Word: minoan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ethnologically speaking, it's a wise child indeed who knows his own father. Were the Greeks really the founders of Western civilization? The Greeks themselves looked to Crete, whose earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths-of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid...
Eleven dollars will buy a one-way air ticket from Athens to Crete, and still another unseen aspect of the Greek way: Candia's fragrant food bazaar, the Minoan ruins near Knossos, and the high Lasethi plateau, crammed with hundreds of white-sailed windmills. In any of the little plateau villages, a traveler can buy his lunch merely by hailing, say, the butcher, who will put a table outside and provide wine, bread and cheese, while curious, good-natured Greeks in baggy trousers, sashes, boots, brocaded vests and fierce mustaches gather round and ask the stranger's name...