Palekastro (the “old castle”) and the beaches of Chiona and Kouremenos

Palekastro, Chiona and Kouremenos

Palekastro lies a little under twenty kilometres east of Sitia in a broad plain covered with olive groves, two kilometres from the sea. With its square lined with kafenia, the village is the last place of any size before the eastern tip of the island and a natural base for Vai, Itanos, Toplou Monastery and Zakros. Between its two beaches rises the striking table-topped hill of Kastri, a promontory due east of the village whose flat summit looks as though it had been sliced off. Fortifications once stood on it, and it is to this “old castle” above the shore that the village owes its name.

North of Kastri the beach of Kouremenos runs for more than a kilometre and a half as an open bay of fine brownish sand and shingle between Cape Plaka and Cape Tenta, fringed with tamarisks that give some natural shade; it is the longest beach in the district. In summer the meltemi blows here strongly and evenly from the side, and from April to October there are few days when it does not reach force four on the Beaufort scale; Kouremenos is accordingly reckoned one of the best places in Greece for windsurfing, and windsurfing schools and hire stations operate on the beach. Close inshore the water is flat and shallow enough for beginners, while further out there are waves for the experienced. Chiona, south of Kastri, is by contrast sheltered by headlands: fine sand, a very shallow seabed that suits children, and on the shore a handful of fish tavernas whose reputation reaches far beyond the village. Anyone who walks on southwards along the coast from Chiona comes after a few minutes to small, deserted rocky coves.

The folk museum and the Minoan town of Roussolakkos

In the village a folk museum, set up in a restored old house, displays the household goods of eastern Crete: weavings and a loom, pottery, the tools of farmers and craftsmen, furniture and everyday utensils. A few kilometres away, immediately behind the beach of Chiona, lies the excavation site of Roussolakkos (Ρουσόλακκος, “red pit”) – one of the largest Minoan towns known, a trading settlement inhabited from the Early Minoan period to the last phase of the Late Bronze Age. The British School at Athens began digging here in 1902 under Robert Carr Bosanquet, joined by Richard Dawkins, and worked until 1906; Hugh Sackett and Mervyn Popham returned in 1962–63, and since 1983 the excavation has been continued, with long interruptions, into the present under Sandy MacGillivray, Sackett and Jan Driessen.

What has been uncovered are blocks of houses separated by straight, paved streets, together with lanes, water conduits, drains and workshops; a broad main street runs through the town. It was not built at a single stroke but existed through various phases of Minoan history, and was several times destroyed and rebuilt. The fenced area covers some 50,000 square metres, and the town certainly extended beyond it. A palace, which one would expect in a town of this size, has not been found to this day.

Finds, sanctuaries and the hymn to Zeus

From Roussolakkos come painted pottery of high quality, clay tablets in Linear A script and cult equipment. The most celebrated find is the “Palaikastro Kouros”: a statuette of a youth about half a metre high, made around 1450 BC of hippopotamus ivory, gold foil, grey-green serpentine for the hair and rock crystal for the eyes, the parts held together with olive-wood dowels. It had been burnt and deliberately smashed in antiquity, and was recovered from 1987 onwards in a great many fragments – the torso first, the head in 1988, pieces of the legs in 1990, the rest by sieving the soil; it is now the showpiece of the Archaeological Museum of Sitia, and is thought by many to be the only cult image to survive from Minoan Crete. On the summit of Petsofas, which overlooks the plain from the south at 255 metres, lay a Minoan peak sanctuary first dug by John Myres in 1903, in whose thick layers of ash thousands of small clay figures of people, animals and single limbs had been deposited – the limbs, it is supposed, as prayers for healing. When Costis Davaras re-excavated the site in 1971 he found two stone libation tables inscribed in Linear A. A waymarked path leads up and rewards the walker with a wide view over the coast.

Above the ruins of the Minoan town the sanctuary of Dictaean Zeus arose in historical times. There, in May 1904, the excavators found four fragments of a limestone slab bearing a hymn to the god: the “greatest Kouros”, son of Kronos, is called upon to “leap” into the herds, the fields, the cities and the ships for the coming year and bring them increase. The verses were composed in the late 4th or early 3rd century BC, with a refrain sung between each of the six stanzas, but the surviving copy was cut only at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. The inscription bears witness to the religious ties of eastern Crete; an “environmental law” in the modern sense it is not. The finds from Palekastro are kept in the museums of Crete, chiefly in Sitia and in Heraklion, where the hymn itself is on display. Coast, archaeological sites and museum thus make up a single cultural landscape, in which beach life and history lie side by side.