The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (13 page)

They are windmills, immensely old and distinctly malevolent, some merely turrets now, some with the remnants of arms hanging derelict from their snouts; and when you cross the pass, and run down the gentler hill on the other side, towards the symmetrical green plateau that lies like an arena below, you discover that they are, so to speak, only the sentinels of their kind. Massed in the plain behind, wherever your eye turns, in every
field, above every hut, there stand the 10,000 iron windmills of Lassithi, silent and motionless on a winter morning, clanking, whirring, flapping and groaning when the summer breezes freshen off the hills.

Each is an ironic memorial to Venice. The people of the Lassithi plateau were a particularly prickly and independent community even by Cretan standards. Their fertile home, rich in corn, fruit and vegetables, was shut off from everywhere else by the high mountains all around it, but had been inhabited continuously since pagan times, and was littered with ancient sites and associations. It was a hive of Cretan feeling, and became a natural centre of resistance to the Venetians. From its great pit in the hills raiding parties of
palikares
repeatedly harassed the shores below, and they played an important part in the great rising of 1362.

In retribution the duke in Iraklion, Paolo Loredan, ordered that the entire Lassithi plateau should be laid waste. Every single inhabitant was made to leave. The fruit trees were uprooted, the fields devastated, the villages burned. Cultivation of the plateau, even grazing of cattle on the surrounding mountain slopes, was punishable by the loss of a foot. By these means, Loredan reported to Venice, Crete ‘is for ever rendered incapable of further revolt’. Lassithi became a dead place, and for a century remained utterly deserted. Its fields were hidden in weeds and undergrowth, and dense forests sprang up in its cultivated foothills. The plateau was scorched brown in summer, while in winter the rains turned it into a lake, and only the
agrimi
, the great wild ibex of Crete, roamed its acres undisturbed. Among generations of Cretans the very name of Lassithi inspired grim fancies and cruel traditions.

Crete, though, was a granary for Venice, and in 1463, when food was short, the Venetians were obliged to bring Lassithi to life again. Technicians from Venice criss-crossed it all with a huge grid of drainage ditches, each square marked with a stone pillar in the classic style of the irrigation engineers. The scrub was cleared, the first of the windmills were erected, and gradually Lassithi’s fertility was restored. It was then leased out in plots, a third of its harvest to go to the state. Most of the new tenants were descendants of the original inhabitants, but for generations they would
not live in the haunted plateau, but merely camped there on their fields in the summer months, like nomads.

So Lassithi remains an ambiguous reminder of the Venetian empire. Any large-scale map shows the rectilinear grid of the imperial surveyors, and on the ground their ditches and marker stones, still standing here and there, are oddly suggestive of the Brenta marshes, or the further reaches of the Venetian lagoon itself. To this day the Lassithi villages bear the names of their tenants under Venice – Tzermiadho the pitch of the Tzermia family, Farsaro the lease of the Farsaris. And even now, when the windmills are silent in their fields, in the heat of the afternoon perhaps, or early on a winter morning, Lassithi still looks like a dead place, its scattered hamlets abandoned as they were during the years of its anathema, and only the goats and ghosts at large.

Yet the Venetian impact on Crete was not all harsh. In some respects it was fructifying. By a happy paradox, if the Venetians oppressed the body temporal, they sheltered the body spiritual and artistic, and allowed the imagination of the Byzantines to flower once more under their anomalous aegis.

The Venetians began their imperial career in a mood of ritual intolerance. Morosini, the first trumped-up Patriarch of Constantinople, pointedly swaggered around the city shaven, a deliberate affront to Orthodox convictions, while wearing, so one of the Greek chroniclers reported, ‘a robe so tight that it seemed to have been sewn to his skin’. The first Latin priests of the Aegean islands did their best to discredit the Orthodox rite, and scandalized the islanders with their worldly behaviour. To many Greeks, the religion of the Venetian was, if anything, more repugnant than the religion of the Turks – the Turks generally left the churches alone, and did not try to proselytize.

When the Venetians first came to Crete they seized all the churches, tried to ban the Greek language in church rituals, threw out the Greek bishops and made the Orthodox clergy subject to their own Latin prelates. The three towns were allowed only one Orthodox church apiece. But the fervour did not last. In some parts of the empire the antipathies were sustained to the end, but in Crete, if only theologically, the Venetians mellowed.

For one thing their attempts to squeeze out Orthodoxy abysmally failed, the people resolutely declining to shift their loyalties. For another the Venetian settlers became increasingly Hellenized themselves. Many of them married into Orthodox families, and many joined the Greek church. At the same time some of the Cretan nobles, though they remained Orthodox in faith, became increasingly Latinized in style, bringing the two classes of landed gentry ever closer together. Gradually attitudes were tempered. By 1403 we find the Captain of Iraklion, the military commander of the capital, actually taking Greek lessons, and in the countryside churches were now sometimes dedicated to
both
rites, the Latins worshipping in one half, the Greeks in the other. By the sixteenth century the tables were turned entirely: all the country priests were Orthodox again, and the only Catholics were in the Venetian quarters of the towns.

Orthodoxy flowered, and with it art. The exquisite painted churches of Crete are almost all protégés of Venice. Tucked away in unexpected valleys, perched gaily on hillocks, sprawled in the middle of villages, with their amalgam of landscape, sweet architecture and dazzling colour they form almost an art form in themselves. Outside they are domed, whitewashed and innocent: inside they glow with the grandeur of their Byzantine frescoes, given a particular dimension, a rustic frankness, which is unique to Crete. In colours bright but often peeling, in images striking but often defaced by time or bigotry, all the Christian ideas are given expression – the grand cycle of the Christian story, nativity to ascension, the terrible conceptions of heaven and hell, miracles and resurrections, angels and archangels, saints, martyrs, massacres and second comings – all are lavished upon these little country churches, as though a huge sacred book has been torn into fragments and scattered through the island.

The artists were often refugees. When the Greek emperors returned to Constantinople in 1261 there was a revival of Byzantine art and craftsmanship: when the city fell again in 1453, this time irrevocably to the Muslims, it was ironically to Venetian Crete, where the indigenes struggled so restlessly for their independence, that many of the best artists, writers, artisans and
scholars brought their gifts. The Great Island, secure if scarcely happy under the protection of Venice, became for a time the cultural centre of the whole Greek world: Venice, which had helped to destroy Byzantium, now cherished its survivors. The refugees who came to Crete were mostly destitute and often terrified:

Learned and gifted men as they often were, they were coming to an island where the Greek population was largely illiterate, where there were few schools and no universities. But the presence of Venice ensured an element of educated sympathy, and so they flourished there, whatever the
palikares
might think, under the banner of St Mark.

Many of the Greek scholars and their pupils moved on from Crete to the imperial capital, and so made Venice in its turn the chief repository of classical learning. The great Aldine Press, which printed the whole catalogue of Greek classical literature, depended upon Cretan scholars, editors and craftsmen. A Cretan in Venice established the Kalergis Press, and published the celebrated
Etymologia Magnum
, a Greek dictionary of seminal importance. Cretan icon-painters founded their own Venetian guild: Cretans established the Scuola di S. Niccoló dei Greci in Venice, with its own church. The painter Michael Damaskinos, who went from Crete to Venice in 1574, created a whole new manner of icon painting, combining Venetian techniques of chiaroscuro with the ancient Byzantine traditions.

The Cretan painter Domenico Theotokopoulos went further still to synthesize the arts of east and west. He migrated to Venice in his youth; studied with Titian, and presently went on to Rome and Spain: and strangely blending his Cretan background with the skills and styles he had learned upon his travels, became known to the world as El Greco.

∗

The Venetians transformed the face of Crete, during their four centuries upon the island. Not only did they change its landscapes, by denuding them of their great cypress forests, but they built in every corner of it. Even in the deepest recesses of the Samaria Gorge, one of the geographical wonders of Europe, a gloomy defile ten miles long, 1,800 feet deep and sometimes only ten feet wide, silent but for the sheep-bells, the clatter of falling stones and the shrieks of raucous birds – even in the depths of this unnerving phenomenon there stands, deserted now except for the passing trekkers, the Venetian hamlet of Santa Maria which gave the declivity its name.

Some of their monuments are great fun, oddly enough, and bring a rare touch of gaiety to the sombre Cretan scene. Fountains especially splash their greetings with an anomalous
brio.
In the village square at Spili, near the south coast, nineteen curly-maned stone lions spout their water into the village fountain with the authentic fizz of the baroque, all the more exhilarating in that rocky and goitresque environment. In the Orthodox monastery of Vrondisi, high on the flank of a bare mountain, a fountain is presided over with lovely incongruity by a now headless couple from the Garden of Eden, a plump but accommodating Eve, a skinny but virile Adam. In Rethimnon the Arimondi fountain has Corinthian columns and three lions’ heads, and is a delightful plashy structure in the middle of town, where old ladies still go to collect water in buckets in the morning, and the sound of the running water agreeably alleviates the traffic din; while in the very centre of the old Venetian capital, in Venezilou Square, stands the exuberant fountain which Duke Francesco Morosini built in 1628, supported by grimacing lions, covered all over with mythological reliefs, and supplied with water by its own aqueduct, twelve miles long, from the mountain slopes behind the town.

Arkhadi, the most famous monastery in all Crete, is another blithe surprise from Venetian times. It was blown up by the Abbot and his monks during a revolution in 1866, to prevent its capture by the Turks, and is now a national monument, a Valhalla of the
palikares:
it still has a slightly detonated feel, standing alone on a bare plateau, attended by an ossuary of heroes and a few funerary cypresses. But though it looks gloomy from the outside, when you enter its central doorway, passing through its deep shadows into the courtyard, a marvellous fantasy awaits you: for there in the middle of a fairly ramshackle yard stands a church so gay and entertaining, so elaborate of invention, that it might easily stand, an undiscovered prodigy, in one of the lesser-known squares of Venice itself. Arkhadi was built in 1657, almost at the end of the Venetian empire in Crete, and with its merry
mélange
of fancies classical and baroque, forms the happiest monument of all to the Venetian presence – a structure altogether Italianate, dedicated from the start to the rituals of Greekness.

These are only grace-notes, though. The great walls, the castle towers, the keeps and the barrack blocks – alas, these are truer reflections of the long occupation. The three towns of Crete are all recognizably Venetian still, and are all instinct with the nervous inhibitions of the regime. The best of them is Khania, in the west. It is one of the most delightful towns in Greece, but retains its slightly neurotic air. Behind the town the bare ridges of the White Mountains, often snow-covered, stand in threatening mystery, and the houses of the town seem to cluster around the little harbour for comfort, as though they wish they could embark. Stout sheds of the old Venetian arsenal line the waterfront still, disguised now as fish restaurants; a Venetian lighthouse guards the harbour entrance; the bollards of the mole, which look from a distance like charred or petrified tree-stumps, are actually captured guns embedded there by the Venetians. The city walls are robust, and emblazoned ever and again with the lion of St Mark, but if you look down from them into the heart of the little town, you will see that they are only an outer protection for the Venetians who lived there: for in the middle of the place, with its own convenient water-gate to the harbour and the get-away ships, there stands an inner fort, the Castello, where the town Rector lived, and his chief officials, and where the local archives were kept. It is elevated slightly above the general level of the town, is pretty now with window boxes and indolent with pampered pets, but gives an ineradicable impression still of an elite embattled against all contingencies,
nullus parvus est census qui magnus est animus
, it says to this day on the
façade of the Venetian loggia, in the heart of it – ‘He is not poor in wealth who is great of soul.’

The most compelling Venetian structure of all, I think, is a small fortress called Frangocastello, which stands on a desolate tract of shore on the southern coast. It is less desolate than it used to be indeed, now that the tourist trade is bringing surfaced roads and seaside chalets to the remotest corners of Crete, but it is still a chill and comfortless place, especially in the winter. At this point, where a narrow shaly plain separates the mountains from the sea, a dramatic gorge opens to split the highland mass in two, like an earthquake fault, or the effect of some stupendous lightning: directly in front, silhouetted on the empty shore, stands the castle.