Cultural Retreat

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster and – according to the Washington Post – a rock star mythologist. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, as was The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, her previous book. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017. Her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships, was published in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. It has been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent non-fiction book, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myth was published in Oct 2020, and Margaret Atwood liked it.
She has spoken on the modern relevance of the classical world on three continents, from Cambridge to Chicago to Auckland. She writes for the Guardian. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4: reviewing for Front Row and Saturday Review, appearing as a team captain on three seasons of Wordaholics, and banging on about Juvenal whenever she gets the chance. Six series of her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, have been broadcast on Radio 4: all series are available now on BBC Sounds.

Doniert Evely is now the Previous Curator of the British School of Archaeology of Knossos. He has ties to the BSA, and works freelance with a number of archaeologists.  As the President of Minoan Steps, Doniert Evely writes about his experiences about Crete, the Minoan civilisation and the new cultural organization Minoan Steps. “Like with everyone, it was the exuberant (if luxurious) items that first captured my attention, but then I began to realize that the Minoans were quite different from every other advanced culture of this area – in how they represented themselves: they are still an enigma, even after a century of hard work by so many people.
For me, the most amazing excavation experience was revealing the tomb of a man of outstanding importance for what went on to become Greece, who lived at the beginning of the Iron Age, at Lefkandi on Euboea. We are all lucky in Crete (especially when compared with the chaos in England)! Cretans have a reputation of being both rapidly hospitable to good-intentioned visitors, but very careful in forming their real long-term friendships. Both are – to me – virtues. And so I have found the Cretans broadly to be. Both men and women are full of character. But, it has to be said, that I deliberately steer clear of politics: matters can get swiftly convoluted here. I am not a political animal. Right now, though technically retired, I choose to spend much of my time here, partly to pursue my interests, and partly to share the life of my nonos-extended family with whom I worked when Curator at Knossos for BSA. They – and others like them – are simply worth it!“

Ionna Kalypso Glypti is an affiliate of Doniert Evely: “My introduction to Greece, as an Alexandrian Greek, took place when I was a child, but one of many tongues and continents. The Greek islands were my summers, bathed by the phosphorescent blazing light on a white wall, the austere rocks, the dramatic mountains and the incandescence of the blue sky pouring into the sea. Under that light and the songs of Leonard Cohen, nostalgia took hold of me, as like the ship of Ulysses Nostos I began to learn how to word my emotions in this ancient tongue. This was a voyage into the light as I managed to escape my personal darkness and the various Labyrinths of my subconscious mind. In fact, I was finding a way to freedom through words.
Freedom, or Eleutheria, in my tongue means she who walks freely towards what she or he loves and brings love to his or her soul, because the chains are many and not always tangible, and so able to be escaped from.
In this moment I realized that my tongue embodied my spiritual essence. It is not surprising that everything here in Greece speaks now just as it has for centuries making everything clear -without being known. It is this clarity that I return to within me to understand what is unknown as we go through these difficult times. As I write the word clarity, everything becomes translucent like the morning dawn as the ancient God Apollo with his chariot announces the arrival of light.“