The Mines of Moria

There are very few pictures from the morning of our second day on Crete- we went to an ancient site at Eleutherna, and couldn't take pictures because it hadn't been published yet. This was really too bad- there was a lot of cool stuff there, and there were some things that were extremely well preserved. (Included the skeletons of three children killed in the earthquake that ended Roman occupation of the site. They were huddled together to try to protect themselves from falling rocks. It was interesting to see them there, but sort of heart-wrenching too- sometimes it's a bit too easy to forget that the people I study were real people.) This is a view up to Mount Ida, the mountain where baby Zeus was hidden to keep his father from eating him. We were worried about rain the whole day, but it actually never was a problem- the sky cleared up a few minutes after this was taken.
This is the remains of a Hellenistic guard tower- you can distinguish easily between what was built then and what was built in the middle ages. This was a part of Eleutherna, but far above the site of the town- we were still allowed to have cameras.
Christine at the guard tower! There was a beautiful view, but also quite a steep drop on either side of the hill- I'm afraid of heights, and I had a hard time walking around up at the top. As usual, we were the only people at the site- we had to be led there by some of the archaeologists who were involved with the dig.
And it's a good thing we had the archaeologists! We were chilling, and I was trying not to fall off a cliff, when one of them came over and asked if we wanted to see an ancient cistern. We said yes, assuming it was a little thing- it wasn't. There were two huge underground cisterns, and the neat thing was that they let us go into them and wander around! It was quite dark. This is the view from the smaller of the two, outside to the open air. (Nigel referred to them as the "Mines of Moria", which made us all laugh.)
They definitely weren't promising from the outside, though! We asked how old they were, and it seems that the holes were first dug as quarries- there were probably some natural caves that were enlarged. This was during the archaic period. By the hellenistic period they were being used as cisterns- from inside, you could see the remains of the plaster they were using to seal out moisture.

Eleutherna was really cool too- there is a grave site there, and the finds there are proof that human sacrifice was once practiced as part of funeral rites. (A human skeleton was found that was either beheaded or strangled- we couldn't tell which, the archaeologist's English wasn't so great.) The town had a very nice Roman bath and an ancient temple and a herm and a Christian basilica from the Byzantine period with some mosiacs that we unfortunately couldn't see. Also the skeletons that I mentioned earlier.

Like most of our trips, it also involved a ridiculous amount of hiking- Vasilis, our bus driver, refused to drive down the road that led to the site. I think he was worried about the switchbacks involved.