Villa Ariadne E-Book

Dilys Powell

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Villa Ariadne stands above the Minoan ruins of Knossos in Crete, a memorial to the British archaeologists who built, lived and worked there. Dilys Powell brings to life the autocratic founder Arthur Evans and his successor John Pendlebury, whose heroic leadership of the local defence against German invasion in 1941 made him a legend. The villa was also the site of the daring kidnap of German General Kreipe by special operations officers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 1944. But The Villa Ariadne is far more than just their story. Uniting ancient myths and history with first-hand observation and tales she is told, Dilys Powell leaves us a complex portrait of the island as a whole - a place she knew and loved for forty years.

Leseprobe

THE VILLA ARIADNE

DILYS POWELL

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK is set in Crete, and Crete is changing. Some of the changes I have lately seen, but more are coming, and the traveller may not always recognise the places I describe. My Crete is chiefly an older Crete. And the people I have known – in the light of the passing years they too change. I have tried to tell a truthful story; where I could I have sought out the witnesses; but there are some I have failed to trace. In one instance at any rate I have preferred to leave the legend, if legend it is, untouched. In writing about Patrick Leigh Fermor I have set down what the Cretans said to me. It seemed a pity to risk destroying the charm of their tales, and I have not asked him to confirm or deny; I hope he will forgive this omission.

I will not make a great show of apologising for the inconsistent spelling of Greek words and names. As a rule I have used the form familiar to me – Herakleion rather than Iraklion – or the form which retains some trace of its origin; I pronounce Ayia, but I write Hagia. My transliteration of place-names thus is erratic; I have abandoned the attempt to distinguish between the nominative and the accusative of Christian names or between the masculine and the feminine of surnames; and for readability I have left out all the accents.

I am indebted for help from many people, both British and Greek, whose names occur or whose stories are recorded in the book; I thank them all. I owe especial thanks to Dr Joan Evans, who allowed me to quote from the Evans letters and on whose book Time and Chance (Macmillan) I have relied in sketching Sir Arthur’s early life; to the late Hilda Pendlebury, who without restriction handed over to me her husband’s letters, as also to her daughter Joan Pendlebury; and to Mrs Doreen Dunbabin, who entrusted to me her husband’s manuscript account of his experiences in Occupied Crete. The British School of Archaeology at Athens has generously given permission for quotations from Evans’s records, published in the School Annual, of the first years of excavation at Knossos. I have referred in the text to my indebtedness to the late Stanley Moss’s book Ill Met by Moonlight (Harrap), and I have quoted briefly from Mary Chubb’s Nefertiti Lived Here (Geoffrey Bles). I should like to thank also Miss Edith Clay, Mrs M. J. Thornton, Miss Euphrosyne Sideropoulou, Mr John Stanley and Mr Stelio Hourmouzios.

Contents

Title PageAuthor’s NoteMapPrologueIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIAbout the AuthorCopyright

PROLOGUE

i

FROM HERAKLEION the road, leaving the ramparts, ran south-east beside a ravine, past a straggle of shops and little houses with gardens, between vineyards and fringes of eucalyptus towards dry gradual hills. I took a ticket to Knossos, and in a quarter of an hour the bus was pulling up by a café opposite the entrance to the Palace of Minos. Then I realised that I should have got out fifty yards or so farther back. I had not seen the place since 1935, and this was 1958; you forget, in twenty-three years, the exact position of a gate.

‘Where,’ I said – I knew, but I asked all the same – ‘where is the Villa Ariadne?’ The conductor was blank. ‘The Villa Ariadne,’ I said again, ‘where the archaeologists stay, the English archaeologists?’ Blank again and a shrug. As I moved to get out I tried once more. ‘The Villa Ariadne, Sir Arthur Evans’s house?’ ‘Ah, Evans’s house! Wait!’ He shouted down the bus. ‘The lady wants Evans’s house!’ ‘Evans’s house!’ the driver repeated. ‘Wait!’ He leaned out of the window and backed. ‘There,’ said the conductor, ‘there is the entrance.’

I pushed open the door in the wall and went into the courtyard. A woman whom I did not know answered when I knocked at the door of the lodge. The Director, she said, had gone to Rethymnon, and since it was a Sunday the students too would probably be out for the day, but I could go up to the Villa and look for myself. Morning glory swarmed over the wall by the road; it was cool in the courtyard. But at the top of the few steps which skirted the little whitewashed building everything was thin, everything thirsty. Wire netting enclosed the lodge garden. Inside its irregular triangle long grass wove a mat over the soil; a few exhausted hollyhocks struggled out of the weeds. I went through the gate in the fence and up the path towards the Villa. Pines, reeds, desiccated palms, oleanders, bougainvillea, dusty olives; long ago, fond preserving hands had set fragments of antique statuary here and there among the trees – an empty shrine, a plinth, a broken capital. Headless but majestic, a marble Hadrian posed in the shade; a turkey with her brood scratched round the base at his sandalled feet. Emaciated, the shrubbery dangled spiky branches. A pomegranate had put out a few parched flowers, but there was no sign of the hibiscus whose blossoms we used to pick on breathless July afternoons, nothing was growing in the urns on the terrace where amidst the scent of jasmine we used to dine.

But the Villa itself – that looked unchanged: the polygonal blocks of sand-coloured stone outlined in mortar, the flat roof against the background of pine trees, the dark shutters and the half-basement, the sense of suffocation, stubbornly Victorian in the Mediterranean landscape. Somewhere a dog barked furiously and rattled his chain. The front door stood open. I climbed the flight of stone steps and went in. On the right-hand wall, a replica of a relief from the Palace – the noble head of the charging bull. Beside it, a commemorative plaque: dates, names. Nothing else: floors bare, ceilings cracked, walls peeling. The passage at the end of the hall led past the long dining-room; sparse furniture, the table minimally laid with the necessary frugality of an archaeological expedition.

An unwarranted ghost, I crept downstairs to where, for coolness in the Cretan summer, the bedrooms had been contrived below ground level. Through an open door I could see the stone floor naked, the shutters drooping from their hinges, green light filtering through windows overgrown with creeper; nothing except a camp bed, a tray of sherds and a suitcase exposing a trail of shirts and socks. Time had sucked the house dry.

When I went out two young men were walking up the path from the lower house. In that arid garden they were unmistakably English. Two archaeological students from a British excavation party; simply to look at them reminded me how long I had been an alien from their society. The dog barked again frantically. He was in view now – prickly black coat and old white muzzle – bouncing on the roof of his kennel; and a woman came from the servants’ entrance behind the terrace to see what was going on. Yes, she said, she was Ourania. I asked if she remembered me: ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I used to know your husband.’ No, she said, at that time, though she was married in 1933, she did not work at Knossos but lived up at her village. But the name I gave, Payne – she knew that. And her husband? Ah, Manoli had gone to his own village, to Lasithi, for the day.

‘I will come back tomorrow,’ I told her. On the bank behind the Villa the pines had shed a dark slippery carpet of needles. I scrambled up and looked towards the slopes which hid Fortetsa village and Herakleion. A donkey was tethered by the tumbling stones of a broken hut, and in the field beyond it a group of women in headscarves were cutting the corn. In the still, warm, aromatic air I could hear them calling to one another. Only the house and its garden were dying.

I walked down to the gates at the bottom of the Villa drive, but they were locked, and I went back the way I had come. Farther down the main road, cars and buses were drawn up in a car-park outside the Palace of Minos; a pavilion sold embroideries and orangeade; there was a ticket-office. I paid and went in, up the leafy approach, across the courtyard with the walled pits on the left and the trees on the right shading mysterious trenches. A maze: but I remembered not so much the involutions and the dead ends as the pall of history pressing bloodstained and heavy on summer days; and the Cretan light settling dense, like the red local wine; and the hot smell of dust in the paths; and the afternoon shadows creeping thick as tar from the walls. For me it had always been afternoon in the Palace, late afternoon, men trudging home from the dig in the cemetery behind the hill, the pines solid and gold-fringed in the dying sun, and as I clambered about the reconstructed passages something sacrificial in the air; one half-expected a roll of drums. In those days it had been comforting to escape from the deserted labyrinth back to the company at the Villa.

But now the Palace buzzed with visitors. Tourists with cameras and handbooks; a bearded young man in shorts and a blue shirt, a peasant’s straw hat on the ground beside him, sat sketching under the cypresses beyond the pits. Taking a short cut, I climbed over a wall into the complex of buildings. In the Central Court a polyglot guide was lecturing to bemused faces, English, French, German; abruptly he turned and made off, trailing his party behind him down long stairways. I waited till the footsteps had faded, then wandered without plan. Along corridors, down steps, past light-wells, under colonnades, through porticos, out to terraces – at last I stopped short on a high jagged edge. Still a maze; it was a struggle to find the way back. Here and there vegetation was reasserting itself. Liquorice plants rooted in crevices, and gold and yellow daisies rampaged over the Court. Behind the reproductions of the frescoes on the walls of the royal rooms the swallows had nested; wings flashed and whirred as they flew between the Minoan columns. But the huge restored Palace itself, the old-and-new Palace, Evans’s Palace – that was still arrogantly alive. Storey upon storey, new walls propping up old, twentieth-century pillars raising roofs which might have fallen before Troy – war and the tremors of the earth had scarcely marked it. Time had made it accessible, that was all.

On my way out I stopped to look at the bust under the pine trees near the entrance. Stirred by the wind, a branch gently brushed the back of the bronze head. ‘Sir Arthur Evans’, said the Greek inscription, ‘The people of Herakleion in gratitude’.

ii

I never stayed at the Villa Ariadne while Sir Arthur Evans was there himself. Indeed I came to Crete late, several years after my husband Humfry Payne had begun taking me on my first novice excursions in the islands and on the mainland of Greece. At the time of those early trips Humfry was still a student at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, and I – not a student, just a student’s wife with a knowledge of the classics which the most euphemistic friend could not have called as much as rudimentary – was still struggling to find my bearings in archaeological society. But the unknown Villa was already part of my background. A pale gold phantom, it presided over remote arguments. At dinner in the Athens students’ hostel its name brought a touch of fable, and sitting silent over the rissoles, embarrassed by my endless ignorance, I imagined oriental splendours.

In my first spring in Athens the air seemed to me full of talk about Crete. Sites, villages, monasteries, mountains, dates, digs, sherds, seals, tablets, scripts, everything rang confusedly in my head. Even when we set out for a trip in the country Knossos went with us. Staying for a night or two at Old Corinth, where the Americans were digging, we found among our companions the English architect and draughtsman Piet de Jong, who worked sometimes for the American School of Classical Studies, sometimes for the British School, sometimes for Evans in Crete. It was from Piet that I first heard stories, already merging with legend, of feudal state at the Villa Ariadne.

‘There was a train of donkeys bringing snow from Mount Ida for the sherbet,’ he said, pursing his mouth and giving his subdued little laugh. The amused eyes with their spectacles beneath the prominent eyebrows, the long fine nose, the whole spare, self-contained face was happily bent on the joke, and for a moment I almost believed him.

And the names. Long before I saw the setting I was aware of the cast – Duncan Mackenzie, Evans’s assistant; Gilliéron, who had been occupied in some way not clear to me with the restoration of the Palace at Knossos; Wace, the Cambridge scholar who had dug at Mycenae and was now locked with Evans in a ruthless and to me incomprehensible controversy. In 1927 John Forsdyke, later Director of the British Museum, was finishing the exploration of a Minoan necropolis, discovered a year earlier by Evans himself, on the slopes beyond the stream which bounds the Palace to the east. Humfry also was digging in the Knossos area, and when that summer I joined him in Athens for a holiday Arcadian in both the metaphorical and the geographical sense of the word, he often talked about the people at Knossos. But several years were still to pass before I saw any of the Cretan characters in the story of the Villa. In treasured visits to Greece, in breathless trains and buses, on mule-back and on foot Humfry took me travelling the width and length of the Peloponnese. We crossed mountain ranges, we took ship to the Archipelago – but never to Crete.

Not, that is, together. In the summer of 1929 Humfry was once again digging there, this time at Eleutherna in the foothills of Mount Ida. He was appointed Director of the Athens School that year, and had the dig proved important he might have gone on working in Crete. There was indeed one rediscovery – a reliable and responsible Cretan foreman, Yanni Katsarakis, who had worked for the School long before. But the soil at Eleutherna held no great treasure. Instead, the main British excavation for some time was to be on the Greek mainland at the Heraion of Perachora. There for the next four years Yanni worked with us, and Eleutherna and Mount Ida joined Knossos, the Palace of Minos and the Villa Ariadne in the haze of gossip and legend and archaeology which for me enveloped all Crete.

Not that my grasp of the other business of the School was much firmer. In retrospect the incidents and encounters of the first season as Director’s wife in Athens have meaning for me, but at the time the weeks went by unrecognised. The names of eminent American and European scholars jostled one another in my head. With the early days of temperate sun, of wild tulips and almond blossom, hordes of tourists called at the Director’s house and, mistaking me for an archaeologist’s mate suitably equipped, vainly questioned me about the validity of Evans’s reconstructions at Knossos or the relation of the egg-and-dart motive to fertility rites. Students set off on trips to places with strange names, while with my handful of Greek words I took the tram down to the city, performed inessential shopping and made statutory requests for my residence permit. Once at the police station – though this I think must have been in some later year – I came across a young man even more disorientated than I was. Angular high cheekbones, deep brown hair, a fine dark flush of the skin and an off-hand, remote splendour of physique – in the crowd he looked lost, and hearing him speak in English I asked if I could help. He was, it turned out, a student newly arrived at the School: Tom Dunbabin, from Oxford and before that Tasmania. I directed him to the right room, supplied him with the right phrase, and went home to lunch disproportionately pleased with myself.

And Tom Dunbabin, too, was to be part of the Cretan story. But that was years later. Meanwhile as I grew familiar with the names I began little by little to know the characters in the tale. In England, where we spent part of each year, Sir Arthur Evans used occasionally to invite us to a week-end at Youlbury, his house on Boar’s Hill outside Oxford. Some people, it is true, were never more to me than distant figures in a myth. Evans’s lieutenant Mackenzie was one I never saw, though there was an occasion when, confusing me with the wife of some earlier Director – a woman no doubt with the qualifications for membership of archaeological society which I never managed to acquire – he wrote me a charming and gallant letter.

The stories about him merged into my picture of the Villa: Mackenzie complaining that the nightingales kept him awake and employing a boy to throw stones at them, or commenting sourly on the prevalence of romantic human attachments. Those were the days when women in the academic world were apt to be regarded as intruders; and on the news, blameless one would have thought, of an engagement between a young Cambridge archaeologist and another of the Athens students, ‘Never a week passes,’ Mackenzie was reported as remarking in his soft Scottish accent, ‘without some fresh scandal at the British School.’

But by the time I at long last made a first trip to Crete he was no longer there. In the summer of 1929 he fell ill and was obliged to retire. His work at the Villa had been dual. Not only had he been Evans’s assistant and indeed right-hand man, he had served as Curator of Knossos, a post which in some manner not at the time clear to me was under the control of the British School at Athens. Ironically enough the man elected to follow him in the job was one of those he had marked down as symbolising the decline of archaeological morals. Coincidental with Humfry Payne’s appointment as Director in Athens came the appointment as Curator at Knossos of John Pendlebury, by then married to his partner in ‘scandal’.

The Pendleburys and Humfry had been contemporaries as students at the School. Now they were colleagues with official as well as friendly relations. It was usual for the Director to visit Knossos to discuss the various responsibilities of the School; it was usual for the Curator to stay at the School on his way out to Crete. The Director took up residence in the autumn, the Curator not until after the New Year. When John and Hilda Pendlebury came through Athens the fresh spring afternoons were beginning to dazzle, the processionary caterpillars were spinning their cocoons in the pines, and the four of us would play vociferous games of tennis on the hard court in the School garden. Then the season’s business would disperse our party. Humfry would already be planning the year’s campaign at Perachora, and Hilda and John would take ship to Crete and their own enigmatic preoccupations with lustral areas and protopalatial houses.

They were established at Knossos – it was their second season – when I was taken on a first visit to Crete. It was early in the year, with the days cool, unsettled. I was not yet at ease with the Pendleburys, and the nervousness of spring tightened the nervousness I have always felt on coming to an unfamiliar house and on having to find my bearings in a strange society and strange surroundings. The talk, the questions to be settled, everything was foreign to me; in an obscure disquiet I listened while around me echoed phrases about the tenancy of vineyards, the evasiveness of lawyers, the incidence of earthquakes and the friable nature of archaeological remains.

As Curator John Pendlebury lived in the small house, the lodge, always known as the Taverna, at the lower end of the garden where the road from Herakleion ran past the high wall. But we all had meals together in the big house, the Villa; and again the position was far from clear to me, for it appeared that the School had the responsibility for both houses but that the Villa was still at the disposal of Sir Arthur Evans when he arrived to carry out further excavations or further studies. Indeed his invisible presence seemed to me that spring to command the house and the dark-foliaged garden. Faint traces of his autocratic scholarly comfort still clung about the place. Denuded though the rooms were, here and there a carpet, a curtain, a sofa recalled the welcome of a Victorian country week-end. The Villa Ariadne was still an enclosed, self-contained little world from which one made forays into a countryside so far tamed by few roads and fewer buses.

We made one such expedition ourselves. Humfry wanted to show me the site of Eleutherna, and in a hired car we were driven off into a landscape which I recall as lowering and claustrophobic. One of the house servants, Kosti the steward, was in attendance, and spread wild flowers round the rug on which we sat to eat our picnic lunch. After it we left the car and the road and walked under a cloudy sky. There was a hill and a moist, luxuriant canopy of trees and it began to rain; on this at least memory is explicit. I was wearing shoes with crepe rubber soles; as we scrambled back towards the car my feet slid on the streaming path, and Kosti tugged me up the inclines. The precipice road was covered with rich mustard-coloured mud, and the driver expressed alarm lest the car should slide. We were thankful to get back to the Villa and drag off our soaking clothes in the basement bedroom. There was even the chance of hot baths. Suddenly, in Hilda’s attentions, I recognised the face of genuine friendship.

Twice more I stayed at Knossos. Humfry’s close friend Alan Blakeway, tutor in ancient history at Corpus Christi College, had raised in Oxford funds for the excavation of an ancient cemetery, and in 1933 we set off with him for Crete. It was high summer. The School session was over, everybody except the servants had left, and we had the Villa to ourselves. Humfry and I slept under mosquito nets on the terrace roof beneath moonlight which seemed to generate heat; at sunrise we woke to the wild rusty screech of the first cicadas. In 1935 the three of us were back at Knossos, joined this time by our friend James Brock, a student of the School who later was to be responsible for the splendid publication of the finds.

Spellbound, I watched the two seasons drifting past me. Once we took time off to drive westward along the coast and through Rethymnon. When we passed Souda Bay there were warships in the huge natural harbour, and somebody remarked that it had been used by Allied shipping in the Great War. But 1914 was more remote to us than the Minoan age. Our lives revolved round the Villa, and though our drive had taken us as far as Canea, capital of the island, though the names of great Minoan sites – Phaistos, Mallia, Hagia Triadha – were constantly in the day’s talk, to me Crete was Knossos. The slopes where Evans’s restorations, the jagended roofs and interrupted colonnades, hung conjecturally in the fiery air; the bleached hills across the valley; and the Villa garden with its rich integument of shade and flowers, pomegranates, plumbago, hibiscus – that was Crete; that and midday with lunch in the long cool dining-room; shadows thickening, and dinner on the terrace with its hoods of jasmine.

Alone in the house during the day, I struggled to write. Then as the afternoon swam on I would throw down my work and stroll out towards the village of Fortetsa and the fields and olive groves and vineyards where, hollowed in the banked earth, the ancient cemetery was giving up its painted burial jars. The little boys of the village looked at me with curiosity as I went by, and once, I remember, I rescued a toad with which they had been amusing themselves. For the rest my exchanges with the Cretans were confined to the minimal daily greetings.

All the same I was learning to fit faces and voices to some of the names which for so long had rung in my head. Kosti I had met on my first visit, Kosti the steward with the flowing, light brown moustache, eyes of a mad bright blue, and a disposition wheedling but obstinate. He was the hero of an abduction, not an uncommon event in the Crete of the 1920s. The young man who served at table was Manoli Markoyannakis, a good-looking boy, quiet-voiced, deferential. Sometimes a woman muffled in black was seen emerging stealthily from the kitchen quarters or sweeping with a vague tentative broom the stone floors in the bedrooms; this was Maria, widowed Maria, like Kosti a relic from the great days of the Evans régime. And when I wandered out to the dig there was Manolaki the foreman – Manolis Akoumianakis, who had long worked for Evans in the excavation of the Palace and who now was serving a season with our party; one of his sons, Micky – a boy like the other village children but graver, more observant – ran industriously about the site, carrying messages.

The sun swung across the screen of pine trees round the Villa garden, the cicadas filled the air with a sound as thick as silence, and a handful of Cretan names were added to my stock of characters. Occasionally an incident, absurd or tragic, broke the routine of the week. There was an invitation to lunch in Herakleion with the British Vice-Consul, a friendly Cretan citizen given to what I am sure he regarded as high-life English persiflage; at any rate he trapped me into desperate apologies for damaging an armchair by upsetting a bottle of ink – which turned out to be a joke-bottle with rubber ink-pool attached. Once at midday, sitting in the dining-room in the Villa, we could hear in the distance long painful cries. It was some time before we discovered that they were cries of uncontrollable mourning; Yanni Katsarakis, our foreman at Perachora, had come over from his home in the east of the island with the news that his wife had died. The loss was calamitous from the practical as well as the emotional point of view. She had been, we knew, an ideally capable woman, good at the management of her household, good at spinning and dyeing and weaving – I still possess a tough, bright-patterned bedspread which she sent me as a present. And all that day Yanni, his face blotched with tears, sat in the kitchen rocking back and forth in his chair and howling with grief and despair.

Meanwhile in the pale crumbling soil beyond the sultana vines the cluster of tombs was being methodically opened and cleared. Sometimes a south wind brought dust and mosquitoes and lassitude; but at the noon-time break in the work, or at night when we dined on the terrace, the archaeologists still wrangled with happy obstinacy. I began to take life in the Villa for granted. We should pick it up again next summer; that seemed as natural as midday.

But next summer Humfry was dead; and a few months after him Alan Blakeway, best of friends, was gone too. Three years later the war broke my remaining ties with Crete.

iii

Or so I had thought at the time. Now I found that the passage of twenty-three years had left nearly everything clear in my mind. As I loitered about the courts and stairways of Knossos I felt as if I had never been away. There was even, to remind me of Evans’s massive reconstructions, some restoration in progress – only this time it was the restorations which were being restored. Workmen were cleaning the Palace, brushing soil from the pavements, mending the cement in the walls. And like those shreds of coloured paper which, dropped into water, swell and branch into waving flowers, the stones blossomed in my mind. I remembered lost days: an evening on the beach beyond Herakleion, Alan bringing out a bottle of Greek champagne, unpalatably warm from the late sun, to drink after our swim, and the three of us squabbling about the best way of keeping the bubbles in while pouring; night in the Villa and Alan again, flown with Cretan wine, lingering on the stairs to pursue some archaeological argument before he clattered down to his subterranean bedroom – the room, it struck me now, in which Humfry and I had slept on that cool, initiatory spring visit.

The long interval between then and now suddenly contracted, and as if in some non-temporal time the days were telescoped. In the same moment Evans was walking across the garden of the British School to lecture to an Athenian audience; and Kosti was writing to me from his village to tell me that he had put flowers on Humfry’s grave at Mycenae; and in some war-time office in London I was reading news of the Battle of Crete and the story of John Pendlebury.

In the summers of 1933 and 1935, with the excavation of the cemetery taking up the days from early morning to late afternoon, to go into Herakleion, no more than three miles away, seemed an expedition. I scarcely knew the place. And in that I echoed the ignorance of a good many foreigners. Travellers came to Greece to see the monuments and the museums. Even visitors who were sensible of the charm of the villages were indifferent to the life of urban Greece. Athens they might enjoy. But a provincial town was something which had to be endured, a mere stage in the journey to the collection of sculpture, or the ancient theatre, or the fragmentary temple. My impression of Herakleion – which for years I inclined to call by its old Italian name of Candia – was of sun, market stalls and harbour walls on which with the image of the Lion of St Mark the Venetians had left occasional traces of their former occupation. Once or twice I sat in a café. But I had never really looked.

Now in 1958 with the new, comfortable Hotel Astir to stay in, there was a chance to explore. I took to strolling about the market. One of the streets, I noticed, was called oδós Eβavs: Evans Street. Seventeen years since Evans had died; twenty-three years since he had last visited Crete; twenty-seven years since he had last undertaken any serious excavation of the Palace. In the interval, the Second War; and Greece is a country much given to the political game of renaming its streets. But there in the company of high patriotic tributes (a road a few yards away is called, after the date of a famous bid for Cretan independence, 1866 Street) was the name of the foreign archaeologist; war and Occupation and a temporary coolness between Greece and Britain over Cyprus had not erased it. Interesting, I reflected, to discover the local views. In England many people were still living who had been colleagues of Arthur Evans, and reminiscences had been published by friends and family. But nobody so far as I knew had enquired from the Cretans. Already it might be too late. Those who knew him at the beginning of the excavation of Knossos were long since dead. And the war had made a great crack in the life of the island. Some of the men who had worked on the site in the twenties and thirties had been killed in battle; a younger generation might recall nothing.

Without much hope I began to ask the people I met what they remembered of the great Evans. A few remembered him well – a Greek archaeologist; an Englishwoman who before the war had been an archaeological student and had worked with Evans. Yet this was not quite the kind of opinion I was after. Rather I wanted strictly local memories, and once or twice I found them. There were still Cretans who had dug at Knossos and Cretans who had been servants at the Villa Ariadne. Occasionally from some unexpected quarter – a taxi-driver perhaps – there would be a scrap of reminiscence.

But now there was an interruption. When asked what he remembered of Evans, sometimes a man would break off to talk of another name: Blebbery. At first I could not make it out. Who on earth was Blebbery? Then on a trip eastward I had a flash of recognition. Ashamed of my ignorance of Crete outside Knossos, I was using my time in visiting some of the places which I knew only by name, on this occasion Mallia, a Minoan palace excavated by French archaeologists. A few colossal pithoi, storage jars each of which could have accommodated a couple of Ali Baba’s thieves – for the rest little more than the foundations remained, and bemused by so many interlocking rectangles I reflected that at Knossos with Evans’s restorations one at any rate knew where one was. No, said the driver who took me to Mallia, he had not known Evans. But Blebbery – before the war he had driven Blebbery everywhere, east, west, along this very road. And using the Greek’s phrase of esteem, ‘a golden man’, he exclaimed, ‘a golden man’. And suddenly I knew the name. The Cretans had always found it impossible to pronounce the word Pendlebury.

From that moment my pursuit of the Evans legend grew complicated. The great ghost of the old scholar was everywhere in Crete: in the landscape, in the mountains, in the Herakleion museum amidst the spoils of excavation; at Knossos in the Palace of Minos which he had unearthed and reconstructed; especially at the Villa Ariadne. But often, as I pursued him in the memories of the Cretans, this other figure intervened; the young heroic figure of John Pendlebury. And not Pendlebury alone. The islanders wanted to talk about the British liaison officers who went in during the Occupation to help in organising resistance. They wanted to talk about a famous exploit, the capture by a party of Cretans and British officers of a German general. It was not always easy to identify the heroes, especially the foreign heroes, of such a tale. But little by little under the familiar Christian names by which the British were known in Crete in the war I discovered figures as distinguished as Patrick Leigh Fermor. I discovered my own friends: Tom Dunbabin, for instance. And I heard tales of the Cretans themselves, some still living, some killed in battle. Evans was not the only ghost whose presence could be felt at Knossos. For all these disparate characters, Cretans or British, were linked by place. They had been archaeologists, writers, farmers. But nearly all of them had been in some way connected with the Villa Ariadne. They had lived or worked at the Villa; their stories took flight from there or there came to rest. Their stories: not everything I heard about the war in my Cretan expeditions can be taken as simple fact, and what I repeat must sometimes be read as the accretion of myth. The record, like the tale of the Minotaur himself, is part-history, part-legend. The legend has grown round the people in the story. The Villa Ariadne gives the legend a basis of truth.

I

ARTHUR EVANS saw Knossos for the first time in the spring of 1894. That is to say he saw a rounded flowery hill known as Kephala, overlooking a stream and bearing on its surface, among the blossoms of anemone and iris, stone blocks with curious markings. Legend, endowed in Greece with a special tenacity, had preserved for scholars the identity of the site. Here Daedalus had designed for Minos, King of Crete, the labyrinth in which lived the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull. But to the Cretans Knossos was known by a humbler name. Sixteen years before Evans’s visit an antiquarian from Herakleion, or Candia, as it was still generally called, had dug up some large ancient storage-jars on the spot, and the local people had come to refer to it as sta pithária– the place, as you might say, of the jars.

The remains visible on the surface – fragments of walls, gypsum blocks – had already attracted foreign archaeologists, and American, German, Italian and French enthusiasts had reconnoitred the hill. Some of them had thought of exploring. Schliemann himself, excavator of Troy and of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, had proposed to dig, but the plan had fallen through. Possession of the land presented the greatest difficulty. As Evans soon discovered, the first requisite for carrying out an archaeological exploration was to be owner of the soil. But Crete up to the end of the nineteenth century was still under Turkish rule, and the Knossos site, he wrote, ‘was unfortunately held by several co-proprietors, native Mahometans, to whose almost inexhaustible powers of obstruction I can pay the highest tribute’.

In Evans, however, the Mahometans had met their match.

He was a confident, slightly lordly figure; small but indomitably tough and capable of exceptional exertions; short-sighted but endowed with close vision of inestimable value to an archaeologist dealing with the minutiae of coins and seals. He came of a family of parsons and antiquarians who in the generation before him had joined forces with the world of industry. His father belonged to the company of Victorian polymaths. Denied an academic education, sent instead to work in the paper-mills of his uncle John Dickinson, John Evans learned mastery of the job; making a love match, he married the daughter of the firm; and finally came to run the business. But his ruling passion was elsewhere – in the fields of numismatics, geology and anthropology.

He amassed a vast collection of flint implements and prehistoric bronzes; his discoveries in palaeontology made him internationally famous. To his physical vitality the family circle itself was witness. He was three times married, the last time at the age of sixty-nine, and Arthur, his eldest son, was forty-two when of the third marriage a half-sister, Joan, was born. And in the grand Victorian manner the physical resources were matched by ceaseless intellectual and social activity. Treasurer of the Royal Society, High Sheriff of Hertfordshire, President of the Anthropological Institute, Chairman of Quarter Sessions – John Evans unmasked archaeological forgeries, fought against the excise duty on paper, resisted a vandal restoration of St Alban’s Abbey, taught himself to make flint implements. He attended innumerable committees and congresses, he travelled incessantly, he carried on an enormous personal and business correspondence.

It was not surprising that at the age of twenty-four Arthur should have been condescendingly described (by the historian J. R. Green) as ‘little Evans – son of John Evans the Great’.

Arthur Evans, then, grew up in an atmosphere of enthusiasm for learning. As a schoolboy he was already accompanying his father on archaeological expeditions. He inherited the habit of prodigious industry. For the first half of his life, however, his energies were dissipated. He became archaeologist, collector, administrator, journalist, above all traveller: in France, Germany, Sicily, Sweden, Finland, Lapland, the Crimea and the Balkans – in particular Bosnia and Herzegovina, later to be part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but at the time of his visits first in Turkish hands and later under Austrian protection. His journeys and a certain romantic liberalism in his nature ranged him on the side of the Slavonic peoples. He was special correspondent in the Balkans for the Manchester Guardian and campaigned on behalf of the Bosnian insurgents. When in 1878 Turkish rule was succeeded by what he regarded as an oppressive Austrian administration – and by more insurrections – he continued to send fiery despatches to England, with the result that the Austrian authorities took him for a political conspirator, ordered his expulsion – and arrested him before he could leave. He spent seven weeks in a prison cell in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), a city in which he had enthusiastically settled and which he had come to think of as his home. Fifty years were to go by before he revisited Dalmatia. To the official who in 1932 showed him round the prison he had once occupied ‘I come back every fifty years’, he said (adding, it is reported, in a soft obstinate voice, ‘and I will’).

In 1887 Evans had married the daughter of the historian Freeman, and with her after his expulsion from Ragusa he settled in Oxford. In 1884 he was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, then a muddle of antiquities and curiosities housed in what is now known as the Old Ashmolean.

Ten years later – ten embattled years during which he had secured grants from the University; through loans, bequests, purchases and his own inextinguishable activity – had transformed the display as well as the collection itself; in short had created for Oxford an archaeological museum worthy of the name – the new Ashmolean he had fought for was being built. He was doing some building of his own too. While the Ashmolean battle raged he had conceived the idea of a house on Boar’s Hill. With the financial help of his father he bought sixty acres of woodland, with a fine view, and began to plan. The house was to be a refuge from the frustrations of Oxford and a place of recuperation for his wife, who was ill, and as a start he built for her a kind of log cabin in the woods. In 1894 he was moving into the new Ashmolean, and Youlbury, as his Boar’s Hill house was called, was finished. But it was too late. His wife was dead, and the big Victorian house in the setting of garden, lake and woodland had lost its initial purpose.

He was now forty-three; for most men those forty-three years might have seemed full enough. It was at this point that he set off on his first Cretan journey.

Of course he had been in Greece before, had visited Mycenae and Tiryns, met Schliemann, seen the great Mycenaean discoveries – and found them, understandably when you think of the direction his life was to take, much more stirring than the monuments of the much later classical period. Recently he had been thinking of the possibilities of Crete. He had come to believe that ‘a prehistoric system of writing’ was to be found somewhere in the island, but he had never gone to look. Now, with the Ashmolean fight half won and his domestic ties tragically broken, he came at last to Knossos.

He was not looking for the Palace of King Minos or the legendary maze through which Theseus sought the Minotaur. He came bent not on revealing and re-creating a lost civilisation but on following ‘a clue to the existence of a system of picture-writing in the Greek lands’. He saw a ring, a piece of an ancient vase, some engraved gems, traces of mysterious signs on stones, and these were the relics and the clues which changed the course of his life. Or, rather, gave his life its true direction.

Ranged on his side at this crucial moment was his powerful inheritance of obstinacy, energy, enthusiasm. And there was something else: money. He had never, all his life, truly known the lack of money. He had always possessed means of his own. There was an allowance from his father. There was a legacy from his grandfather. Always behind him there was the faithful backing of a well-to-do family. He needed to own the Kephala site. The obstructive Mahometans never stood a chance. Before he left Crete that spring he had arranged to buy a quarter share of the necessary land – a share which would later give him the right to buy the whole.

A year later he was back at Knossos. John Myres, a famous, romantic and adventurous figure from the ranks of ancient historians, was with him; they were eating their lunch in the open air on a slope overlooking the site when suddenly Evans announced: ‘This is where I shall live when I come to dig Knossos.’ The absolute certainty was characteristic, and here in fact it was that the Villa Ariadne was built.

But not yet. Five more years went by before Evans could begin excavation. Bosnia and Herzegovina were not the only places where Turkey was losing hold. Crete at the end of the nineteenth century was in revolt. There were massacres and counter-massacres. Greece landed an expeditionary force. Everybody expostulated, the Great Powers sent in naval detachments and the British took over Candia. In 1898 Evans was once again writing despatches for the Manchester Guardian– and taking part in relief work in the distressed areas of Crete. Meanwhile he went doggedly on trying to buy the rest of the Kephala site. Finally in 1899 the last of the Turkish forces left the island. Crete became autonomous (union with Greece came much later – in 1913). Prince George of Greece, appointed High Commissioner for the Powers, showed himself friendly to foreign archaeologists; and Evans wrote that ‘after encountering obstacles and delays of every kind’ he was able at the beginning of 1900 to purchase the whole of the Knossos area, ‘this favourable result being due in large measure to the new political circumstances of the island’.

He was now a Cretan landowner and could apply for a permit to dig. But he had not yet come into his own fortune. He could not finance the whole operation, and together with David Hogarth, then Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, he organised a Cretan Exploration Fund.

The results were disappointing. ‘Owing to the war in South Africa the contributions from this source fell far short of what was needed.’ Nevertheless on March 23 he began digging. His assistant was Duncan Mackenzie, an archaeologist with experience of field work for the British School on the island of Melos. The workmen were both Moslem and Christian ‘so that the work at Knossos might be an earnest of the future co-operation of the two creeds under the new régime in the island. Considering,’ Evans comments drily ‘that a few months earlier both parties had been shooting each other at sight, the experiment proved very successful.’

If allowances are made for the passage of time and the change in the value of money since 1900 the life briefly described in Evans’s first report (published in the British School Annual) is recognisable to anyone who has watched archaeological excavation in Greece and particularly in Crete. The keenness of the workmen (‘great intelligence in the more delicate parts of the work’); the dancing on a feast day; the hated south wind bringing clouds of dust – true that nowadays the archaeologists themselves and not the local women would probably wash the potsherd, that eight piastres (less than sevenpence in today’s English money) would scarcely be a day’s wages. But the general picture is familiar. What is not familiar is the immediate success.

When after the Cretan revolt of 1897 against Turkey, after the massacres and the intervention of the Great Powers, Evans had gone back to look at Knossos and the land, part of which he already owned, he had been thankful to find corn growing. The fighting had done no damage, nobody in that troubled year had disturbed the site. But then with the exception of the antiquarian from Candia and a former American Vice-Consul who also had reconnoitred nobody, as Evans presently discovered, had disturbed it, or at any rate much of it, for about three thousand years. He spent a week in preliminary excavation on the slopes of the hill of Kephala; when you dig you need somewhere to dump the earth, and you must be sure that you are not dumping it on ground which you will want to dig later. The trial explorations were more than enough to show that he was on the right track. After a few days he could have no doubt that the hill, the fields he had bought were the site, that the flowering soil was the thin covering of a huge complex of ancient buildings.

He had come to Crete – he said so repeatedly – to look for an early system of writing. Exactly a week after the first pickaxe had been driven into the soil there was his first piece of evidence, ‘part of an elongated clay tablet … engraved with what appeared to be signs and numbers’. A few days later ‘an entire hoard of these clay documents’ was discovered. By the end of the season he had found over a thousand inscribed tablets, fragmentary or complete.

Not all used the same system of writing. A few had inscriptions in the hieroglyphic or ‘pictographic’ manner which he had found on engraved seals and which had drawn him to Crete in the first place; they recorded by signs, by stylised drawings (‘the double axe, the bent leg, the eye … the branch or spray’). Ten times as many used a linear script. These turned out to be in not one but two kinds of writing, presently known as Linear A and Linear B. The latter, the more advanced, became a subject for savage controversy, and its deciphering would exercise scholars for the next half-century.

But gratifying to Evans as this discovery was there were more spectacular finds.

Archaeology often brings to light relics – mysterious foundations, tumbled blocks, a charred sacrificial pit, the decaying stumps of dead houses – fascinating to the scholar but a stunning bore to the simple visitor. Knossos was different. It was not simply that the masonry of terraces and corridors persisted or that a passage was found to lead to a series of magazines with huge storage-jars standing over secret lead-lined storage-cists. It was that during their first season the explorers unearthed the remains of a civilisation fantastic in its aesthetic luxury. Still clinging to the walls or lying broken on the floor of portico or gallery there were frescoes brilliantly painted on plaster: groups, drawn in miniature, of court ladies with tiny waists, naked breasts, flounced skirts and hair in curls; the life-size figure of a young man – the Cup Bearer, as Evans called him – wearing an embroidered loin-cloth and silver ornaments, carrying ‘a fluted marble vase with a silver base’ and forming part of a long ritual procession. At one point the decorated walls were no more than a few inches beneath the surface of the soil. The excavators dug to find a room with paintings of griffins crested with peacock’s feathers and crouched against a background of water plants and palm trees. On adjoining walls there was a painted landscape of hills, a river and flowering sedges; gypsum benches ran along the sides; between two benches stood a gypsum chair with a base and a high leaf-shaped back. ‘The elaborate decoration, the stately aloofness, superior size and elevation of the gypsum seat’, Evans decided, ‘sufficiently declare it to be a throne-room.’ A throne-room, then, a Palace with a throne-room. ‘The seat itself’, he wrote in his first report, ‘is hollowed out to suit the form of the human body and, as it was probably also covered by a cushion, must have been a comfortable resting-place. In an adjoining room to the West a less carefully executed slab of a seat was found in which the hollowed space was larger, and’, he added in delicate surmise, ‘it seem probable that this was intended for a woman, while the seat of the throne seems better adapted for a man.’ Refinement could scarcely go farther.

That year digging went on until the beginning of June, when malaria from the stream which runs at the foot of the Kephala hill made work too difficult. A nine weeks’ season, nine weeks of success during which, as the annual report of the British School recorded, he had been ‘fortunate enough to light upon the remains of a great prehistoric palace’.

‘To light upon’ – the phrase suggests a trust in the workings of Providence to which the energetic and self-reliant Evans would not have subscribed. Nor would he have entirely endorsed certain other comments made that year at the School’s annual meeting. The chairman was Asquith, a few years later to be Prime Minister. Speaking not without irony of ‘the days when Sir Charles Newton, with a firman in his pocket, a Company of Royal Engineers and Sappers at his back, and a British man-of-war lying at a handy distance in a convenient bay, was able to rifle at his will the half-hidden treasures of Cnidus and Halicarnassus’, he remarked that since then ‘a humbler and more apologetic mien’ had been adopted by the British archaeologist. ‘There is no longer pride in his pick or defiance in his spade.’ Shortly after the meeting Evans was writing to his father about a second appeal for finance and the risks of placing everything in the hands of a Fund Committee.