The Golden Step by Christopher Somerville

Author:Christopher Somerville [Somerville, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907973338
Publisher: Haus Publishing

Looking north from the central court of the palace at Phaistos on the Mesara Plain, a modern-day visitor can make out the mouth of the Kamares Cave as easily as could the Minoans who worshipped there 4,000 years ago. The cave is seven miles distant and some 3,500 feet above the plain, yet it shows clearly as a sizeable black smudge high in the mountain wall, with the twin peaks of Mavri curving above like the horns of a bull.

It’s a hard morning’s hike up from the plain, on a poorly marked track that is often obscured by clouds. But the cave, and the immense view, make the climb worthwhile. Kamares is an enormous hole. Its mouth yawns well over a hundred feet across. The roof is sixty feet high, while the cave runs back a hundred yards into the hill – roughly the dimensions of a cathedral, and with the same sense of presence in the shadows.

As with all the major Cretan archaeological sites, a local man made the first finds by chance. It was in 1890, at the start of the golden era of archaeological discovery in Crete, that a shepherd picked up some shards of old pottery in the great cave high in the southern flank of Psiloritis. When Italian archaeologists made the first scientific exploration of the cave in 1892, they unearthed pottery of a beauty and delicacy far beyond anything yet dug out of Cretan soil. Further excavations in the early 1900s, and a British dig in 1913, brought to light still finer examples of this ‘Kamares ware’.

The pottery had been made in the palace workshops at Phaistos and neighbouring Agia Triada, in two distinct phases between 2000 and 1700 BC. The earlier type of pottery, probably thrown on a slow hand-turned wheel, featured red and white designs on a dark background. The later style must have been fashioned on a more sophisticated potter’s wheel, perhaps foot-driven, certainly capable of much faster speeds. This type of Kamares ware is astonishingly delicate, some of it dubbed ‘eggshell’ in reference to its thinness, as fragile as the finest porcelain. There are wide-mouthed cups with slender handles and out-turned rims, decorated with floral bands that narrow and widen to emphasise the flowing lines of the vessel. There are spouted jugs of yellow, black and orange, and kraters for mixing wine and water whose bowls are studded with exquisite eight-petalled flowers sculpted in three dimensions. To put the sophistication of this Old Palace-era pottery in context, much of northwest Europe in 1900 BC had not yet lifted itself out of the Stone Age, while in Britain the architects of Stonehenge were still labouring to fix their crudely-cut monoliths together. Many of the best pieces of Kamares ware, retrieved whole or painstakingly reassembled, are on show in the Iraklion Archaeological Museum, where their beauty lights up the display rooms.

It turned out, after analysis of the Kamares finds, that the cave had been in continuous use as a religious centre since

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