crete-card.com - Panorama from all over Crete


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  • Crete is a land in the dark waved sea,

    fertile and graceful and surrounded by water. Countless people

    are living there and their cities are ninety: ...

    ... Their kings' city is Knossos, where Minos reigned,

    who at the age of nine spoke to Zeus, the great God.

    Homer's Description of Crete (from Johann Heinrich Voß)

  • They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one.

    The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bell

    But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,

    For in thee we live and move and have our being.

    An excerpt of the poem 'Cretica' from Epimenides

  • Daidalos however, being tired of Crete and the tedious ban,

    longing for home and the land of the youth,

    was surrounded by sea. 'He might block lands and billows',

    he said, 'but the heaven's space is free. There we want to go.

    May he be the God of everything, but Minos is not the God of air'.

    Ovid, Metamorphoses (VIII, 183-235)

  • I hope anything.

    I fear anything.

    I am free

    Epitaph from Nikos Kazantzakis

  • Wild peas or vetches arise from the rocks,

    that bear both pods and flowers in their ears,

    clusters of Cretan Iris, apparantly, orange-blue

    and even rose for a change

    margined with dark reddish green.

    Sir Arthur Evans, "The Palace of Minos", Vol.1 2

  • There, Zeus united with Europa in Gortys and she gave birth

    to three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon.

    ...After his death her son Minos reigned over Crete

    according to the laws his father gave him all nine years.

    By Anna Michailidou: "Knossos – A Guide Through The Palace Of Minos"

  • All of the problems that I, tied to a chair,

    knot by knot tried to solve in my loneliness,

    this man up in the mountains, in the open air,

    already solved a long time ago with his saber.

    From "Zorba The Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

  • I remember it exactly, that I could smell the island,

    long before I could see it from the ship

    - because of its strange citrus note.

    Then I saw fog over the sea and soon after that the

    bright crests of the white mountains became visible.

    Mikis Theodorakis about Crete

  • But Ikaros did not listen to the incantations of his father

    not to fly too high. The sun made the wax, that held his wings

    together, melt. The sapling rushed down and drowned

    in the sea, which today bears his name. ...

    By Anna Michailidou: "Knossos – A Guide Through The Palace Of Minos"