Mochlos – Minoan harbour and fishing village on Mirabello Bay

Mochlos (Μόχλος) has kept the unhurried look of a village by the sea. Barely a hundred people live here all year round; tavernas and low houses line the water’s edge, and beside them open shingle coves and quiet little beaches. The village is reached by hairpin bends that drop to the sea from the national road at Sfaka or Tourloti, the Ornos mountains at its back shutting it off from the rest of the island. The water is clear, there are no large hotel complexes, and on the waterfront one sits right beside the sea with no through traffic to disturb the peace – a place for days on which one has nothing more in mind than to swim, read and eat fish.

Facing the village, some 150 metres from the shore, lies the islet of Agios Nikolaos, named after the white chapel of St Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers. On Venetian maps it appears as “Scoglio de Muflo”. The strait is hardly more than two and a half metres deep; practised swimmers cross it in a few minutes, though it is more comfortable to go over in a fisherman’s boat, which can be arranged by asking in the tavernas. The islet is a protected archaeological zone: landing and visiting are possible only within the regulations in force, walls must not be walked on and sherds must not be picked up.

Minoan Mochlos

The first settlers arrived in Early Minoan times, roughly between 3650 and 3000 BC, and by the middle of the 3rd millennium the place had grown into a large village with houses, streets and workshops. Thanks to its position on a natural bay – more precisely, on two sheltered anchorages either side of a spit of land – Mochlos became an important junction of sea traffic. Obsidian from the island of Melos and raw materials from the Near East reached Crete through this harbour, and later copper in the form of oxhide ingots from Cyprus; stone vessels modelled on Egyptian ones attest early links as far as the Nile. On the islet and on the mainland, residential quarters, workshops, tombs and traces of the working harbour have come to light, and the settlement continued to develop through the Minoan periods that followed. At its height it covered a little under a hectare and housed some hundreds of people.

The site was discovered in 1908 by the American Richard Seager, who uncovered parts of the settlement and the Early Minoan cemetery on the western slope of the islet. It is regarded as one of the largest and most important burial grounds of its period on Crete: more than twenty built tombs laid out like small houses – the grandest of them, two groups of three chambers, on a terrace in the west, plainer ones on the south slope – together with burials in storage jars, in rock shelters and in simple pits. Nikolaos Platon worked here in the 1950s; Jeffrey Soles drew up the first full plan of the cemetery in the 1970s, and since 1989 a Greek-American mission under Soles and Kostis Davaras has been excavating. It found the Neopalatial town of c. 1700–1430 BC, with lanes crossing at right angles and houses of two and three storeys on terraces up the slope, and an artisans’ quarter on the opposite shore, where pottery, textiles, bronze, stone vessels and ivory were worked. The largest building, on the north-west edge of the town, was a three-storeyed ceremonial house faced with dressed sandstone, with two pillar crypts on its ground floor; another, the so-called House of the Metal Merchant, contained hoards of bronze. The town was destroyed at the time of the eruption of the Thera volcano and immediately rebuilt; it finally perished by fire.

In one of the large buildings and in the tombs were found gold jewellery, diadems, seals, stone vessels, double axes and tools, as well as vessels of silver. A gold signet ring showing a goddess in a curious boat became famous. These finds bear witness to a prosperous community and a highly developed craftsmanship: gold jewellery, sealstones and vessels of steatite and serpentine were made at Mochlos itself, and the place accounts for well over a third of all the gold objects known from Early Minoan Crete. A considerable part of the material is kept in the Archaeological Museums of Heraklion, Agios Nikolaos and Sitia – the last has an elaborate ivory box from one of the town houses.

After the end of the palaces the town shrank to a scatter of houses but remained inhabited; on the beach of Limenaria Mycenaean chamber tombs, some thirty in all, were discovered in 1986. There was a little habitation on the summit in the 7th and again in the late 5th century BC. In the 1st century BC the islet was given a fortification wall on its north and east sides, presumably on the orders of powerful Hierapytna, the modern Ierapetra, and the settlement of that time included an eight-roomed building for the production of oil or wine. People lived here into Byzantine times, when there was a farmstead and the summit was reoccupied, until pirate raids drove the inhabitants away.

When the island was still a peninsula

In antiquity the islet was joined to the mainland by a narrow strip of land. The gradual rise in sea level, and earthquakes that caused the coast to subside, altered the shore and turned the peninsula into an island. A Late Hellenistic fish tank on the coast now lies almost two metres lower than it did when it was in use – a vivid measure of that movement. With the disappearance of the land bridge Mochlos lost its two harbours and with them its importance. The remains of ancient buildings under water can be made out from a boat; diving requires a permit and strict observance of the protection regulations.

West of the village is Limenaria beach, of fine shingle. It suits those who like more solitude, but there is hardly any natural shade and the seabed shelves quickly – care is needed with small children. Mochlos is a destination in its own right and equally a stop on a tour of the archaeological sites of eastern Crete, combined for instance with Gournia, Vasiliki and the museum at Sitia.