Crete Tours

Crete tours are expert-led trips across Crete, the large island that separates the Aegean from the Libyan Sea. The topics are the island itself, the painter Michael Damaskinos and the ancient city of Dreros. The rizitika songs and the Pentozali dance follow, then the singer Nikos Xylouris. The page ends with four short answers. Other pages cover the 10 day Greece itinerary and Greece island hopping tours. Crete itself belongs to the wider family of Greece tours.

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What are Crete tours?

Crete tours take place on the Greek island with the biggest population, over 600,000 people. The island lies apart from mainland Europe, Asia and Africa. That isolation shows in the rich variety of its wild animals and its plants.

Long before Crete tours, dwarf elephants, dwarf hippos, dwarf mammoths and dwarf deer lived on the island. Giant flightless owls shared the island with these dwarf animals. Flightless means unable to fly at all. All of them date from the Pleistocene, the geological epoch of the last great ice ages.

More than 200 kinds of wild orchid grow across the island. They include 14 varieties of Ophrys cretica, an orchid named after Crete. The griffon vultures of Crete form the largest island population of that bird anywhere in the world. Griffon vultures are big birds of prey that feed on carrion, meaning dead animals.

Change in the island’s economy became clear in the 1970s, as tourism gained weight. Income per person on Crete is much higher than the Greek average. Tourism is the business of serving visitors from other places. Crete tours run on an island where unemployment stands near 4%, one-sixth of the rate for all Greece.

• Dress: Cretan men can wear stivania, black knee-high riding boots, in everyday life.
• Cicadas: Locals call these insects tzitzikia, and they make a repeated tzi tzi sound.
• Dikti: The Dikti Mountains rise to 2,148 metres above the sea.

Crete tours concern an island where olive, oak, pine, cypress, chestnut, plane and tamarisk are common trees. A plane is a broad-leafed tree that gives deep shade. Trees grow taller in the west of the island, where water is more plentiful.

What does the painter Michael Damaskinos add to Crete tours?

Crete tours have a link to Michael Damaskinos, who was born in Candia. That was the earlier name of the city of Heraklion. He was a leading post-Byzantine Cretan painter. Post-Byzantine describes Greek art made after Byzantine rule ended.

Damaskinos stands as a major figure of the Cretan School of painting. That school flourished during the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 1560s he moved to Venice, where he learned miniature painting. Miniature painting is the art of making very small, detailed pictures. Crete tours unfold in the homeland of that school.

Contracts show that he stayed briefly in Sicily from 1569 to 1571. Afterwards he travelled back to Venice. He was a member of Venice’s Greek Brotherhood between 1577 and 1582. A brotherhood here means a society of Greeks living abroad. He returned to Candia around 1583. Later his work centred on Crete and the Ionian Islands.

His paintings stand out for a particular rose colour. He set the proportions of his figures with a handful of brush strokes. He was also the first artist to give post-Byzantine painting paler flesh tones. Flesh tones are the colours used for skin. Crete tours draw on an island that produced a painter with 100 known works.

• Vrontisi: Legend says he worked at Vrontisi Monastery, which kept six of his icons, or holy pictures, until 1800.
• Venice church: Twenty of his works belong to the Venetian church of San Giorgio dei Greci.
• Legacy: In a book of 1720, the painter Panagiotis Doxaras ranked him among the leading painters.

The Greek Orthodox brotherhood in Venice invited him back to paint the dome of San Giorgio dei Greci. He declined for personal reasons. His work also influenced the painter Theodore Poulakis. Today Candia, his birthplace, lies on the island of Crete tours.

Which records make ancient Dreros part of Crete tours?

Crete tours share their island with Dreros, an ancient archaeological site 16 km northwest of Agios Nikolaos. Neapoli, a town in the Lasithi region, stands close by. It is post-Minoan, so it dates from after the Minoan civilisation.

Only a chance remark by Theognostus, a 9th-century Byzantine grammarian, names it in surviving books. A grammarian studies the rules of a language. Mainland Greeks first settled the city early in the Archaic Period, the age before classical Greece. Lato and Prinias were settled at about the same time.

Digging first took place there in 1917. The city peaked in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. It has two acropoleis, or hilltop citadels, with an Archaic agora between them. An agora served as the open square of a Greek city, for meetings and trade. Crete tours happen on the island where its Dorian-dialect inscriptions came to light.

The sacred law of Dreros is the oldest full text of constitutional law yet found in Greece. Constitutional law sets out how a city is governed and who holds office. It names two Dorian Cretan offices, the kosmos and the damios. The law was inscribed on the island that now hosts Crete tours.

• Temple: Its temple of Apollo Delphinios, from around 750 BCE, is among the earliest free-standing Greek temples.
• Excavator: Spyridon Marinatos dug out the temple in 1935 and published his findings.
• Dreros Triad: Three statuettes of hammered bronze sheet, thought to show Apollo, Artemis and Leto, came from the temple area.

In Hellenistic times, Dreros declined in importance. Thirty Cretan cities signed a pact with King Eumenes II of Pergamum, and Dreros was not among them. The Hellenistic age followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. Those cities shared the island where Crete tours run today.

Which songs do the rizitika give Crete tours?

Crete tours sit on an island whose oldest kind of music is the rizitika. These songs come mainly from western Crete. They have also spread into central and eastern Crete. Each one comes from an unknown maker of past centuries.

Rizes, meaning roots, is the Greek word for the foothills of the mountains. One view holds that the name comes from the roots of Ida, Dikti and the White Mountains. Another view ties the name to the songs of the roots left by the ancestors. Foothills are the lower hills that rise at the foot of a range.

Rizitika carry no set titles as a rule. People name each song by its first verse, or by another verse. In general they are not danced. A singer first sings a verse, and a chorus then tends to repeat it. These unnamed songs began on the island of Crete tours.

One writer, in a book on the songs, sorted them into 32 melodies. He found that 31 songs had melodies of their own, always on major scales. A major scale is a run of notes with a bright, settled sound. Crete tours relate to the island that keeps these melodies.

• Free form: The songs need not rhyme, and a verse need not hold fifteen syllables.
• Digenes: The song of Digenes counts as a monument of Cretan music, with lyrics seen as flawless.
• Cretan War: A historical song among them tells of the Cretan War of 1644 to 1669.

One old song mentions vigles. The word comes from the Latin vigilare, to keep watch. Vigles were small settlements on mountain peaks that watched coasts open to landings by invaders. Those lookouts once guarded the coasts of the island where Crete tours run.

How does the Pentozali dance belong to Crete tours?

Crete tours run in a land with a great wealth of native dances. Among them, the Pentozali enjoys the widest fame. Men and women both perform it. Its music has no words and is played on instruments alone.

The line of dancers turns anticlockwise very slowly, and at times it does not turn at all. The bulk of the lively steps stay almost in one place. The first and second dancers link hands. The second dancer holds firm and motionless, giving the leader a steady base for acrobatics. Crete tours share their island with this dance.

Women’s steps in the dance were traditionally more restrained. Their long dresses did not allow high jumps. Restrained here means smaller and calmer. Legend says Cretans danced the Pentozali when Turkish armies sailed to the island. The Turks then fled, believing such fast, fierce dancers to be demons.

Before battle, Cretans danced it to weaken the spirit of opposing armies. The main tune sounds on a violin or a Cretan lyra. The lyra is a bowed instrument shaped like a pear. The laouto, a Cretan lute, keeps the rhythm rather than the melody. Crete tours unfold on the home island of this dance.

• Soloist: The lead musician directs the dance and improvises to signal when the first dancer improvises.
• Dodecanese: The Dodecanese islands, in the Aegean, have a well-liked version of their own.
• Local styles: Each island keeps its own version and style of the dance.

People even believed the Pentozali was a dance sent from God. When the leader’s turn ends, the soloist returns to the main tune. Another dancer then steps forward and takes the lead. The dance’s home island is also the setting of Crete tours.

Which singer from Anogeia matters to Crete tours?

Crete tours happen on the island of Nikos Xylouris, a singer, Cretan lyra player and songwriter. He performed both rural Cretan folk music and orchestral music from the cities. The lyra is a string instrument of Crete, played with a bow.

He was born on 7 July 1936 in Anogeia, a village high on the slopes of Mount Ida. His nickname, Psaronikos, comes from psaro, a Greek word meaning fish-like. His younger brothers, Psarantonis and Psarogiannis, are also well-known names in Cretan music. Crete tours concern the island of his birth.

He got his first instrument, a Cretan lyra, at twelve. His father opposed a music career until a local schoolteacher won him over. He then trained as an apprentice under the lyra player Leonidas Klados. An apprentice learns a craft by working beside a master. In 1953, aged 17, he moved from Anogeia to Heraklion.

His first studio recording came out in 1958. In 1966 he represented Greece at the San Remo Music Festival. There he won first prize in its folk music section. In 1967 he helped found the first music hall in Heraklion devoted only to Cretan folk music. His music grew from the island of Crete tours.

• Award: In 1971 the Académie Charles-Cros in France gave him the Grand Prix du Disque, a record prize.
• Partnership: His work with the composer Yannis Markopoulos lasted nearly a decade.
• Wedding: He and Ourania ran away together to Anogeia and married there.

Xylouris serenaded Ourania repeatedly, following a Cretan custom rooted in medieval Italian influence. To serenade is to sing to a loved one. He died on 8 February 1980, aged 43, and lies in the First Cemetery of Athens. His home island now hosts Crete tours.

What do travellers ask about Crete tours, and what are the answers?

Crete tours share an island with Skotino Cave, among the largest caves on Crete. Georgios Chortatzis, a dramatist, wrote his plays in Cretan verse. Theophanes the Cretan was born in Heraklion. Vitsentzos Kornaros grew up in a village near Sitia.

Before Crete tours, what was found in Skotino Cave?

Arthur Evans made the first study of the site. In the 1960s, French and Greek teams explored it. They found bronze and clay votive offerings, the oldest from the earliest Minoan periods. Votive offerings are gifts to a god. The cave was a shrine to a female fertility goddess, thought to be Britomartis.

Around Crete tours, which play is Georgios Chortatzis known for?

With Vitsentzos Kornaros, he was a main figure of a school of writing in the vernacular Cretan dialect. Vernacular means the plain speech of ordinary people. The school thrived under Venetian rule during the late 16th century and the early 17th. His best-known work is Erofili, a tragedy set in Egypt.

On Crete tours, what is known of Theophanes the Cretan?

His family came from the Peloponnese and had worked in painting for over a century. The Strelitzas-Bathas family left over one hundred surviving works across Greece. Records place him in Heraklion by 1552. His will left his two children silver, gold coins and apartments in Heraklion. A will shares out property after death.

Near Crete tours, what did Vitsentzos Kornaros do in Candia?

In Candia he married Marietta Zeno. During the plague of 1591 to 1593 he worked as a sanitary supervisor, a health official. He joined a literary club, the Academy of the Strange Ones, founded by his brother Andrea. He was buried in Candia at the church of San Francesco.