Crete and Rhodes, 4 thousand years on the western frontier

A small question: how was Western civilization born? The answer is easier than it sounds, and it touched us (along with other lighter sensations) as we disembarked from a cruise ship on the island of Crete this summer. Civilization without adjectives flourished at the beginning in Mesopotamia and Egypt, then the Phoenicians spread it by ship here and there in the Mediterranean, and the first place where it took root in Europe was precisely Crete, with characters that made it a daughter. of the East, but with something that from the beginning, 4 thousand years ago, distinguished it as peculiar; from there, through Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc., it continues to reach us (and maybe it wasn’t worth it …).

Crete and another island in the extreme south of the Greek Archipelago, namely Rhodes, were on the border between East and West even in a completely different historical context, when they acted as a bulwark of Christianity against the Turks: Rhodes hosted an order of crusader knights while “Candia”, as it was called, was the scene of the last resistance of the Venetians. And again Rhodes was the object of the decisive push against the dying Turkish Empire when an Italian fleet, distant heir to the Venetian one, occupied the island in 1912 in the wake of the Libyan war. It should be noted that Turkey now wants to question everything, from the eastern Mediterranean to Libya.

In short, in these parts there is a lot of history and a lot of international political topicality, but we would like to give precedence to mythology, because Rhodes and Crete, in addition to representing two stops on our cruise, also correspond to two chapters of the book by Guidorizzi and Romani “Il mare degli of the. Mythological guide to the islands of Greece ”, which made us the author Baedeker in this navigation.

Although civilization in Crete is much older, we begin this new chapter of the reportage from Rhodes, a bit to follow the real order of the stages of our summer cruise (Rhodes was the fourth stop and Crete the fifth, after the islets of Athens, Mykonos and Santorini) and partly because we benefit from the fresh memory of 40 medals won by Italy at the Olympics and we start by telling an episode of the Hellenic Olympics with four athletes from Rhodes as protagonists.

There was a Rhodesian boxer named Diagora who had a herculean physique, was two meters tall and had won repeated Olympic laurels. By now old he presented himself to another Olympics, but this time as a spectator, and saw one of his sons triumph in boxing, another in wrestling and the third in pancrazio (a hybrid between the two disciplines). Diagora exploded with joy, the children lifted him up and gave him a tour of honor around the stadium; and while the boys were carrying him in triumph, Diagora died, at the height of happiness.

Rhodes was sacred to Elios, the Sun; when Zeus (Jupiter) divided the universe among the gods he forgot to assign a part of it to this particular god, because at that moment he was busy riding his chariot of fire; Zeus himself realized the mistake, and was about to make up for it by redoing the distribution from scratch, but Elios prevented him, telling him that while he was crossing the sky he had seen a strip of submerged land that seemed beautiful to him, and to make him happy it would have been enough that Zeus made it emerge: said and done, the island of Rhodes “blossomed the sea like a rose” and from that moment it was consecrated to the Sun.

Although Crete is the largest Greek island, it is not among those whose myths are told in “The Sea of ​​the Gods”, perhaps because its specific mythological heritage refers to an archaic era, prior to classicism. But we met her in the circumnavigation of our cruise and we visited the palace of Knossos, convenient for those who disembark in the port of Iraklion, so we dedicate a space to her. From what we can see, in a palace like this we do not imagine that there are people like Achilles, or Pericles, or Aristotle, but Conan the Barbarian.