Books, maps and other sources that have informed my writing, research and understanding of Crete
Introduction
The Library is a living, personal record of the books, writers, maps and other sources that have informed Tracks of the Minotaur and, more broadly, the way I observe and interpret landscape, history, people and movement.
It is not a record of everything I have read. That would be impossible. It is a record of the works that have stayed with me, that I have returned to, that have opened new lines of enquiry, or that have helped shape the way I look at a place, an event, a route or a fragment of evidence.
Some belong directly to Crete: its history, resistance, archaeology, mythology, culture and landscape. Others come from much further afield — mountaineering, polar exploration, travel, military history, geography, philosophy and memoir. They form part of the background against which I understand terrain, risk, movement, judgement, endurance and human behaviour in difficult environments.
That matters because Tracks of the Minotaur has grown out of curiosity and movement. I explore Crete because that is what I do. I ride, walk, look, read, compare and return to the ground. A track may lead to a chapel, a well, a battlefield, a ruined building, a story, a map reference or a question I had not expected to ask. Reading often begins before the journey, continues afterwards, and sometimes sends me back out again.
The books and sources listed here are therefore part of that journey. Some have provided evidence for particular stories. Some have challenged assumptions or changed the way I understood a subject. Some have influenced the way I write. Others have simply made me curious enough to want to know more.
For readers, The Library can be used in the same way that I use the bibliography at the back of a book: as a place to look further, follow another path, find another voice, or discover where an idea came from.It will continue to grow as the website grows.
Writers and Influences
These are writers whose work has stayed with me and, in different ways, influenced how I look at landscape, movement, people and place. They are not presented as a literary canon, nor have they all influenced me in the same way. Some affected how I write; others how I observe the ground, think about journeys, or understand the relationship between people and difficult environments.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Patrick Leigh Fermor showed how a journey through a landscape could carry history, language, mythology, architecture and human encounter within it. His writing about Greece and Crete has been particularly important to me because the landscape is never simply background. The past remains present in villages, mountains, buildings, conversations and the routes between them.
What I take from Fermor is not an attempt to reproduce his style, but the understanding that travelling through a place and understanding it need not be separate activities. A journey can provide the structure through which history and landscape are explored.
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin approached travel through curiosity. A journey might begin with a place, an object, a person, a historical fragment or simply a question. From there the narrative could move in unexpected directions.
That willingness to follow curiosity has stayed with me. I am interested in what happens when something encountered along the way demands another question. A chapel, an abandoned track, a story told in a village or an object beside the road may lead somewhere completely unexpected.
Chatwin also demonstrated how much could be achieved with economy. His writing could move rapidly between observation, history and reflection without losing the journey that held them together.
Tim Robinson
Tim Robinson’s work is particularly important to the way I think about landscape. He walked, mapped, recorded place-names, examined local history and paid extraordinary attention to the physical detail of the ground.
His work demonstrates that close observation can reveal layers of a landscape that are easily missed when it is treated merely as scenery. Tracks, boundaries, names, settlements and apparently insignificant features all carry information.
That approach has obvious relevance to the way I explore Crete. Moving slowly enough to notice something, stopping to examine it, locating it on a map and then asking why it is there are fundamental parts of my own fieldwork.
Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy travelled directly through the places she wrote about, often by bicycle or on foot and frequently under difficult conditions. She encountered landscape at ground level and depended upon her own judgement, physical ability and interaction with the people she met.
That directness appeals to me. There is a considerable difference between observing a landscape from a vehicle and travelling through it under your own power. Distance, gradient, weather, road surface, isolation and access cease to be abstractions.
Her work also reflects something I value strongly: curiosity about ordinary people and everyday life rather than an exclusive concentration on recognised sights and destinations.
Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane’s writing on paths, landscape and language has reinforced my interest in routes as historical evidence. A path is not simply a convenient means of getting from one place to another. Its position may reflect work, settlement, pilgrimage, communication, geography or patterns of movement that existed long before the modern road network.
His attention to the language of landscape is equally relevant. Place-names and local terms can preserve knowledge about terrain, land use and human experience that is otherwise easily lost.
Sylvain Tesson
Sylvain Tesson’s journeys through remote landscapes explore movement, isolation and the restrictions imposed by geography.
His work interests me because difficult terrain changes the terms upon which a journey is conducted.
Distance alone tells us very little. Surface, gradient, weather, exposure, available routes and the ability to resupply or withdraw may be considerably more important.
His writing also reflects the value of deliberately going somewhere difficult simply to discover what is there and what the journey itself reveals.
Raoul Blanchard
Raoul Blanchard approached mountains as a geographer. His work on the Alps examined the relationship between physical terrain and the communities living within it: settlement, communications, agriculture, isolation and economic activity.
That relationship between terrain and human behaviour is fundamental to the way I look at Crete. Mountains do not simply occupy space on a map. They constrain movement, channel routes, isolate communities, provide resources and influence where people can live and how they communicate.
Blanchard provides a larger geographical framework for questions that I often encounter on a much smaller scale while riding through the Cretan landscape.
Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger’s writing provides a very different perspective: terrain experienced under combat conditions.At that level, small differences in the ground become significant. A fold in the land, a trench, a ridge, vegetation, an exposed approach or a position with observation can affect movement and survival.
My military background inevitably influences the way I read battlefield terrain. Jünger’s writing is valuable because the landscape is experienced from within events rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Nan Shepherd
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain represents another way of understanding mountains. Her interest was not simply in reaching summits but in knowing the Cairngorms through repeated journeys, observation and experience.
That distinction is important to me. Returning repeatedly to the same landscape produces a different understanding from passing through it once. Weather changes it. Seasons change it. Tracks deteriorate or disappear. Water moves differently. Vegetation changes and human activity alters the ground.
Familiarity does not necessarily exhaust curiosity. Very often it creates new questions.
Polar and Mountain Exploration
Arctic, Antarctic and mountaineering literature has been part of my reading for many years. Nansen, Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen and the accounts of those who travelled with them sit alongside mountaineering writing by figures such as Maurice Herzog, Joe Simpson, Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker, Doug Scott and others.These works form part of the background against which I understand terrain, risk, movement, judgement, endurance and human behaviour in difficult environments.
What interests me is not simply physical endurance or the achievement of a summit, crossing or geographical objective. It is what happens when terrain and environment begin removing choices.
Routes close. Weather changes. Equipment fails. Time becomes important. Distance acquires a different meaning. Leadership and judgement are tested against circumstances that cannot be negotiated away.
That literature has accompanied my own experience of walking, climbing and cycling through mountain country, and it continues to influence the questions I ask when looking at movement through terrain.
Battle of Crete & Special Operations
The Battle of Crete and the occupation that followed are central to much of my historical writing. No single account is sufficient. The battle looks different depending upon whether it is viewed from an Allied headquarters, a German airborne unit, a Royal Navy ship, a Cretan village, an individual battlefield or through the experience of those who remained on the island to continue the war clandestinely.
These works provide different perspectives on the invasion, occupation, resistance and special operations conducted on Crete between 1941 and 1945.
Peter D. Antill — Crete 1941:
Germany’s Lightning Airborne AssaultA compact study of Operation Mercury that provides a useful overview of the campaign, supported by maps, orders of battle and illustrations.
Its value lies particularly in orientation. The Battle of Crete involved simultaneous operations spread across several widely separated areas, and a concise campaign study helps establish the chronology and relationship between Maleme, Chania, Rethymno and Heraklion before moving into more detailed accounts.
Antony Beevor — Crete: The Battle and the Resistance
A broad narrative covering both the German invasion and the resistance that developed during the occupation.
Beevor brings together military operations, personalities, civilian experience and resistance activity, making this a useful bridge between the conventional battle of May 1941 and the very different form of warfare that followed.
It has been an important general reference, although individual events and locations still require comparison with official histories, primary accounts and the ground itself.
M. G. Comeau — Operation Mercury
A first-hand account by a British airman caught up in the Battle of Crete.
Personal accounts such as this are valuable because they restore uncertainty to events that can appear ordered and inevitable when reconstructed afterwards. The battle experienced by an individual on the ground was necessarily narrower, more confused and more immediate than the campaign subsequently represented on a map.
Patrick Leigh Fermor — Abducting a General
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s own account of the 1944 abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe.
The operation has become one of the best-known episodes of the clandestine war on Crete.
Fermor’s account is particularly valuable because he was one of its principal participants, but it is also a literary reconstruction written long after the event.
I therefore read it alongside other British, German and Cretan accounts when examining the operation.
Robert Kershaw — The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete
A detailed reconstruction of the fighting for Hill 107 above Maleme airfield.
Hill 107 is fundamental to understanding the battle. Its loss affected control of Maleme airfield and enabled the Germans to reinforce their precarious airborne lodgement.
Kershaw’s close examination of the fighting is particularly useful when considering how command decisions, communications, observation and terrain interacted at a decisive point in the campaign.
Peter Monteath — Battle on 42nd Street
A detailed examination of the fighting on 42nd Street during the Allied withdrawal towards Sfakia.
The Australian and New Zealand counter-attack there has become one of the best-known actions of the withdrawal. Monteath uses personal accounts and documentary evidence to reconstruct both the action itself and the experiences of the men involved.
The work is particularly useful for understanding a battle at the level of individuals and small units rather than solely through higher command.
George Psychoundakis — The Cretan Runner
One of the essential personal accounts of occupied Crete.
Psychoundakis served as a runner for the resistance and the British missions, carrying messages across country under occupation. His account provides something that operational histories cannot: the lived geography of clandestine movement.Mountains, tracks, villages, caves, weather, distance, concealment and physical endurance are integral to the story because they were integral to the work itself.
Patrick Leigh Fermor translated the book into English, but the voice and experience are Psychoundakis’s.
Andrew Roberts — The Secret War
A wider history of intelligence and clandestine operations during the Second World War.
Crete formed only one part of a much larger secret war. Works of this kind are useful because they prevent SOE operations on the island from being considered in isolation from British intelligence structures, strategic priorities and clandestine warfare elsewhere.
David Stafford — Churchill and Secret Service
An examination of Winston Churchill’s relationship with intelligence and special operations.
The book provides useful context for understanding the political and strategic environment within which organisations such as SOE operated. Operations conducted by small missions in occupied territory ultimately existed within a much larger system of intelligence, policy, resources and competing priorities.
Rick Stroud — Kidnap in Crete
A modern reconstruction of the Kreipe abduction drawing upon British, German and Cretan material.
It provides a useful counterpart to the accounts written by participants and allows the operation to be considered from several perspectives rather than solely through the later fame of Patrick Leigh Fermor and W. Stanley Moss.
M. I. Tzatzakis — Force 133: British Operations in Crete 1941–1944
A study of British clandestine operations on Crete, particularly valuable for bringing a Greek perspective to a subject frequently encountered through British memoirs and accounts.
The work helps place individual SOE personalities and operations within the wider network of Cretan resistance, intelligence gathering, communications and British activity on the island.
University of Sheffield — The Enemies Within (2011 dissertation)
An academic study concerned with tensions and coordination problems within SOE activity in Greece.
It is useful as a reminder that clandestine organisations were not seamless institutions. Personalities, political differences, communications, competing objectives and relationships between organisations could all affect operations in occupied territory.
Hellenic Army General Staff, Army History Directorate — The Battle of Crete: May 1941
The official Greek military history of the campaign.
This is particularly important because English-language accounts can naturally give disproportionate attention to British, Australian and New Zealand formations. The Greek Army and other Greek forces were also engaged in the defence of the island, often under severe shortages of equipment and organisation.
The Greek official history provides an essential counterweight and allows events to be examined through Greek military records and post-war analysis.
C. N. Hadjipateras and M. Fafalios — Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed
A collection of eyewitness accounts concerning the German invasion and the response of the people of Crete.
Eyewitness material is especially valuable when examining the extraordinary involvement of Cretan civilians during and immediately after the airborne invasion. It preserves experiences that can disappear from conventional operational histories.
As with all eyewitness evidence, individual recollections need to be considered alongside other contemporary and documentary sources.
I. McD. G. Stewart — The Struggle for Crete
A detailed operational study written by a New Zealand officer who fought in the campaign.
Stewart combines personal military experience with subsequent reconstruction of the battle. The result is particularly useful for following operations and command decisions while retaining an understanding of what conditions were like for those involved.
David A. Thomas — Crete 1941: The Battle at Sea
A study of the Royal Navy’s operations during the invasion and subsequent evacuation.The Battle of Crete cannot be understood solely from the land campaign. British naval forces attempted to prevent German seaborne reinforcement while operating without adequate air superiority and under sustained Luftwaffe attack.
The resulting losses demonstrate the extent to which control of the air affected operations far beyond the airborne battlefield itself.
David A. Thomas — Crete 1941: The Battle on Land
A companion study of the ground campaign.It follows the airborne assault, Allied defence and subsequent withdrawal, providing another operational account against which individual actions and local battlefield evidence can be compared.
Callum MacDonald — The Lost Battle: Crete 1941
An examination of the defeat on Crete with particular attention to Allied command, intelligence and decision-making.
The value of the book lies in the questions it raises about why a battle fought by defenders who possessed significant intelligence about German intentions nevertheless ended in defeat.
Those questions inevitably lead back to communications, command decisions, interpretation of intelligence and the realities of the ground on which the battle was fought.
I. S. O. Playfair et al. — The Mediterranean and Middle East, Volume II: The Germans Come to the Help of Their Ally (1941)
Part of the British Official History of the Second World War.
Its importance lies in context. Crete was not an isolated campaign but part of the rapidly changing strategic situation in the Balkans, Greece, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
The official history allows decisions made before and during the battle to be considered against the wider demands being placed upon British and Commonwealth forces at the time.
Vasilis Tsirbas — The Battle of Crete: The Untold Stories
A Greek study examining less familiar aspects of the invasion and its aftermath through local material and testimony.
Local Greek research is particularly important to my work because events remembered within villages or preserved in regional sources do not always appear in the principal English-language histories of the campaign.
Taken together, these works provide different ways into the same period: official history, operational reconstruction, eyewitness testimony, personal memoir, intelligence history and local Greek research. I use them comparatively, and where a story concerns a particular place, I return whenever possible to the ground itself.
Greek Resistance & Modern Greece
The resistance on Crete did not develop in isolation from the wider history of Greece.
To understand the occupation and the choices made by individuals and communities during it, I have found it necessary to look both backwards and outwards: to the formation of the modern Greek state, Crete’s own long struggle for union with Greece, the upheavals of the early twentieth century, the Axis occupation of the country and the political divisions that continued into liberation and civil war.
These works provide that wider context.
David Brewer — The Flame of Freedom: The Greek War of Independence, 1821–1833
A clear account of the Greek War of Independence and the long and complicated process through which an uprising against Ottoman rule resulted in the establishment of an independent Greek state.
The value of the book for me lies beyond the military history of the revolution itself.
The war became part of the historical memory of modern Greece: independence, sacrifice, foreign intervention, regional loyalties and competing ideas about what the new Greek state should become.
Those themes continued long after independence and provide important background to the Greece encountered in later periods.George Hatzidakis — The Struggle for Crete: 1897–1941A study of Crete during the period in which the island moved from Ottoman rule through autonomy and eventual union with Greece, and then towards the Second World War.
That chronology matters. The armed resistance encountered by the Germans in 1941 did not emerge from a society without recent experience of revolt, political conflict and armed struggle.
Understanding that earlier history helps place the Cretan response to occupation within a much longer local experience of resistance and political change.
N. A. Kokonas — The Cretan Resistance 1941–1945
This work reproduces and comments upon a British report on the Cretan resistance prepared immediately after the war.
Its proximity to the events makes it particularly useful. It records organisations, personalities and activities before the occupation had passed completely into memoir and historical reconstruction.
It also provides an opportunity to compare the contemporary British assessment of resistance activity with later accounts written by participants and historians.
Mark Mazower — Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44
One of the most important works for understanding occupied Greece beyond individual military and resistance operations.
Mazower examines occupation as an experience affecting an entire society: famine, economic collapse, collaboration, reprisals, resistance, political division and the increasingly complex relationships between Greeks and the occupying powers.
For my purposes, its particular value is context. Crete had distinctive circumstances, but it remained part of occupied Greece. Events on the island need to be understood against developments taking place across the country.
Heinz A. Richter — The Battle of Crete: 1941
A study of the German airborne invasion and the Allied defence of Crete.
Richter provides a perspective that can be compared with British, Commonwealth and Greek accounts of the campaign. That comparative reading is important because national histories can emphasise different evidence, decisions and interpretations.
The book forms part of the wider body of material I use when examining disputed aspects of the battle rather than being treated as a definitive account in itself.
Heinz A. Richter — Crete: 1941–1945
An account extending beyond the invasion into occupation, resistance, reprisals and the final years of German presence on the island.
The longer chronology is useful because the Battle of Crete lasted only days, while the consequences of the invasion continued for years. Resistance networks developed, British missions arrived and changed, German security measures intensified, villages suffered reprisals, and political tensions within the resistance became increasingly important.
It therefore helps connect the conventional military campaign with the occupation that followed it.
ΣΚΑΪ Βιβλίο — Εμείς οι Έλληνες, Τόμος Α΄
The first volume of Εμείς οι Έλληνες covers the period from the late nineteenth century through the Balkan and First World War era and into the Asia Minor Campaign.
I use the series as a Greek-language overview of the events through which modern Greece developed during a period of repeated war, territorial expansion and political upheaval.
For Crete, this wider chronology is important because the island’s union with Greece took place within this changing political and military landscape.
ΣΚΑΪ Βιβλίο — Εμείς οι Έλληνες, Τόμος Β΄
The second volume continues through the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the inter-war period, the Second World War and occupation.
This provides a useful Greek perspective on the period immediately surrounding the Battle of Crete and places the island within the broader experience of Greece during war and occupation.
ΣΚΑΪ Βιβλίο — Εμείς οι Έλληνες, Τόμος Γ΄
The third volume moves into liberation, civil war, the Cold War period and Cyprus.
The importance of continuing beyond 1945 is that liberation did not simply bring the wartime story to a clean conclusion. Political divisions that had developed or intensified during occupation contributed to the Greek Civil War and continued to influence Greek society for decades.
Understanding that aftermath is important when dealing with wartime memory and the later interpretation of resistance.
Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora — Selected Issues
Academic journal published by Pella Publishing Company, New York, containing studies of modern Greek history, politics and society.
Selected issues include important scholarship on the German occupation of Greece, the Greek Resistance, British policy and liaison missions, the Greek officer corps, the Security Battalions, and the political and military developments that contributed to the Greek Civil War.
Of particular relevance is Volume 11, No. 3 (1984), devoted to aspects of the Greek Resistance. Its articles include studies of the reports and memoirs of British Liaison Officers and the role of the Greek officer corps in the Resistance.
I use these studies as secondary sources alongside official histories, archival records, war diaries, contemporary reports and eyewitness testimony, particularly where they provide analysis of the political and military relationships between British forces, Resistance organisations and Greek authorities.
Max Hastings — Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45
A study of Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership and his relationship with Britain’s military commanders.
This sits somewhat outside the specifically Greek works in this section, but it provides useful strategic context for Britain’s involvement in Greece, the Mediterranean and clandestine warfare.
Churchill’s determination to remain engaged in the Mediterranean cannot be separated from the wider strategic arguments taking place within the British war effort. Understanding those arguments helps explain why resources were committed, why priorities changed and why operations that appear local when viewed from Crete were sometimes consequences of decisions made much further away.
Together these works help place Crete within the longer history of modern Greece. The island has its own distinctive history and identity, but the events I encounter while exploring it repeatedly lead beyond its shores: to revolution, state formation, war, occupation, civil conflict and the continuing question of how those experiences are remembered.
Cretan Geography, Culture & Folklore
Crete cannot be understood through military history alone. The island encountered on the ground is the product of geology, settlement, agriculture, religion, archaeology, language, custom and successive periods of occupation and political change.
These works help me look beyond individual historical events and consider the longer relationship between Cretans and the landscape they inhabit. They are particularly useful when a ride leads to something apparently ordinary — a place-name, spring, chapel, ruined settlement, agricultural structure or fragment of older infrastructure — and the question becomes not simply what it is, but why it is there.
Roderick Beaton — Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation
A broad history of the emergence and development of modern Greece.
Beaton’s value to my reading of Crete lies partly in scale. The island possesses a powerful and distinctive identity, but its modern history also belongs within the development of the Greek nation and state.
The book provides a framework within which questions of national identity, language, territory, political change and historical memory can be considered beyond Crete itself.
Harriet Boyd Hawes and Charles Henry Hawes — Crete: The Forerunner of Greece
An early twentieth-century study of Cretan civilisation written during a period of remarkable archaeological discovery on the island.
Harriet Boyd Hawes was herself an important archaeologist of Crete and excavated the Minoan settlement at Gournia. The book belongs to an earlier generation of interpretation and therefore also reveals something about how prehistoric Crete was understood and presented at the beginning of the twentieth century.
I find works of this age useful not simply for the information they contain, but because they allow modern interpretations to be compared with those formed when many archaeological discoveries were still relatively new.
Michael Herzfeld — The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village
An anthropological study based on fieldwork in a Cretan mountain community.
Herzfeld examines ideas of masculinity, honour, reputation, performance and social identity. It provides a very different form of evidence from military history or archaeology: close observation of relationships within a living Cretan community.
The book is useful because landscape is inhabited. Understanding a village requires more than identifying its buildings and history; social relationships, customs and ideas about identity also shape how communities function and how they understand themselves.
Adam Hopkins — Crete: Its Past, Present and People
A combination of travel writing, history and observation of Cretan society.
Hopkins moves between the ancient and modern island, considering archaeology, landscape, history and people rather than treating them as separate subjects.
That approach is relevant to Tracks of the Minotaur. The Crete through which I ride contains all of those layers simultaneously. A modern road may pass a Byzantine church, a Minoan site, an Ottoman structure and a place associated with the Second World War within a relatively short distance.
John Pendlebury — The Archaeology of Crete: An Introduction
Pendlebury’s archaeological survey of Crete has an additional significance because of the extraordinary course of his own life.
As curator at Knossos he travelled extensively across the island and developed an intimate knowledge of its archaeology and terrain. During the Second World War he became involved in preparations for resistance and was killed during the Battle of Crete in May 1941.
His archaeological work therefore belongs to a period before the landscape with which I am familiar was transformed by modern roads and development. His knowledge of Crete was not confined to excavated sites; it was built through movement across the island.
For me, Pendlebury consequently sits at an unusual intersection between archaeology, field observation and the wartime history of Crete.
Emmanuel Veloudakis — Myths and Legends of Crete
A collection concerned with the myths, legends and traditional stories associated with the island.
Myth and folklore remain important to the way Crete is understood. They attach stories to caves, mountains, villages, springs and other physical locations and can survive alongside archaeological and historical explanations of the same places.
I am interested in that coexistence. A landscape can carry several kinds of meaning at once, and folklore forms part of the evidence for how people have understood and remembered particular places.
Ministry of Culture — The County of Khania Through its Monuments
A guide to monuments and historical sites across the Chania region. For fieldwork, publications of this kind are particularly useful because they connect individual structures with their archaeological and historical setting.
Many places encountered during a ride are not major tourist sites. A small church, ruined building or archaeological feature may nevertheless belong to a much larger historical pattern. Regional monument guides can provide the first reliable context from which further investigation begins.
Hellenic Ministry of Culture — On Water in Byzantium
A study concerned with water, water management and its wider significance in the Byzantine world.
Water is one of the recurring subjects in my exploration of the Cretan landscape. Springs, wells, fountains, cisterns, channels and storage structures reveal how communities responded to one of the fundamental constraints imposed by terrain and climate.
A water structure is therefore more than an architectural object. Its position can tell us something about settlement, agriculture, movement, technology and the practical requirements of everyday life.
This wider Byzantine context is useful when considering water-related structures encountered on Crete, while not assuming that a particular structure can be dated simply because it resembles a broader historical type.
National Archaeological Museum — The Countless Aspects of Beauty in Ancient Art
An exhibition catalogue examining ideas and representations of beauty in ancient Greek art.
Museum catalogues can be valuable research works in their own right. They bring objects together thematically and provide archaeological context that is not always apparent when individual pieces are considered separately.
This volume contributes to my broader understanding of Greek material culture and the ideas expressed through objects, representation and craftsmanship.
Angelos Delivorrias — A Guide to the Benaki Museum
A guide to the collections of the Benaki Museum and, through them, to a very long span of Greek material and cultural history.
One of the attractions of the Benaki collection is continuity. Ancient, Byzantine, post-Byzantine and modern Greek material can be considered as parts of a much longer historical sequence rather than as completely isolated periods.
That perspective is useful when writing about Crete, where different historical layers frequently occupy the same physical landscape.
Maria Brouskari — The Monuments of the Acropolis
An archaeological guide to the monuments of the Athenian Acropolis.
The subject is geographically distant from Crete, but the Acropolis is fundamental to understanding the architecture, religion and material culture of the classical Greek world.
Works such as this form part of the wider Greek background against which I encounter classical references, architectural forms and historical ideas on Crete.
Taken together, these books encourage a wider reading of the island. Crete is not simply a succession of historical events or archaeological periods. It is a lived landscape in which geology, water, settlement, belief, memory, agriculture, architecture and human movement have continually interacted.
That is often how the research begins for me: something beside a track catches my attention, and I want to know why it is there.