The Xania Town News 6
It’s not Chania: it’s Xaviá
It’s not Chania: it’s Xaviá
Why does Χανιά Old Town look more like Italy than Crete?
From 1285 to 1639 Χανιά’s ladle-shaped harbor was a major merchant port. Cretan labor built the harbor; Venetian commerce sent home the wealth it created. The Venetian model of manipulating a distant populace to prosper a populace at home initiated waves of wealth for a few at the cost of poverty for a multitude that still roil the sea lanes today.
Venice converted Crete from a bucolic backwater into a bulwark whose stone-hard esplanades and arsenals smoothed into the eye-candy strolls of today. The island’s two main harbors Χανιά and Κάντια (Candia, today’s Heraklion) were the foci of an ellipse that looped Byzantine Constantinople in the Northeast, Antioch and Acre in the the Levant, Alexandria in Egypt, Andaluciá in Spain, Barcelona in Catalonia, Marseille in Provence, and Genoa/Pisa. Trade within that ellipse amassed enough wealth to raise Venice from a soggy cluster of islets to promulgating the mandates of Mediterranean power.
Many lines of type have been set to opine the consequences, and many eyelids have drooped amid the volumes of conclusions. The Chania Town News depicts its namesake city as a centuries-old art gallery filled with timeless people gazing into the mirror of changing times.
Constantinople
Constantinople 1572 hand-tinted map engraved by Frans Hogenberg from hand-sketched notes by Georg Braun, whose commentary reads, ”Byzantium is a central place because no one can travel to Asia or Europe without the city's consent, since the city is like a bridge or a gate for one part of the world.”
For a millennium Constantinople was the largest trade entrepôt in the eastern Mediterranean and the largest religious entrepôt of Byzantine Orthodoxy. During the era of Xaniá’s rise, Constantinople was starting to wilt. Trade and Turks were coequal predators. To the Venetian patricians, the city’s greatest asset was its trade links to Samarkand, a forty-day caravan journey to the east. But Samarkand, too, was in decline. A merchant city built on the markups of the Silk Routes trade, Samarkand was the western terminus of a webwork of roads serving Sogdia, Bactria, Kushan, Persia, Gandhara, India, Tibet, China.
Samarkand survived as a terminus of southerly trade to Persia and northerly to Rus and the Viking-controlled Baltic lands. The Vikings surprised everyone by shifting from predators to profiteers when it dawned on them that predating Irish and French priories was small change compared with the wealth to be had from schmoozing Samarkand sultans.
An eighth century silver dinar found in the Viking Vale of York hoard in Durham, England bears the mint mark of Sultan Isma'il I (892-907) — an eloquent glint from the Volga-trade wealth. Courtesy of the York Museums Trust.
Constantinople’s lifeline to India and China declined to extinction in the 1400s as Central Asia was overrun by Mongols. Silk Road caravans were outflanked by the more hazardous but more profitable Silk Sea ships, which debarked not in Constantinople but Alexandria to the south. Constantinople had also seen two vital manufactures slip from its grasp: silk weaving and paper making. When Samarkand wilted, Constantinople withered.
In 1453 the Turks overran the city. They looted its wealth but left its merchants alone. Even uncouth heathens know who replenishes the money they loot. Venetian traders saw 1453 as a hiccough. Xaniá barely noticed.
Constantinople’s most calamitous loss was not its trade capital, but the loss of its intellectual capital. Nearly every significant work of thought and art produced by ancient Greece survived in original documents in the monasteries and libraries of Byzantium. The works of philosophy and mathematics known to northern Europe between the time of Cluny to Aquinas were Arabic translations from Greek produced during the great Beyt-al-Hikma era of Muslim scholarship in Baghdad. From Greek to Arabic in Damascus and thence from Arabic into Latin in Andaluciá, Aristotle and Plato might just as well been debating in Cordoba.
Greek scholars in Constantinople could read doom on the horizon as clearly as they could read glyphs on parchment. They fled west with donkey loads of scrolls, first to Venice, then to Florence. They bequeathed the Renaissance an intellectual heft that reinforced the advances in art after the mathematics of perspective was formulated.
Levant
A 1671 English version of Nicolas Visscher’s, “The Holy Walled City of Jerusalem, first known as Salem” prepared by Joseph Moxon for the bishop of Cheshire.
Crete’s central trade arc sailed to the Levant of Antioch and Acre. Here history writes a piquant tale that offsets the pieties ladled out by Saint Paul. Knights in iron led by princes in peacock feathers had the Levantine wool pulled over their eyes so adroitly that the reliquaries of European chapels boasted enough bits of weathered wood for three True Crosses and enough glass phials of Mary’s Milk to nourish entire orphanages. The fact that Mary’s milk didn’t spoil was taken as a miracle. Modern chemists are less credulous: Mary’s Milk is a colloid of water, glycerine, and powdered white dolomite from the Sitti Mariam grotto a few minutes’ walk from Manger Square in Bethlehem. The disciples of Galilee fished for souls. The merchants of Jerusalem fished for suckers. Crete welcomed them both.
Alexandria
Alexandria in Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun & Hogenberg 1572. In eastern Mediterranean seas Venetian mariners in their billowy three-masted vessels would have been easily distinguished from angular dhoni-rigged Levantine vessels. Vessels with both sails and serried ranks of oars were preferred by pirates because they could make headway directly into the wind.
The pirates off Cochin trapped their prey by stringing a long line of vessels out to sea within sight of each other. Merchant captains who saw smoke on the horizon knew the pirates were signaling who was closest to the prey. Yet slaughter they did not. Kochi pirates had the good sense to invite the captains of captured vessels aboard for tea, wish them well while looting their cargo, and inviting them to visit again. So tasty were the profits who merchants successfully evaded the pirates (by sailing on moonless nights, for instance) some merchants played the game well enough to survive several pirate tea parties and still die peacefully in their beds.
Lying midway between this eastern Mediterranean trade trinity and the Western Mediterranean’s trade trinity of Andaluciá, Marseille, and Genoa/Pisa, the canny Doges of Venice wasted little time turning Κάντια (Candia), into the hub of a wheel whose rim hooped the Med and whose axle was Anglicized from Χανιά to Chania. Tour book orthography notwithstanding, the correct pronunciation of “Chania” is Hanyáh, with the stress on the -yáh.
Yesteryear’s Χανιώτη Xaniote trading entrepôt comprised the west-side merchant import-export entrepôt lining Akti Kountourioti, today turned into a cafe-lined tourist promenade; and the east-side Arsenale ship repair and provisioning depot where Venetian oar-driven nave sottile war galleys and rotund galleons could be hauled out of the water in cavernous dry docks.
Χανιά’s Arsenale repair depot in the early twentieth century before the modern docks occluded them. Several are still in use. In one of them replicas of old wooden vessels are still being painstakingly reconstructed by historical re-creation enthusiasts.
Over the centuries a stony shoal on the north side of the harbor was gradually walled off from the sea with thick wave-defeating ramparts save for a narrow access channel dredged to a navigable depth on the western end. The landmark lighthouse which signals the harbor entrance is a glory of seventeenth century maritime architecture, refurbished in he early 2000s to is ancient glory.
Today the bustle of Χανιά’s Arsenale repair depot and ship chandlery have dwindled to a few small sailing vessels winched out of the water onto trunnions for a barnacle scrape and new coat of paint. The bristling warships have been replaced by grandiose yachts and a contingent of local fishers whose sword against the sea is a boat roughly the size of a compact car with a prow and stern attached.
The water is lucidly clear and trash-free. Fishing boats appear to levitate above a bottom so clear one can see fish darting insouciantly between the fish hooks and anchor chains.
Stone bulwarks rise about four feet above the tide line to an esplanade of large rectangular slabs. These slabs are living history, trodden smooth by galley-slave agony in one century, sweating shipbuilders the next, entrepôt merchants the century after that, and volta promeneurs today. The walkway is about twenty meters wide, lined with dozens of street cafes and restaurants featuring downscale cuisine at upscale prices. Sometimes the dishes are indeed “real Cretan”.
The tables are shielded by awnings which are rolled back in the evening to reveal magnificent moonscapes over the harbor. Inside, these eateries are furnished with bamboo and wicker chairs, tasseled cushions, glass-top or cloth covered tables, fresh cut flowers, and in the evenings, battery operated LEDs that flicker like the candles. The different premises are bordered off from each other with potted palms, ficuses, bamboo screens, and mutual disinterest.
I soon settled on a convenient scribbling spot, the Kyma Cafe, Κύμα Καφενείο. The name Κύμα meant “wave”. The reason for such an anodyne name is Cretan shrewdness. The Greek tax authorities have keen noses for the whiff of monetary gain. Chaniote Χανιώτη cafe owners deodorize their balance sheets with a rose-water of changing identities and bookkeeping so intricate that it is referred to as the Triantáfyllo system. Τριαντάφυλλο is the Greek word for “rose”, literally “thirty petals”. The term neatly describes the layers of concealment in an average cafe’s true ownership and false profit-and-loss statement.
The Κύμα was on the west side of the harbor, out of the sunset’s glare. It was secluded enough to work without being disturbed, yet gave a full view of the arc of the harbor. Directly across the water was the town’s architectural piece de resistance, the Mosque of the Janissaries — more accurately but less elegantly known as the Masjid Küçük Hasan. This lovely shaped but unlovely named mosque has been gentrified into an exhibition centre for Cretan crafts. Exhibitions change biweekly. Cretan domestic and trade crafts are so true to the soul of the land they are worth a three-week layover just to appreciate how deeply creative vitality runs on this island.
Upper face of a Minoan-era gold ring in the Athens Archeological Museum. The significance of the scene is speculative. One interpretation is four emissaries from the nether world disguised by animal masks are presenting ritual obeisance gifts to the Queen or High-Priestess of Minoa.
Music manuscript dated 1433.
