Cretan H and S

This photo is for Rosemary of Five Valleys fame. I promised I would find it to show her and I discovered it yesterday whilst looking for other stuff.

It is a large Minoan tomb set into the rocky hillside of what is now an almond grove in Crete. Just off the main road leading between Heraklion and the South, hand-painted signs point to the almond grove (or they were hand-painted years ago) which say 'Minoan Tombs'. It is quite easy to shoot past them without noticing. This is why many people have never seen them.

The hillside is very steep and there is a cluster of what look like trenches cut into the rock, of varying sizes. The trenches are the top of the tomb entrances and they spread out wider the deeper they go. The entrances are cut horizontally, so the the deeper they are, the taller the 'roofs'.

They terminate in a small chamber containing what looks like benches around the walls. This was where the dead were placed before the tomb was sealed with a large slab. The tombs are unlit and the only way I could see the inside was to fire the flash of my camera. I warned the German tourist couple that were down there at the time that I was about to do this so I did not blind them.

In most other countries they would put railings around the trenches above ground to stop people falling in and down, but Cretans have a very different attitude to Health and Safety. A whitewashed rock in the middle of a mountain road just before a hairpin bend denotes that the road has collapsed just around the corner. I learned this the hard way by driving around a white rock at night at speed, only to find that the piece of road I was intending to use was now about 1000 feet down in the valley, blending in with the rest of the rubble.

All of the ordinary road signs in the mountains are riddled with bullet holes. Most of the mountain-dwellers have guns, and most of them are vintage left-overs from WW2 and the German occupation. At midnight on Easter Sunday, the rattle of gunfire echoes around the mountains and can be heard miles down in the tourist towns which fringe the beaches of the South Coast.

Crete in the Spring, with its flower-covered mountain slopes, is wonderful.