The ride began, as most of mine do, from home in Kokkino Chorio. On paper it was a fairly ordinary Apokoronas circuit: 38.4 kilometres, 819 metres of ascent, 831 metres of descent and a highest point of 300 metres. The E-MTB was moving for 2 hours 27 minutes, averaging 15.6 km/h, with nine recognised climbs along the way. The steepest climbing gradient recorded was 18.5 per cent; the steepest descent, −20.5 per cent.

There was nothing particularly heroic about any of this. It was simply another morning ride.

Except that somewhere on Litsarda Ridge I stopped.

I had stopped ostensibly to admire the view, and I started thinking about the ground beneath me and the tracks that crossed it. Northwards, beyond the lower country of Apokoronas, lay Souda Bay and the Cretan Sea. Southwards the land rose towards the White Mountains, the Lefká Óri. Between the two were ridges and valleys, villages, olive groves, dry watercourses and tracks disappearing into the folds of the land.

It was one of those places where Crete appears briefly to explain itself. Sea on one side, mountains on the other, and several thousand years of human activity spread across the country between them.

Of course, Crete rarely explains anything quite as neatly as that.

Perhaps that is why I am writing this story.

Tracks of the Minotaur began with riding. I wanted somewhere to record the E-MTB routes I was exploring across Crete and the things I encountered along them. But somewhere along the way the website changed. The rides remained, but increasingly they became the means by which I found other stories. A track led to a battlefield; a battlefield to a military record; a ruined building to an old map; a memorial to a name; a conversation in a village to something that needed checking.

The website gradually became less about where I had ridden and more about what riding through Crete had caused me to notice.

A reader arriving at it now might reasonably wonder what connects an E-MTB route through Apokoronas with the Battle of Crete, an SOE hideout, a Cretan revolution, an ancient city, a forgotten soldier, Herodotus or The Odyssey.

The answer is the ground.

There is another connection, though, and I think it may be equally important.

The journey.

Departure and Return

The Odyssey is one of the great journey narratives. It is a story of departure, wandering, encounter and, ultimately, return. Odysseus moves through a world of islands and seas, strangers and dangers, stories and uncertain identities, but Ithaca remains the fixed point towards which the journey eventually leads.

My journeys are obviously of a rather different order. I usually leave Kokkino Chorio in the morning and, barring mechanical failure, or an especially poor navigational decision, expect to be home considerably sooner than Odysseus.

But there is something about the structure of The Odyssey that I recognise.

I leave home and travel through the landscape. Somewhere along the way I encounter something — a place, a track, a name, a building, a story or simply a question — and eventually I return.

Very often I come back knowing something I did not know when I left.

Sometimes what I bring home is no more than a photograph, a GPS position or a place-name. Sometimes it is a question. Occasionally it is the uncomfortable discovery that something I had believed before leaving home cannot possibly be correct.

Then the research begins.

Crete itself enters The Odyssey. In Book 19, while concealing his identity from Penelope and constructing one of his elaborate false histories, Odysseus places himself here:

“There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea.”¹

He continues by describing a rich, populous island containing ninety cities and peoples speaking different languages.¹ It is a memorable description, but it needs to be handled carefully. Odysseus is inventing an identity, and Homer is poetry, not a gazetteer of Bronze Age Crete. Nevertheless, the literary image matters. Crete is already imagined as a substantial and diverse island within a wider Mediterranean world of ships, movement, war, strangers and return.

A few lines earlier comes another phrase that catches my attention. Odysseus speaks of being away from his country and of “wandering through the many cities of men”.²

I would not push the comparison too far. Odysseus had Cyclopes, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis to contend with. Apokoronas generally offers dogs, goats, thorns and the occasional pickup coming around a blind corner.

But movement creates encounters in both stories.

My own journeys usually begin and end in Kokkino Chorio. Home is the fixed point. I ride out from it into Apokoronas, towards the White Mountains or beyond, and eventually return. In that deliberately limited sense, Kokkino Chorio performs something of the narrative function of Ithaca: it is not the adventure but the place from which the journey begins and to which I come back.

The stories accumulate between departure and return.

Reading the Ground

I had ridden the country around Litsarda often enough to know that the view from the ridge was only part of it. Some tracks ended at fields. Others crossed streams, passed ruined walls or climbed towards villages before continuing into country where modern roads had taken quite different lines. A few could be followed for kilometres. Others gradually narrowed until there was little more than a line through stones and vegetation, usually at about the point when turning around had become inconvenient.

Some were older than the maps on my handlebars.

When I first started riding these tracks, I was interested mainly in where they went. That remains a perfectly reasonable question, particularly when the battery is declining, the track has disappeared and coffee is several kilometres away. Gradually, however, another question became more interesting.

Why was the track there in the first place?

Once I started asking that, the riding changed. I began looking at the ground differently. A track was no longer simply something to ride. Why did it take this particular line? Why climb one side of a valley rather than the other? Where was the water? What settlements did it connect? Was I following an older route, or had modern agriculture created something entirely new?

The map could suggest answers, but the ground had the final say. A route that looked straightforward on a screen could become something quite different when I reached it. Gradients mattered. So did water, vegetation, walls, riverbeds and the simple difficulty of moving through the landscape.

This ride provided a small demonstration. Nine climbs appeared within 38.4 kilometres. Some were short and sharp: one reached 18 per cent and another 18.5 per cent. Others were longer, steadier pulls towards the higher ground. The final recognised climb covered about a kilometre, rising from roughly 240 to 290 metres before the route reached its highest country.

The numbers describe those climbs accurately enough, but they do not explain the landscape.

For that, I had to ride through it.

Gradually I found myself doing the same thing with history. A written account might say that someone travelled from one village to another, that soldiers withdrew along a particular route, or that a track connected two settlements. I wanted to know what that actually meant on the ground.

So I went and looked.

Sometimes the ground supported the written account. Sometimes it complicated it. Occasionally it suggested that I had been asking the wrong question altogether.

That became part of the journey.

The E-MTB

Crete provides an almost inexhaustible supply of questions, and the E-MTB provides the means of reaching them. It could take me along tracks that cars could not easily use and across distances that would make repeated investigation on foot impractical.

More importantly, it allowed me to return.

A place could be visited once, considered, researched and then approached again from another direction. Something overlooked on the first ride might become obvious on the second or third. Or it might remain completely inexplicable, which happens as well.

The E-MTB changed the scale at which this was possible. It allowed sustained climbing while still requiring concentration, judgement and effort. There is sometimes a curious assumption that putting a motor on a mountain bike removes the difficulty.

The rocks have apparently not been informed of this.

Nor have the gradients.

A badly chosen line can still deposit rider and E-MTB onto Cretan limestone with considerable efficiency, and gravity remains stubbornly indifferent to technology.

What the E-MTB changed was access.

Gradually, movement became method.

The Old Maps

I began to understand this more clearly when I started working with British military maps of Crete produced during the Second World War. Among the most useful are those associated with 512 Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers.

They were produced for operational purposes, not for someone riding an E-MTB eighty years later, but that difference in intended readership has proved surprisingly unimportant.

The surveyors recorded things that mattered to people who had to move across the island: tracks, paths, wells, chapels, rivers, contours and settlements. Placed beside modern mapping, their work sometimes reveals another Crete. Roads built since the war have altered patterns of movement. Tracks have been widened, abandoned or swallowed by vegetation. Agricultural machinery has created new approaches to fields, concrete has replaced earth, and old routes have been bypassed.

Yet the earlier lines frequently remain.

That is when the interesting part begins.

A track shown in the 1940s may still leave a faint line across a hillside. A chapel marked by the surveyors may remain beside it. A water source can help explain why a route passes through one place rather than following what appears, on a modern map, to be the obvious line. A difficult climb sometimes makes more sense when considered from the perspective of a loaded mule rather than a motor vehicle.

There is considerable satisfaction in finding one of these old routes on the ground. There is rather less satisfaction in discovering that the Royal Engineers were perfectly correct about its existence but neglected to mention that, eighty years later, it would contain two fallen trees, several hundred metres of thorn and an extremely territorial goat.

Occasionally I find nothing at all, and that matters just as much. A line on an old map is evidence, but it is not proof that the ground remains as the cartographer recorded it. Landscapes change. Tracks disappear. Place-names alter or migrate. Maps contain errors. Memory changes things as well.

One of the easiest mistakes in field research is to find what you hoped to find, particularly after spending three hours getting there. The temptation to declare the nearest pile of stones historically significant can become surprisingly strong.

So I photograph it, record the location and go home. Then I check.

Sometimes I return.

Herodotus and a Good Story

There is nothing particularly new about this problem.

At the beginning of The Histories, Herodotus explains that he is recording his enquiry so that human achievements should not be forgotten with the passage of time and so that the causes of conflict should be remembered.³ The Greek word behind the title, historiē, carries the sense of enquiry or investigation.

That appeals to me.

Herodotus travelled, listened and collected accounts. He encountered different versions of events and did not always pretend that he could resolve them. Elsewhere in The Histories, when faced with claims that he cannot establish securely, he makes the distinction between reporting what has been said and accepting it as fact.⁴

Two and a half millennia later, that remains a useful distinction.

A ride that begins with a question about a wartime map may end with coffee in a village square. Someone notices the E-MTB and a conversation begins. A place-name is mentioned, or an old track, a grandfather, a ruined building, perhaps a spring somewhere above the village.

These conversations are one of the pleasures of riding Crete. They are also dangerous territory for anyone interested in its history.

A story told confidently over coffee does not become established fact simply because the teller points convincingly towards a mountain.

Oral testimony is evidence of a particular kind. It can preserve information that never entered an archive, but memory is fallible and stories change in the telling. The conversation may nevertheless provide something extremely valuable.

It tells me where to look.

That is often enough.

Ride, observe, ask, research, compare and return. Without consciously planning it, that became the rhythm of my fieldwork.

When the Ground Disagrees

The same habit has shaped much of my work on the Battle of Crete and the wartime resistance. A written account can tell us that men moved from one village to another, occupied a ridge, withdrew along a road or hid in the mountains.

Sitting at a desk, those movements can appear deceptively simple.

Standing on the ground changes them.

Distances become real. Gradients acquire meaning. Lines of sight appear and disappear. A route that seems curious on paper may become perfectly sensible when approached from below. At other times the opposite happens: the ground contradicts the comfortable explanation and raises a question the written account does not answer.

Those are often the best days.

There are places in western Crete where the Second World War remains unusually close to the surface. Around Maleme, Galatas, Prison Valley, Stilos and the routes towards Sfakia, much of the landscape through which the fighting and withdrawal of May 1941 occurred can still be examined. Elsewhere there are caves, shepherds’ shelters and isolated places associated with resistance networks and clandestine movement during the occupation.

I have visited some of these places with veterans, serving soldiers, historians and families. Others I have reached alone by E-MTB, sometimes after several attempts to work out how to get there.

Neither experience requires embellishment. A military cemetery does not need dramatic language. The names, units and ages on the stones are sufficient. A cave does not become more important because someone describes it as mysterious, nor does a ruined building acquire a wartime history because we would like it to have one.

What matters is establishing who was there, when they were there, what happened and how confidently the evidence allows us to say so.

The more research I do, the less comfortable I become with certainty.

Crete has accumulated thousands of years of human activity, but those layers do not arrange themselves conveniently for a passing rider. A ruined wall beside a track might be ancient, medieval or comparatively recent. It may have been defensive, agricultural or simply a boundary. A spring may help explain why people settled nearby, but the fact that water flows today does not prove continuous use since antiquity. A chapel above a route tells us something about people and place, but its position does not automatically make it a lookout post.

There is always a temptation, particularly when writing a story, to make the landscape tell you what you want it to say.

The discipline lies in allowing it, occasionally, to say absolutely nothing.

Where Does That Track Go?

Oddly, uncertainty makes the riding more interesting rather than less. Why is the village here? Why does the old track climb this side of the valley rather than the other? Where did the water come from? What could actually be seen from that ridge? Could a loaded mule have climbed the route shown on the map? If an account says men moved from one place to another during the night, how far was it, what ground did they cross and how long might the journey reasonably have taken?

And sometimes there is the oldest question of all.

Where does that track go?

This question has caused me more trouble than most of the historical ones.

A promising line through the olive groves can deteriorate remarkably quickly. A track wide enough for a vehicle becomes a path; the path becomes a goat track; the goat track becomes a vague suggestion among rocks; and eventually it becomes apparent that the goats possessed information I did not.

At that point there is usually a choice between retreating with dignity and continuing for another twenty minutes before retreating without it.

Experience has made me slightly better at choosing the first option.

Only slightly.

Another Kind of Journey

Long before I thought seriously about creating a website to record these rides and the stories I was finding along the way, I had encountered Matsuo Bashō and The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Bashō travelled on foot, recording temples, graves, villages, mountains and brief encounters along the road.

Crete is not Japan, and there are obvious limits to any comparison between a seventeenth-century Japanese poet travelling on foot and someone riding an E-MTB around the White Mountains. Bashō also appears to have encountered fewer punctures.

But I recognised something in his method.

Movement created the encounters.

Bashō did not separate the journey from what he discovered along it. The road provided the structure. Places appeared in sequence because that was how he reached them. Landscape, history, conversation and reflection became part of travelling.

Something similar had happened to my own rides without my consciously planning it. I would leave Kokkino Chorio with a route in mind and return with something else: sometimes a wartime position, sometimes a chapel, sometimes a track shown on an old map, sometimes a conversation, and occasionally nothing more significant than another question requiring another ride.

Gradually, those journeys joined together, and Tracks of the Minotaur grew from them.

Tracks of the Minotaur

The website gave me somewhere to record not simply where I had ridden, but what I had found, what I had subsequently researched and, just as importantly, what remained uncertain. A ride could lead to a story about the Battle of Crete, a wartime escape route, a forgotten track, a village, a revolution, an ancient site or something as ordinary as a wall or spring that had made me stop.

The route was often the beginning of the story rather than its subject.

Crete began to appear not as a collection of separate historical periods but as a landscape through which successive generations had moved. Bronze Age communities, Greek city-states, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottomans, revolutionaries, shepherds, soldiers, resistance fighters and modern farmers did not inhabit identical landscapes, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise.

Roads changed. Settlements moved. Forests disappeared. Rivers altered course. Political and economic worlds changed completely.

But the physical constraints persisted.

Mountains remained difficult. Water remained necessary. Passes channelled movement. Valleys offered routes through country that resisted easier passage. Human beings repeatedly changed the landscape, but they never acquired the ability to ignore it altogether.

That was the connection I had been looking for on Litsarda Ridge.

The E-MTB was not really the subject after all. It was an instrument.

It allowed me to move slowly enough to notice things but far enough to connect them. A line on a wartime map became several kilometres of actual ground beneath the tyres. A route described in a memoir became a climb, a descent, a river crossing and a measurable distance. Repeated journeys allowed places to be approached from different directions and at different times of year.

Most importantly, travelling the ground imposed a useful discipline upon historical imagination.

A map can make two places look close.

A mountain is entitled to a different opinion.

The Return

Eventually the route turned towards home.

The final part of that September ride climbed back onto the higher ground. The eighth recognised climb rose for 0.9 kilometres, from about 218 to 265 metres. The ninth added another kilometre, finishing at around 290 metres. From there the route began to surrender the height it had spent much of the morning acquiring.

By the time I returned to Kokkino Chorio, the E-MTB had covered 38.4 kilometres and accumulated 819 metres of climbing.

But those numbers were no longer what interested me most.

The ride had become part of the answer to the question I had been considering on Litsarda Ridge: what exactly is Tracks of the Minotaur?

It is not simply a record of E-MTB rides, and it is certainly not an attempt to explain the whole of Crete.

It is a record of following things.

Sometimes I follow tracks. Sometimes maps. Sometimes names in military records or inscriptions on memorials. Sometimes stories told in villages. Myth belongs here too, not because myth should be confused with history, but because generations of people have attached stories to this landscape and those stories have become part of the island’s cultural geography.

One journey leads to another because Crete rarely provides an answer without quietly leaving another question beside it.

And that brings me back to The Odyssey.

Odysseus’ journey is ultimately a journey home. Mine is different, but departure and return still provide its rhythm. I leave Kokkino Chorio, travel through the landscape, encounter something and return. Then I look at what I have found.

And sooner or later I leave again.

The comparison ends there. I am not Odysseus, Kokkino Chorio is not Ithaca, and a difficult climb through Apokoronas is not ten years wandering across the Mediterranean.

But a journey does not have to be epic to change what the traveller sees.

That, perhaps, is the reason for this story.

This website is not a guidebook, nor is it intended as a definitive history of Crete. It is a record of what I have ridden, observed and subsequently tried to understand. The routes are real. The effort is real. So are the rocks, the wind, the wrong turns and the tracks that looked perfectly reasonable when viewed on a computer the previous evening.

In time, the stopping became as important as the riding.

Look at the wall. Check the map. Photograph the inscription. Follow the old track. Talk to the man in the kafeneio. Go home. Find the wartime map. Read the account. Check the place-name. Discover that the explanation you had confidently constructed that morning cannot possibly be correct.

Then go back and do it again.

There is no need for the landscape to confirm what I want to believe. Its value lies partly in its refusal to do so.

The stories on Tracks of the Minotaur therefore follow more than E-MTB tracks. They follow questions across Crete: through villages and olive groves, along forgotten paths, across battlefields and into the mountains. Some lead into documented history. Others reach archaeology, folklore or myth. Some begin with a name on a headstone or an old map spread across my desk. A few lead nowhere at all and end with me pushing an E-MTB through vegetation while questioning the judgement of whoever selected the route.

That person is usually me.

Then I return home.

And another journey begins.

Η γη θυμάται.

The land remembers.

Footnotes

1. Homer, Odyssey, 19.172–180, trans. A. T. Murray, The Odyssey with an English Translation, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1919). Odysseus, speaking to Penelope under an assumed identity, begins his invented Cretan genealogy with his description of Crete “in the midst of the wine-dark sea”, followed by its many inhabitants, ninety cities and different peoples.

2. Homer, Odyssey, 19.165–172, trans. A. T. Murray. The passage forms part of Odysseus’ fabricated account to Penelope and therefore needs to be understood within that narrative setting.

3. Herodotus, Histories, 1.1, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1920). Herodotus introduces his work as the presentation of his enquiry, undertaken so that human deeds should not lose their renown with time and to record the causes of conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks.

4. Herodotus, Histories, 7.152, trans. A. D. Godley. In discussing disputed claims concerning Argos and Persia, Herodotus distinguishes between what has been reported and what he can establish with confidence.