Tamata
Faith, incense and high hopes in the mountains of Eastern Crete
Looking out from the porch of the Monastery at Panagia Vidiani, I could see across the old entirety of Lasithi, scraped and tattered by the tumbling frames of windmills. The little light of day had cooled towards evening. Frogs had emerged from the rocks around me and they began to roar in a rowdy relay. I mistook them for birds at first – the sound was too crisp and dry to come from damp and indecisive amphibians - but then I saw one with his cheeks like bubbles of milk and his expression frighteningly certain. I crouched to take his photograph and he became a stone. Four months later, I look at the picture and I can’t remember why I took it. He’s not there.
I had climbed into the mountains through a string of precipitous villages, and sat for an hour beneath the monstrous plane tree of Krasi, where the writer Nikos Kazantzakis used to drink his coffee. I drank my coffee there too, but I am no closer to being him. Then I stared at the centuries-old tree which surpasses all measurement and has been designated a national monument. It’s a nightmare of plotchy, scabious bark and when I tried to sketch an imagined line to show how a single twig-end might be traced up and around and down to the point at which the trunk met the ground, I ran out of paper, gasping.
