Art And Culture in Crete

Art and culture in Crete has an unusually long memory. The Minoans were painting frescoes here around 1600 BC — the bull-leapers, the dolphins, the blue monkeys — and the originals hang in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum a few kilometres from where they were found. Nothing else in Europe goes back that far with pictures still attached, and seeing the museum before Knossos rather than after changes how the site reads.

The second layer is Byzantine and Venetian. El Greco was born near Fodele in 1541 and trained as an icon painter here before Toledo; the Historical Museum in Heraklion holds two of his early panels. Rethymno and Chania kept whole Venetian quarters, and in the mountain villages the small painted churches — Panagia Kera at Kritsa is the best — carry fourteenth-century frescoes on walls a metre thick.

The living part is music and food. The Cretan lyra is a three-string bowed instrument played upright on the knee, and at a proper village kentro it goes with mantinades, rhyming couplets improvised on the spot, often at someone's expense. Cooking classes in Crete usually start at a garden or a cheese maker rather than a kitchen; the diet here was the one the 1960s Seven Countries Study measured, and the cooks know it. Cultural tours in Crete pair a village, a workshop and a table — the table is not the filler, it is the point.