Katalimata is the brief story of my small expedition to Eastern Crete in summer 2023.
I was staying at my friend’s villa in the North and I had rented a car for a week to work with my professor on an archaeological survey near Kritsa. Unfortunately my professor injured himself on the site, which forced us to suspend the work and my itinerary to take a new direction.
At first I simply drove to the library of archaeological studies of Crete to scavenge for material related to my master’s thesis, but sitting in a room with artificial light and air was insufferable for me to bear. My soul rather sought the Cretan Sun. So I left.
The story is about the couple of days which followed that.
Those are also the days which preceded my last menstruation before becoming a mom.
I was free and ungovernable, all one with the wind.
Last days of girlhood and days of fun around the island, where everything was possible, where destinies are still played in the caves, like a prayer to Eileithyia, or the bare sleep under the sky.
Katalimata is an obscure Minoan site on the precipitous hilltop overlooking the Cha gorge, which is now inaccessible to the hikers. It served as a “refuge settlement” in times of instability towards the end of Minoan domination. I climbed up the steepest walls above the gorge, with the sheer void underneath, but refrained from crossing the very last rock, which was corroded by the raindrops. I slept one night in the gorge, in Kato Katalimata, heard feral goats in the distance all above me. Only goats now inhabit the site. Katalimata constituted the limit to my hiking sandals, but also the moment of extreme excitation of the senses which leads to death.
I saw it in front of my eyes but instead I chose to live. I headed east.
I laughed at the frivolities of the world, I loved to taste them as if my own. Then my mind was back to Katalimata, where the body could not sneak in. The body kept going forward.
After all there is only one place where body and mind can converge again.
And the answer falls outside of this story.