Cretan-homes, Crete property estate agents

‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.’

Well, yes, we should…..  Many years have gone by since the end of the last worldwide conflagration – nearly sixty in fact.  So who is going to remember, apart from the people who were alive then……….and their numbers are rapidly diminishing as the years go by. 

I was thinking along these lines on a recent visit to Crete. I had just paid the obligatory visit to Knossos, and a book I had read by Dilys Powell, film critic of the British Sunday Times for over fifty years, sprang to mind.  Called ‘The Villa Ariadne’, it dealt with the life of her husband Humfry Payne and of his British compatriots who lived and worked with him at Knossos.

Foremost amongst these was John Pendlebury. He arrived in Crete in March of 1930 to take over control of the dig and the curatorship of the British-owned archaeological site of Knosses from Arthur Evans, and he found himself totally at home with the Cretan Greeks.

Crete is renowned throughout Greece for its warriors: some villages are accessible only by foot even today and bitter, violent family feuds still erupt, beyond the reach of the law.  Pendlebury was a swashbuckling self-dramatist, somewhat uncharacteristic for an Englishman. The Cretans loved him for his flashiness and theatricality, for his recklessness and spontaneous bravery.  The usual British understatement was anathema to them – they empathised with his sense of the dramatic. He could also drink them under the table and walk them off their feet – and they loved him for it. 

When war broke out and the Germans invaded Crete in the summer of 1941 the British forces were taken off the island, but Pendlebury decided to remain with the guerrilla fighters. Who better to lead the resistance on this strategically vital island than the British archaeologists?  They spoke Greek, knew the terrain like the back of their hands and knew the Cretan people intimately – they were to form the backbone of the resistance movement on the island.

The Cretans are what author Paddy Leigh Fermor calls ‘a mytho-poetic society’ - an essentially oral society. The basis of Cretan legends and history is a verbal one - this is the land of King Minos, of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minator. After all, it was the Cretan people themselves who had revealed the site of ancient Knossos to Arthur Evans, remembered from tales handed down verbally from one generation to another.

Pendlebury’s story was told and retold throughout the length and breadth of the island, embellished in the telling until he was raised to level of a mythical hero. He was the stuff of legends: when he went out on military operations he would leave his glass eye next to his bed, don a black eye-patch and, armed with his swordstick, throw himself into the fray.

Finally, on a mission, with his back against a wall, urging his men on, he was shot and captured.  Later, he was put up against a wall and shot out of hand by the German occupying forces.

Some fifty years later, driving across the Lissithi plains, a friend and I decided to stay the night at the village of Tzermiado.  Windmills dot the countryside and cypress trees punctuate the countryside, a theme carried out by the exclamation marks painted -somewhat whimsically I like to think – in the middle of the precipitous, winding roads of this part of the island.

I like the Greek approach to driving: I once told my husband that I couldn’t drive as there was something seriously wrong with my car.  On closer inspection he discovered what I meant: the hooter wasn’t working.  He looked a trifle sceptical – I think I even caught a look of disbelief flit across his face.  The Greek drivers of Crete would SO not have had a problem understanding this concept…………

Sitting in a small restaurant, over dinner that night, I asked the young owner Vassilis if he knew of Pendlebury.  ‘Blebbery, you mean?’ he exclaimed excitedly – this was what the Greeks had always called him………..and the years melted away. The legend of the intrepid British soldier, saviour of Crete, had been passed down so that now, nearly half a century later, he was spoken of as a personal and intimate friend.

‘I have pictures’ he said. We were left sitting alone in solitary splendour in the restaurant as he raced home - only in Greece could this happen.  Half an hour later he returned, bearing an old calendar with photos of Xan Fielding, Paddy Leigh Fermor - all the British guerrilla leaders- including, of course, the mythical ‘Blebbery’.  Pointing to each one he recounted the oft-told tales of bravery as if they had happened just yesterday.

I had the answer to my question – yes, they will indeed be remembered.

Carol Dunning

Greece Buying Guide

Overseas Guides Company.