5/10/08.  Leslie Day

When I first thought of a course that would allow me to bring students to my favorite parts of Greece (Crete and the Islands), I decided to focus on the most important and cataclysmic event of the Bronze Age: the eruption of the volcano at Thera that in ways we are only beginning to understand completely changed the course of history in Greece in the second millennium.  I had thought that the high point would be the visit to the site buried like Pompeii by this volcanic eruption, and that may well be so for the students accompanying me.  For me, however, the high point occurred today, when I took the group to eastern Crete, where I have been working for the past 30 years.  We first visited the East Cretan Study Center, directed by Tom Brogan, Wabash class of 1988.   Then Tom took us to the site of Mochlos, a small island off the coast of Crete, where he has been serving as assistant director for the past 20 years.  Tom is an amazingly knowledgable man, whether you want to know what happened in 1450 BCE or where to eat in Heraklion in 2008, and he shared his knowledge and enthusiasm with us.  He showed us the Center he directs and some of the artifacts that are being studied there, and told us about all of the exciting new scientific and technological advances that he and his staff are applying to the study of the past.  He provided a wonderful meal at Mochlos and took us over to the island for a tour of the town that he has been instrumental in uncovering, discoursing equally on the intricacies of dating the Thera eruption and the various layers at Mochlos and the importance of C&T at Wabash.  After the tour, two guys swam the straits from the island across to the mainland of Crete, while the rest of us were ferried across in a small boat with an outboard motor that could only hold four people or sink.  After finishing at Mochlos, we again boarded our bus and went to Kavousi, where Tom and one of the local men ferried us up to my site of Vronda at Kavousi.  Vronda was inhabited far too late to have played any role in the subject of the course, but it seemed a shame to come to Crete and not show off my site to the students.  So, carried in the beds of two pickup trucks, we drove up to the site in the late afternoon, and I gave them a guided tour of the houses and tombs on the site.  The site was still covered in spring greenery and was redolent of sage plants, and I showed how one can wrest meaning out of the most apparently insignificant details of architecture and pottery.  We had all been exhausted when we arrived at the site after our long day, but as we rode down again and got back on our bus, everyone was energized by our visit to what is still one of the most beautiful and least visited sites on Crete.  We had begun our Cretan journey with the most important, lavish, and heavily visited site on Crete at Knossos, and we ended with one of the simplest, most beautiful and least visited sites on the island.  In the end, we all felt like real archaeologists instead of merely tourists.