Word: crete
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...town was repeatedly overrun by the Golden Horde of Tartars, one of whose reasons for coming back again & again was Moscow's women, much coveted on the world slave markets. Sultan Ahmed I is said to have asked his eldest son one day: "My Osman, wilt thou conquer Crete for me?" Whereupon Osman replied: "What have I to do with Crete? I will conquer the land of the white Muscovite maidens...
...that period, ancient Greece was not yet Greece, for the real Greeks had not swept down in numbers from Thessaly in the north. Athens was probably a small city subject to great Mycenae, itself an outpost of the strange, semi-Egyptian civilization which centered on the island of Crete...
Mozart's librettist, Giambattista Varesco, brewed a confusing plot based on the Odyssey, with such extraneous characters as Electra thrown in. Idomeneo, King of Crete, is buffeted by storms on his return from the siege of Troy. To appease Poseidon, he swears to sacrifice the first person he encounters on landing. That turns out to be his son Idamante, who is in love with Ilia, daughter of the vanquished King of Troy. The gods finally clear up the whole matter, and the opera ends four hours later with Idamante and Ilia on the throne. Even the charm of Mozart...
...painted pine tablets and sacred statuettes might easily have been mistaken for relics of ancient Crete. They had the same soft, staring eyes, tight smiles and ornate costumes. Actually they were made between 1680 and 1850, in a cutoff, primitive, fiercely Roman Catholic corner of western America. Last week 80 of them, on tour of the Pacific Coast, were on exhibition in Portland, Ore.'s art museum. Next stop: Seattle...
From ancient Scythia, by way of Egypt,Crete and Spain, came the persecuted, wandering children of Gaodhal Glas in search of the Isle of Destiny. "I pray," sang their Gaelic bard Amergin, "that they reach the land of Eirinn, those who are riding upon the great, productive vast sea; that they be distributed upon her plains, her mountains and her valleys...