Crete, Greece (2)

Up in the hills, away from Heraklion, an enterprising hotelier has taken a traditional Cretan village and turned it into a hotel/function centre. Or maybe he has built a hotel in the style of a traditional Cretan village. Either way, it's a nice place to visit.

Lots of fig trees, olive trees, and this is carob fruit. Our guide Evangelina said that during the war, villagers made coffee from carob pods, as well as grinding them for flour when food was short. Her grandmother is repelled by carob now, she said, after the privations of the war years.

The estate includes an original shepherd's hut and an example of a village well. Traditionally these huts, dry-stone constructions, dotted the hills of Crete so that shepherds could take refuge overnight.

The village winds picturesquely up a hill. Note that we are definitely not in the Cyclades now: the squat whitewashed buildings of Mykonos, Santorini and Paros have been replaced by bursts of colour and a lot of stonework.

One of the cottages has been preserved exactly as it was when someone lived there. Evangelina told us that this was exactly how she remembered her grandparents' home. The photos make the rooms look quite light, but actually they were very dark. Often the farm animals would stay inside in cold weather too, to help heat the home.

There were cats. Collective cats. Lots of them. And kittens. And a parrot.

The village is high on a hill, with a glorious view across the valley.

We were served Cretan food — very distinctive cheeses and pies. The spinach and cheese pies were deep fried, not baked in filo pastry like spanakopita, and the small cheese pies were sweet cheese with short pastry. We were encouraged to try the local raki, a fiery spirit, but it's not my cup of tea. Well, nor is tea my cup of tea. But the coffee, ah. Now we're talking. A wedding was being hosted the same evening and I admired the wedding favours that were being prepared: pots of herbs.

Back to the ship but we still had a few hours in Crete, so we walked from the port into the centre of Heraklion. Follow the yellow line to get to the city centre, they said.

So we walked and walked and walked, and wondered whether this was a labyrinth, too, and this was all a game that the city plays with tourists. But no, finally we reached the city centre ...

... and then our next task was to find the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, with the artefacts from Knossos. There are a number of museums in Heraklion; we followed signposts, asked friendly locals and eventually (lots more walking) arrived at our destination.

We spent a few hours in the museum but really, it needs days. Weeks. The Knossos site covers such a long period, with so many changes in the way people lived and created, that it's really difficult to browse 7000 years in one go. So I'll skip to the period of the Minoan palace.

Yes, more history.

Here we are in the period 3000 to 1100 BC. Ish. (Also, here Ken and I are taking a photo at opposite ends of the same exhibit.) This is a model of what the palace at Knossos would have looked like. Remember the rectangular theatre? We're looking at it in the second photo.

Stoneware in the first picture carved from alabaster, serpentine and marble, and then plenty of pottery. Is it just me, or does anyone else think these designs are stunningly modern?

The Minoans used a container called a larnax for human remains. A corpse was either doubled over in the box or the cremated ashes were stored in it. The first two are very early terracotta and were for ordinary people, but the third photo shows the famous Haga Triada larnax made from limestone and decorated with frescoes. It looks so Egyptian! This sarcophagus was for a prince, and has been dated to a period when the Minoans had a lot of contact with Egypt. The fourth picture includes the detail of a bull being sacrificed on a table. Bulls were hugely significant in Minoan culture, and I'll get to them specifically in a few paragraphs.

Actually to be fair the museum has a lot of larnakes, and most are decorated terracotta, somewhere in between these two extremes.

The human figurines are plentiful. As offerings to the inconsistent and unpredictable gods, they'd represent insurance from falling into disfavour with the other world. I was particularly struck with the disembodied limbs. If you had a problem with your hand, you offered an arm to the gods. Sore foot? Give them a leg. The body position of so many of the figurines — the arms crossed over the body and one arm raised — was the attitude of worship.

Given that it was the Bronze Age, there are bronze figurines too. The three statues in the second picture represent Apollo, his sister Artemis and their mother Leto. I'm sure that Apollo wasn't really twice the size of his mother and sister, but then again, who knows.

The snake goddess figurines caused great excitement when they were discovered in 1903. Snakes had symbolic significance across the region, including the link between snakes shedding their skins and the renewal of life. Apparently there was a flurry of fakes created and sold to various European and American museums! No one is quite sure what the (authentic) figurines were used for, but they are probably linked to fertility. Images of Minoan women often have the voluptuous bare breasts — yet oddly this feels far more powerful socially than sexual to me.

I was fascinated by the bronze warrior accoutrements. Homer's stories, the battles of Troy, the sound of steel in hand-to-hand combat — these come alive for me when I imagine these functional pieces being used. The second helmet is made from boar's tusk sewn onto leather. Less protective than bronze, but more ceremonial. The shields intrigued me: the warrior's hand goes 'into' the animal head from behind and presumably the head adds a layer of protection. But wouldn't this extra embellishment make the shield much heavier to carry? So much to think about and to learn.

Ah, the bulls. The image of the bull permeates the Minoan world. Bulls are on the palace walls, on jewellery, on frescoes, in figurines. They're also on rhytons, a type of pouring vessel, with holes in two ends. The Bull's Head rhyton (fourth photo below) is probably the most famous one. To hold liquid, they had to be plugged. Historians now believe that they were used to hold blood from sacrificial animals, which was collected and then poured onto the ground as a libation to the gods.

Remember the bull-leaper fresco? Here's a model of a bull-leaper as he/she is somersaulting over the bull's back. Impressive. Makes those modern Pamplona bull-runners look amateur ...

I was awestruck by Minoan history but I am wrenching myself away now. We'll amble on to another island: Rhodes. I don't guarantee there won't be more history there, but it'll be more modern.

More to come.