The Dictaean Cave, the Lasithi Plateau and Tzermiado

The Dictaean Cave and the way up to the Lasithi Plateau

The Dictaean Cave – Diktaion Andron (Δικταίο Άντρο) – lies above the village of Psychro at an altitude of about 1,025 metres, on the northern slopes of Dikti. Two paths lead from the car park at Psychro to the entrance: a newly laid one to the left that climbs gently, and the old stony track, whose stones have been worn smooth and can be slippery. The ascent takes about a quarter of an hour, and on the way the view opens wide across the bowl of the plateau. In season the tavernas at the starting point are open, there is ample room to park, and local people offer a ride up on a donkey. Tickets are bought at the entrance to the cave itself.

The cave is sunk into the limestone of Dikti and covers some 2,200 square metres. The visitors’ route is about 250 metres long; the halls are lit and fitted with steps and handrails. Just inside, to the right, is an antechamber where wild pigeons nest; from this upper hall one descends steeply into the lower, which divides into several chambers and holds a small lake at its deepest point. The water is lowest at the end of September and rises noticeably with the winter rains. There are columns, stalactites, stalagmites, stone curtains and massive flowstone formations to be seen. One of the best known is the “Mantle of Zeus”, a deeply folded stalactite that hangs above the lake like a chandelier and suffered in the past at the hands of visitors. The cave impresses not only by its myth but by its own architecture: over immeasurable spans of time, water has slowly shaped the stone. Bats – the Mediterranean bent-wing species – roost in the lower chambers. It is cool and damp below throughout the year, with humidity of around 85 per cent, and a jacket and shoes with a firm tread are advisable even at the height of summer.

That the cave was a sanctuary has been proved by excavation. It came to light by chance in 1883, and in 1886 Iosif Chatzidakis and the Italian Federico Halbherr made the first small investigation; Arthur Evans followed in 1896 and the Frenchman Pierre Demargne in 1898, and from 1899 the Englishman David Hogarth dug systematically and opened up the lower hall. In the upper cave stood a built, plastered altar surrounded by ash and broken pottery, the residue of sacrifice. The excavators found votive offerings in great numbers: bronze statuettes, weapons, knife blades, needles, miniature double axes, stone libation tables and seal stones of carnelian, steatite, amethyst and jasper, many of which pilgrims had pushed into the crevices of the stalactites. The cave was in use from the 3rd millennium BC, at first as a dwelling and burial place, and as a place of worship from about 2000 BC, with its heyday in the Middle Minoan period; veneration continued through the Geometric and Archaic periods into the Roman, though from about 700 BC the Idaean Cave drew the greater share of the pilgrims. The finds are now mainly in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with smaller groups in the Louvre and the British Museum.

The myth of the birth of Zeus

According to the Greek myth, Kronos lived in fear of a prophecy: one of his children would overthrow him, just as he had himself overthrown his father Ouranos. He therefore swallowed each of them at birth. Rhea, unwilling to hand over her youngest, came to Crete and concealed the birth of Zeus in a mountain cave. In place of the child she gave her husband a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and Kronos swallowed it without noticing the deception.

The infant was guarded by the Kouretes, the armed attendants of the Great Goddess. They beat their spears against their shields and drowned the crying of the child, so that Kronos should not hear it. Amaltheia fed Zeus with milk, and nymphs brought honey. Once grown, Zeus rose against his father, freed the brothers and sisters who had been swallowed and took his place at the head of the new race of Olympian gods.

The Lasithi Plateau and the villages of Dikti

Psychro lies on the south-western rim of the Lasithi Plateau, an enclosed, fertile basin at about 840 to 850 metres, some eleven kilometres from east to west and six from north to south, ringed by the mountains of Dikti, whose highest summit, Spathi, reaches 2,148 metres. Around a dozen and a half small villages are strung along the foot of the slopes beside the fields and orchards – the plain itself is kept for cultivation – and joined by a ring road about 23 kilometres long, from which lanes branch off to churches, old stone houses and tavernas. The second largest of them, after Tzermiado, is Agios Georgios, which has the plateau’s museums. The plateau is best understood not as a single sight but as a living farming landscape in which work in the fields, festivals and the memory of very ancient sanctuaries exist side by side.

Its history, too, is that of a place of refuge. For a long time – more than two centuries from 1293 – the Venetians forbade all settlement and cultivation and had the villages pulled down, in order to deprive rebels of their base; only in the early 15th century were refugees allowed to settle the plain again. Later, between 1514 and 1560, they had the waterlogged plain drained by a grid of straight ditches, the “linies”, which divided it into 193 fields; the grid can still be made out today and still carries the water to the Chonos sinkhole on the western edge, the source of the River Aposelemis. In May 1867 Ottoman and Egyptian troops under Omer Pasha attacked the plateau for ten days and destroyed its villages; houses were burnt, livestock killed, and many of the inhabitants slaughtered or carried off as slaves.

The chief place of the plateau is Tzermiado, seat of the municipality, at about 850 metres, some 49 kilometres from Agios Nikolaos and 55 from Heraklion. The village – it appears in 1630 in Francesco Basilicata as “Zermiades” – has grown up on the northern slopes of Selena and has kept its Cretan appearance: stone houses, tiled roofs, courtyards and a great deal of greenery. There are guesthouses, coffee houses and tavernas, and it makes a convenient base for excursions to the cave, to Karfi, to the monasteries – above all the Panagia Kroustallenia on its hill, a 16th-century foundation destroyed in 1823 and again in 1867 – and to the mountain paths. The inhabitants live mainly from growing potatoes and vegetables.

Karfi and the memory of the Minoans

Above Tzermiado the path climbs to Karfi, a rocky spur at a good 1,100 metres whose name means “nail”. On the summit lie the ruins of a Late Minoan settlement which arose after the upheavals associated with the arrival of the Dorians and was inhabited from about 1200 to 1000 BC; the peak itself had served earlier, in Middle Minoan times, as an open-air mountain sanctuary. Among the rubble one can make out the remains of single-storey houses along paved lanes, some of them of megaron type with a central hearth, and of a shrine with an altar; a little lower down, in the area known as Ta Mnimata, are round funerary buildings, small tholos tombs, many of them robbed long ago. Water came from the spring of Vitsilovrysi nearby. The site was excavated in the seasons of 1937 to 1939 by the Englishman John Pendlebury with the British School, and perhaps only a third of it has been uncovered; from the shrine come the clay goddesses with upraised arms and cylindrical skirts that now stand in the Heraklion museum, together with loom weights, miniature vases and figurines of animals. Estimates of the population vary widely and run to several thousand – 3,500 is a figure often quoted. From the top there is one of the most impressive views over the plateau and the mountains of Dikti – and northwards as far as the sea.

Wind pumps – the technical memory of Lasithi

North of Tzermiado, on the pass of Seli Ambelou, stand stone windmills; individual groups comprise dozens of buildings, and of the 27 that once lined this ridge 24 survive, all facing north-west into the prevailing wind and listed since 1986. They were built here at the end of the 19th century to grind grain. The wind wheels of the plain, by contrast, were no ornament but pumps: the wind raised the water from the shallow water table and helped to irrigate the fields through the dry summer months. In the 20th century thousands of these white-sailed pumps were at work on the plateau – more than ten thousand, it is said, at their peak in the 1950s – and made a piece of peasant engineering into one of the best-known images of Crete. Werner Herzog recorded the sea of turning sails in 1968 in his film “Signs of Life”.

A particular part was played by the local inventor Emmanouil Papadakis of Psychro, known for his ingenuity as Spirtokoutis, “Matchbox”. Around 1890 he transferred the gearing of the stone mill to a pump – at first on a wooden frame, a simple tripod, and from the 1920s on an iron one, a change credited to Stefanos Markakis of the village of Marmaketo, which allowed taller towers and better performance – and showed how an everyday problem of farming can be solved with the materials to hand. Shortly after 1900 there were only about twenty of the wooden machines; the light metal frame with its triangular cloth sails then spread across the whole plain. From the 1970s diesel and electric pumps displaced the wind wheels. Today many stand idle and a few have been set up again at the entrances to the plateau and in taverna courtyards; yet their technology has been recognised since 2020 as part of the intangible cultural heritage of Greece, and the restored rows recall the shared labour of the people of the plateau.

The Cave of Kronos and the festivals of the plateau

Nearby is the cave of Trapeza, also called Kronio, at 860 metres and about 800 metres outside Tzermiado; a stepped, cobbled path shaded by oaks leads up to it in a few minutes. It consists of two main chambers with side recesses, and among its stalactites and stalagmites lay archaeological finds – potsherds, bones, the remains of many burials – that point to use in prehistory as a dwelling, sanctuary and burial place, from the Neolithic onwards; it too was investigated by John Pendlebury, in the mid-1930s. Local tradition associates it with the worship of Kronos, hence its second name. Near Tzermiado one also sees the church of the Holy Cross and other village churches, and in summer the villages come to life at the panigiria – patronal festivals with a church service, a market, music and hospitality.

How to experience this landscape

The way to the Dictaean Cave combines well with a stroll through Tzermiado, a visit to the windmills of Seli Ambelou and the climb to Karfi. The road passes through small villages where a stop at the church or in a taverna is worthwhile. Those who come early in the morning reach the cave before the excursion coaches; from the north coast the drive up takes three quarters of an hour to an hour. In this way the plateau reveals itself not as a backdrop for the myth of Zeus but as a place in which an age-old sanctuary, Minoan ruins, peasant technology and present-day life make up a single story.