We arrived at Pachia Ammos by chance. My little daughter had spent the night with a fever and we could not extend the stay at the hotel in Heraklion. We had to find accommodation nearby. We followed the coast eastwards, looked out over Mirabello Bay, and when we finally left the resorts behind, we stopped. There were a few scattered houses, a long beach of pebbles and gray sand, a short pier, and a tavern where rooms were rented. Under an awning, an older man shelled beans. We sat down to eat, stuffed grape leaves, zucchini with cheese, salad and golden brown to the exact point.
The price of the room seemed more than correct to us. At dusk, the tavern keeper knocked on the door of the room.
“For the girl to recover, there is nothing better than tomato with olive oil,” he said.
And he gave us a bottle of oil and some tomatoes. We decided to extend the stay for several days.
The next morning, we finished tracing the curve of the Mirabello Gulf to approach Mohlos, another coastal town: three taverns and an islet with bushes as speckled as the skin of a jaguar. Above the waves, a white chapel. In Minoan times, the islet was attached to land. Faithful devotees threw amphorae into the water to honor Neptune, who rewarded them by separating them from Crete and sinking its dock under the sea.
At night, the moon crossed the sky with thin bull horns. And, during the following days, we dedicated ourselves to discovering that eastern end of Crete. We discovered an island with the skin of a withered dragon: scaly, rough, barely shaded by the gray down of some olive trees and split with the cuts of torrents and gorges. The rocks stuck out like old bones. And the haze arranged the vertical walls in successive curtains, one after another, like the stage for a divine tragedy.
Turning our backs to the sea, we went up to the white town of Kritsa, which was repeatedly devastated by the stubbornness of its inhabitants for joining every attempt at rebellion. Perhaps that is why his church of Panagia Kera seemed clinging to the ground. Thus it has preserved some frescoes from the thirteenth century that look like they have just been painted.
And we continued ascending, curve after curve, until, finally, after overcoming a last hill, we discovered a plateau more than half a mile high. The plain spread like a quilt, cultivated in patches. Pear trees, cherry trees, apple trees, all the fruit trees were in bloom and their white petals danced along the road.
Surrounded by a ring of snow-stained ridges, the Lasithi plateau is a strange, closed, circular world. With dozens of mills from when Crete was Venetian, it seems like a kingdom out of time. And there must be something, because even the god Cronus overlooked it. This is how his son, baby Zeus, was saved, hidden in a cave at the foot of Mount Dicte. Neither on land, nor in the sky or in the sea, did his father find him, because the nymph Amalthea had hung the cradle from a tree. And they hid the little one’s cries with warrior dances. Fed with goat’s milk and bee honey, the baby grew beautiful and strong, so strong that he dethroned Cronus and became the supreme god of Olympus.
At Lasithi, my little girl also showed that she had recovered. When we stopped to eat, she swallowed the tomato salad as if her life depended on it, and then she chewed lamb and potatoes, and finished the banquet with a serving of yogurt drizzled with honey that could very well be the best of our lives. The delicacy of the gods.
