On Sunday I had the unique opportunity to witness an absolute "first": The official completion of the excavation of Galatas, the fifth Minoan palace (after Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia and Zakros).

The excavation has been started in 1991 and is now officially complete and soon to be published. The excavator, Prof. Georgios Rethemiotakis, invited his fellow archaeologists as well as the interested public (like me) to a 2 1/2 hour tour through the site, which normally still is closed to the public.

So I enjoyed this first-hand information in the company of all those people well-known within the archaeological circles of Crete. Prof. Rethemiotakis' presentation was in Greek language, which would have brought my comprehension down to nought, had I not met Sabine, who is a member of the archaeological survey team (systematically analyzing the environment of the palace for further clues about life in the palace in Late Minoan times). She kindly took over the job of my personal simultaneous translator.

On our way back to Ierapetra we crossed the Lassithi plane high up in the mountains and during our three hour drive through narrow mountain roads got a good impression of the vast size of this island which has been perceived by the early inhabitants not as an island at all but as a separate continent.

As you may have noticed, this tour required a complete day on the beach to recover, before I found my way to the Web.

Greetings from Crete