Chapter 8: Discovering a Glass Madonna at the dig

It was the first occasion in the difficult time since Anne had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer that Martin felt so utterly happy and relaxed. He took Savvas Souliotakis with him to see the new dig. It was close to a Bronze Age town that had once surrounded the Kephala Hill, and on this hill the palace of Konoso or Knossos had been built. His old mate, Barnaby Inchbold, now site manager and one of the curators at the British Archaeological School at Athens, came up to meet them. He was a thin man with a head almost bald, his remaining hair cut fashionably close to the scalp. It was fast growing warm and he put the elegant straw hat he was carrying back on his head despite the little breeze that kept threatening to whip it away and bowl it down the hill. Martin idly wondered why Barnaby refused to wear a baseball cap like everyone else. Barnaby had always cultivated an image of himself as a smart old-fashioned archaeologist, like something out of a scene in Death on the Nile. Martin almost expected to see Poirot puttering up to greet them all.

‘Can’t say how glad we are to see you, Kelso, old fellow!’ said Barnaby, seizing Martin’s hand and shaking it with vigour. He turned to Savvas, ‘And always glad to see you too, Souliotakis. One of our best backers,’ he added with a chuckle.

‘We’re both in a state of high excitement,’ said Martin. ‘C’mon, give us a tour of the site before we burst with curiosity. You were full of mysterious hints on the phone. I know you love to make a mountain mystery out of a molehill but it sounds to me as if you’ve really turned something up.’

‘You bet we have. We started the dig last year and knew this was going to be special. It’s great to be here again. I was a bit scared we wouldn’t be able to raise the cash we need and the Italian or French lot would get in. But we’ve got some new backers which has made all the difference. I knew you had to come and be a part of it, you’d never have forgiven yourself if you hadn’t made it. Just come and look.’

They walked around, Martin and Savvas peering into the small test pits that were placed at spaced intervals to establish the extent of the site. It appeared to be a large settlement under there, hiding in the clinging, blanketing dark earth.

A bigger trench had been dug in one area down to the bedrock and patient field workers were scraping away gently with their diamond-shaped trowels at the layers and carefully brushing, wrapping and recording all their finds in minute detail. A good deal had been unearthed and catalogued so far. Between them, the three enthusiasts discussed avidly its implications on Bronze Age culture. Martin was to start work tomorrow at the site laboratory in a nearby village, using his special expertise as an osteologist, dating bones and sorting out the slivers and shreds of human debris that held so many clues.

One of the field workers called out excitedly and they went over at once to see what she’d found. Her patient scrapings now fully revealed a tiny statuette. A few moments’ more work and it was loosened enough to lift out with extreme care and examine. The young girl handed it over to Barnaby, her eyes gleaming with delight at the result of her efforts.

It was a beautiful little faience figurine of a female, her breasts exposed as in other such figurines, her dress made up of the familiar flounced layers which such Cretan ‘goddesses’ wore. She had no snakes twined round her arms as other such statuettes often had. Instead her hands simply rested on her large, rounded breasts rather in the manner of the Venus of Willendorf. It was in remarkable condition, whole and undamaged, unlike the ‘Snake Goddess’ discovered by Sir Arthur Evans. That had a head and one arm missing and these had later been restored.

‘God, she’s so beautiful. She’s very similar to the glass statuette they found in the harbour of Knossos,’ said Martin. ‘Nobody was ever sure how authentic that one was but this find now makes it likely it was genuine after all. It will be interesting to see what turns up when we do some carbon dating. How odd her expression is, isn’t it? Wild and strange. Almost distrait.’

‘If you ask me, the Minoans had a peculiar religious view. They worshipped snakes and wild Mother goddesses, pillars and bulls. What a muddle!’ laughed Barnaby as he wrapped the little statuette up with care.

‘I’ll take this one back with me,’ he said to the girl. ‘It’s our most lovely find yet. Well done, Suzi. You’ve made my day.’

Martin wondered what Emily would make of it all. She might say that the glass statuette represented Isis or Mother Nature in all her variety and mystery. To her these contradictions would not seem so very strange. Wild and natural herself, she would have been at home in those ancient times.

They walked on together to the next test pit.

‘I hear that the whole Palace of Knossos is deteriorating fast,’ said Martin with a frown. ‘Is that true?’

‘You’re not kidding, it’s a nightmare over there,’ said Barnaby, voice crackling with irritation. ‘The valley below is damp and the extremes of hot and cold are making bloody awful cracks in the soft gypsum and stonework. It’s turning to powder before our eyes. What with that and hundreds of people tramping over it like an army on peak visiting days, it’s beginning to look like a lost cause. The locals are getting hot and bothered – Knossos is their livelihood.’

‘That’s so. They rely almost totally on tourism for their living,’ said Savvas.

‘It’s the total stupidity of past archaeologists!’ Barnaby said angrily.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They just exposed everything without taking into consideration that this kind of thing might happen. They need to construct walkways and reinforce some of the floors and ceilings now or they’ll end up having to close parts of it down. I don’t feel that these places should be open to everyone like this.’

‘My father used to play in those ruins as a child,’ said Savvas with a sigh. ‘No entrance charges, no guards, nothing. He just played in the ruins with his friends. How impermanent these things are!’

‘The shame is the way Arthur Evans just recreated this site in his own imagination,’ Martin said. ‘Now we shall never know what it was really like. It’s just guesswork.’

Barnaby looked around, waving his hand over the area which to the untrained eye looked nothing more than a rubble-strewn building site, ‘ Well, we are treating our discoveries with care, recording and trying hard not to disturb more than necessary. This is scientific, not Victorian imagination and fantasy. At least, at this site we’re getting an idea of how ordinary people lived and died, what their homes were like, their shops and commerce and daily lives. That’s far more interesting to my mind than cyclopean and mysterious palaces.’

‘You’re just jealous, ‘laughed Martin, ‘you know bloody well you’d love to find a big palace.’

‘No, seriously, I prefer to find out about ordinary people.’

‘What else are you discovering here?’ asked Savvas, looking around him at the busy bee-like workers whose steady scraping and subdued conversations sounded like a hum in the still morning air.

‘Apart from this house, we have also uncovered a part of what looks like a circular dancing platform, a little smaller it seems than the one we found in the late nineties, but far better preserved. We plan to make a walkway around it so people can see it but not traipse all over it.’

‘It’s just magnificent,’ said Martin, as they found their way to the excavated site and studied the beautiful work of men who had lived in the 15th century BC. The floor paving looked as fresh as if it had just been laid the day before.

‘“For Ariadne of the lovely locks”, ’ mused Savvas. ‘That was what was said of the dancing floor that Daedelus designed in the “broad city of Knossos”. Did some other Ariadne come here too, I wonder? Youths and maidens danced here once . . . it’s such an amazing thought! The girls wearing fine linen and garlands; the young men with white tunics and silver belts and golden daggers, weaving and turning in their sacred dances, making patterns we no longer know anything about.’

Martin smiled in agreement. He could almost see the maidens and youths as they ran lightly and skilfully around the circle, performing their elegant dances on this very spot, accompanied by the minstrels with their seven-stringed lyres, supple acrobats turning cartwheels between the dancers in time to the music. There would be a sacred atmosphere, a sense of festivity and religious feeling. The ancient people were so in tune with nature, the forces of life and the deities. They let their gods flow through them. He thought of a painting by Matisse, The Dance, a picture full of joyous, flowing movement and meaningful abandon. Then he imagined Emily here, her hair loose on her shoulders, sinuously twisting, winding and moving, dressed in the pure, virginal white, dancing for the youthful Zeus or for the Great Mother Goddess that the Minoans revered so greatly. There was something about Emily that fitted in with this flow and rhythm of life and the spirit of deeply religious feeling. He wished she was here to see it; how she would love it! Maybe he would bring her another time. For a moment he remained lost in his thoughts till he saw the others had moved on and hurried to join them.