Itanos: the ancient city at Erimoupoli

Itanos: the ancient harbour near Vai

Where the tarmac road beyond Vai gives out at three small sandy coves, there once stood one of the most important cities of eastern Crete. Itanos occupied two low hills – its twin acropolises, each with its sanctuaries – and the hollow between them, while two further hills closed the site to north and south; its roadstead commanded shipping round the north-eastern cape of the island. When the city was founded cannot be said with any precision. The finds show that the place was settled long before the Classical period – a survey of the promontory has mapped more than fifty sites of the Final Neolithic and Bronze Age, and the name may already appear, as Utana, on Linear B tablets – but Itanos should be linked to any particular Minoan settlement only with caution; the city proper took shape in the Geometric period, around the 8th century BC. Ancient tradition, preserved by Stephanus of Byzantium, named as founder one Itanos, son of Phoinix – or else a bastard son of one of the Kouretes – and so hinted at Phoenician connections.

The city owes its first appearance in literature to Herodotus. When, in the 7th century BC, the people of the island of Thera were commanded by the oracle at Delphi to found a colony in Libya and nobody knew the way, their scouts found at Itanos a purple-fisher named Korobios, whom a storm had once driven on to the Libyan coast. He guided them across – the first step towards the foundation of Cyrene.

Purple, Ptolemies and the quarrel over the land of Zeus

In the Hellenistic period Itanos was a trading city, among the most powerful on Crete and unusually outward-looking for the island, with close ties to Egypt and the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. Its territory ran from Cape Samonion at the northern tip of the peninsula to Cape Erythrai in the far south-east. It grew rich on seaborne commerce – its exports included fish, sponges and glassware – and on the extraction of purple dye from the shells of murex snails. The city’s coins show a fish-tailed sea deity with a trident and two sea monsters facing one another. Temples of Asclepius, Athena, Tyche and Zeus are attested within the walls, and Itanos claimed the stewardship of the sanctuary of Dictaean Zeus near Palekastro, which received votive offerings and whose prestige underpinned the city’s political influence.

Inscriptions and historical notices tell of long-drawn-out conflicts with Praisos and Hierapytna. To hold its own against these neighbours, Itanos placed itself under the protection of the Ptolemies, who kept a garrison in the city from the 3rd century BC; as late as the middle of the 2nd century BC the Itanians appealed to King Ptolemy VI Philometor for help against Praisos. Once Hierapytna had destroyed Praisos, the two remaining powers confronted each other directly and fought over the temple land and the island of Leuke, the present-day Koufonisi. At the instigation of the Roman Senate the city of Magnesia on the Maeander twice gave judgement in favour of Itanos, in a ruling that fixed the city’s territory at its greatest extent, some 130 square kilometres; the marble slab bearing the verdict of 112/111 BC is today built into the church façade of Toplou Monastery. In this way the city was drawn into the Roman sphere of influence.

The Roman period, the basilicas and the end

Under Roman rule, too, Itanos kept its importance and went on striking its own coins. Later a Christian community lived here: within the excavated area are the remains of three early Christian basilicas, built in part from the columns and ashlar blocks of older temples, along with residential quarters, streets, cemeteries and harbour works; the lower town below the eastern acropolis is covered by buildings of the Christian centuries laid over earlier remains. The city’s demise cannot be put down to a single event. Earthquakes – that of 795 is the one most often named – the shifting of the sea routes and the Arab raids of the 9th century gradually emptied the coast. The heavy destruction is linked with the Arab attack of 824, and some scholars hold that the city had been given up as early as the 7th century, after a life of some fourteen hundred years; the archaeological picture, however, is one of slow change over centuries, and a modest settlement may have lingered on until the 15th century, when pirates made the district unsafe.

A walk through the ruins

Itanos has been investigated since the late 19th century, first by the Italian Federico Halbherr, who worked here between 1884 and 1887, then by the French School at Athens – under Demargne at the turn of the century and again in 1950, when a search for Minoan levels produced only pottery from Protogeometric to Hellenistic – which since the 1990s has been digging and surveying here once more together with Greek colleagues. The site is open and may be visited freely. On the eastern acropolis, which juts into the sea between the beach that was the ancient harbour and the beach of Erimoupoli, lie the foundations of a large basilica; on the western hill a stretch of Hellenistic defensive wall in carefully fitted dark ashlar catches the eye – it belonged to a tower, part of a system of walls and towers that also took in the southern hill. To the north stretches the necropolis, in use from the late Geometric to the late Hellenistic period, where a road separates two sectors with an Archaic building and stepped funerary monuments; a marble gravestone of the late 2nd century BC from Itanos, carved with a warrior, is in the museum at Agios Nikolaos. Parts of the harbour town now lie below sea level and can be made out when snorkelling. The three beaches of Erimoupoli have no facilities and are quiet even in high summer.