Kalamafka – springs, crags and the Minoan hills of the Kryos Potamos

Kalamafka: springs, crags and the Minoan hills of the Kryos Potamos

Kalamafka lies at 480 metres on the edge of the hill country, some 15 kilometres north-west of Ierapetra and about 25 from Agios Nikolaos – at one of the narrowest points of Crete, so that from the heights above the village the Sea of Crete and the Libyan Sea can be seen at once. What sets the place apart is water: the springs of Kefalovrysi feed a stream that runs through the middle of the settlement and allow plane trees, gardens and olive groves to flourish where all around is dry. Following the valleys south-west, one comes into the valley of the Kryos Potamos and down to the coast of the Libyan Sea, with its beaches of sand and shingle. The result is a landscape of transition between the fertile inland valley and the sea. About five hundred people live here permanently, most of them from farming – not many more than the 435 counted by the Venetians in 1583, when the village was the seat of a feudal lord. Its tavernas, seven of them at the last count, are a favourite outing for the people of Ierapetra, and on account of its situation Kalamafka is often called the “Arachova of Crete”.

Kastelos and ancient Larisa

Opposite the village rises Kastelos, a steep limestone stack whose forms have earned the district the nickname “Meteora of Lasithi”. From the village square a stairway of 224 steps climbs to a deep cave in which the whitewashed chapel of the Holy Cross (Timios Stavros) has been fitted up, plain as an island house inside, with a bell tower and a broad terrace before it that commands the whole basin. On the western edge of the cliff weathering has shaped a colossal figure that the villagers call the Stone God. The cave was regarded as a place of cult as early as Minoan times and later served as a refuge; from it comes a bronze statuette of Asclepius, now kept in Oxford. Kastelos was the peak sanctuary and acropolis of ancient Larisa, which scholars place here; the name is taken to mean a place rich in water, and Asclepius is said to have been the city’s protecting god. Strabo reports that the inhabitants of this Cretan city were transplanted to Hierapytna; that probably happened in the 3rd century BC, when the city that is now Ierapetra subdued its neighbour. Sub-Minoan burials with skulls, pots and spearheads have been found near by at the spot called Psathi. On 14 September, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the village holds its great festival up on the rock; a second follows on 15 August in honour of the Panagia. Also worth seeing are the church of the village patron, St Antony, with its carved woodwork, and the post-Byzantine frescoed churches of Agios Georgios and Timios Stavros in the locality of Kastellana.

Pyrgos and Fournou Koryfi

The history of the wider neighbourhood reaches deep into Minoan times. On the hill of Pyrgos, above the mouth of the Kryos Potamos at Myrtos, archaeologists discovered a settlement of the Early Minoan period, dated roughly to the years 2400 to 2200 BC. After a fire around 2200 BC it was rebuilt and enlarged, acquiring a two-storey communal tomb in which the remains of 65 people were found and, in the time of the first palaces, a tower and a cistern on the northern slope. Later, around 1600 BC, a building of several storeys stood here, of which the lower floor survives – a country house of some pretension, with a paved court and a wide view along the coast. On the neighbouring hill of Fournou Koryfi, 1.7 kilometres to the east, a still older settlement was uncovered, a tightly knit mesh of some ninety small rooms, which likewise ended in fire. Both hills were excavated by the British School at Athens: Fournou Koryfi in the late 1960s under Peter Warren, Pyrgos from 1970 to 1982 under Gerald Cadogan. Down on the coast, in the village of Myrtos, the remains of Roman baths can also be seen.

Myrtos, 1943

Kalamafka and Myrtos are neighbours, the one in the hinterland and the other on the coast of Ierapetra, but they are two different places. The memory of the tragedy of Myrtos in 1943 therefore belongs to the history of the neighbouring village: there, on 15 September, the German occupying troops shot eighteen inhabitants and burned the village down because it had supported the resistance. The event forms part of the reprisals that struck the villages of Viannos and western Ierapetra in the middle of September 1943. It holds a particular place in the memory of Crete.