What I feel in a place like that, set aside in beauty, is the space where memory ought to be. A silence on the group of us, nobody taking photos anymore, as we did in those millennia-older tombs. My thoughts wandered as I walked, reading names. Some of us were crying, seeing a sixteen-year-old's stone, reading, "Came to visit you, uncle" in the visitor's book. But I have that distance. Only as we drove away did I really start to think: about retreating in exhaustion and bad weather over mountains, and about what it might be like to give one's life.
Someone I met a few years ago went on this field trip and broke both her wrists falling into a tomb. I went into that tomb today, safely over the uneven bit of slippery stone its upper steps have become, and into others, stark slots in the earth their entranceways, spiders spinning over the mouths of their dark single-room chambers. On the Hill of the Wild Oaks, at Armenoi, and from the deep bottoms of the slots you could look up at the twisted branches of those oaks. Horror-movie conventions are never going to get a better straight line from me than that. There are generations of burials in some of the tombs, which were made to be buried and re-opened, the old bones shoved aside to give new bodies space. We felt merry there, as naive students are meant to at the start of horror movies. Complete structures you can go inside, after a week of nothing but walls!
Yesterday we went to the museum in Heraklion, and to Knossos. The museum lays out an incredible sweep of time. I'm used to thinking of Archaic Greece as the borderland of my antiquity, but now I've seen ceramic diningware which was already older to Archaic Greece than Archaic Greece is to me. Knossos, meanwhile... doesn't have that kind of effect, because Sir Arthur Evans scorned such pedantic principles of archaeology as 'Before you tear down a wall you aren't interested in, make a note of where it was', and 'Try to make your reconstructions distinguishable from the originals, especially when you are not using evidence to make them.'
Two days ago, Palaikastro, a Minoan city only a fraction of which has been excavated, with a centrally-designed street plan, drains which received not just repairs but regular maintenance, and one drain which was notably mismade, too steep to not flood, with a great big ornamented outlet from it to cope with the problem. Early excavators looked at the ornament and said, "Hmm. Probably ritual functions," until someone thought of actually pouring a lot of water into the drain to see what would happen.
Today, from Armenoi, we drove into modern history: to Souda Bay, where we spent half an hour walking between the tombstones of Allied soldiers dead in the Battle of Crete, many of them New Zealanders. I felt as distant from that history as I'm used to feeling at war memorials, although I'm not, very. This here is an island on which the Second World War was fought; something that hadn't come into my head as we drove through mainland Greece. What I feel in a place like that, set aside in beauty, is the space where memory ought to be. A silence on the group of us, nobody taking photos anymore, as we did in those millennia-older tombs. My thoughts wandered as I walked, reading names. Some of us were crying, seeing a sixteen-year-old's stone, reading, "Came to visit you, uncle" in the visitor's book. But I have that distance. Only as we drove away did I really start to think: about retreating in exhaustion and bad weather over mountains, and about what it might be like to give one's life.
