Lato – the ancient Dorian city above Kritsa

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Lato – one of the best-preserved ancient cities on Crete

About three kilometres north of the village of Kritsa, and some ten from Agios Nikolaos, a saddle between two mountain summits is covered from end to end with ancient ruins. Here, 300 to 400 metres above the sea, the Dorians founded the city of Lato in the 7th century BC; to distinguish it from its harbour it is also called Lato Etera. As the ancient sources relate, the warlike Dorians ringed it with walls of enormous stone blocks and from here controlled the whole valley. Both summits served as an acropolis – one to the north, one to the south – and from the top the view extends to Mirabello Bay. Most of the buildings to be seen today date from the city’s heyday in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic periods, but the settlement probably goes back further. Pottery of the 12th century BC, the very end of the Bronze Age, has been found on the site, and a place name RA-TO that is associated with Lato already appears in Linear B texts of the Mycenaean period.

The inhabitants named their city after the goddess Leto – Lato in the Doric dialect – the mother of Apollo and Artemis. Its true patron, however, was Eileithyia, protectress of women in childbirth, whose image appears on the coins that Lato struck in its own name. The present Agios Nikolaos was then the Dorians’ commercial harbour and was called Lato pros Kamara, “Lato towards Kamara”. The two places were confused even in antiquity, and it is only modern scholarship that has clearly told them apart. The city’s territory took in large parts of what is now the Mirabello district, including Kritsa, Krousta, the Katharo plateau and the country around Kalo Chorio; a sanctuary outside the walls stood on Mount Thilakas, a kilometre and a half to the south-east. Inscriptions tell of boundary disputes and treaties with neighbouring cities such as Olous and Hierapytna. Lato was the birthplace of Nearchus, a close companion of Alexander the Great and commander of his fleet, who led the voyage home from the Indus through the Persian Gulf. Towards the end of the Hellenistic period, around 200 BC, the mountain city lost its importance and was destroyed or abandoned, its people drifting down to the coast; its harbour of Kamara, by contrast, lived on into Roman times.

A walk through the city

The visitor enters by an impressive city gate – the single main entrance through the circuit wall – on to a paved main street, in effect a long flight of steps fitted to the slope, which was lined with workshops and houses. Many of the houses had small cisterns of their own, fed by rainwater. The street climbs to the agora, the market and meeting place, shaped like an irregular trapezium, through which every citizen had to pass on his way. Here stood a small colonnade and a shrine in which the archaeologists found a great number of terracotta figurines; which deity it served is not known, though Leto herself has been suggested. In the middle of the square lies the dexameni, a large, deep cistern for collecting rainwater, with steps leading down to the bottom – the city had its own water supply. A monumental flight of steps, broad enough to seat about 80 people, leads up from the market to the prytaneion, the seat of the kosmoi, the highest magistrates – the government building, in modern terms – which dates from the second half of the 4th century BC. It had two large rooms: a colonnaded court for the sittings and a hall with a hearth in the centre for the symposia at which the “members of the government” and envoys from other cities were entertained, and where libations were poured to their health. The steps themselves served as the tiers of a small theatre, in which the citizens not only watched performances but also debated in public.

On the south side rises a temple of the late 4th or early 3rd century BC, with the base of the cult statue, which is itself lost; to the east of it is a second theatral area, partly cut from the rock and partly built up in masonry, whose benches held about 350 spectators. Sir Arthur Evans made a small investigation of the site between 1894 and 1896, but Lato was properly explored by the French School of Archaeology: first from 1899 to 1901 under Joseph Demargne, and then again from 1968 into the 1970s under Pierre Ducrey and Olivier Picard. A walk round Lato gives a vivid idea of the civic organisation the ancient Greeks attained and of the intelligence of their building.