Greece: Day 11

We arrived at the beautiful Thalassa hotel on the outskirts of Chania yesterday.  What a wonderful way to end this spectacular trip!  The rooms look out on the Aegean Sea, and the beach is a beautiful place to relax before we begin the long trek back to Stamford.

We visited Maleme today.  This is the site of the Nazi Germans landing to capture Crete and control the island.  The attacks began on May 20,  of 1941, but the Cretans and Allied forces put up stiff resistance.  Eight thousand German soldiers died and over 200 airplances were downed.  Nevertheless, the Germans were able to take the island within 10 days, and they burned a number of villages to take revenge on the stiff resistance to the invasion.

We passed the cemetery to the Allied forces in Chania yesterday.  Today we visited the German cemetery at Maleme.  On May 20, every year there is a commemoration of this event.  Interestingly, the Greek government has allowed the German government to own the land for the cemetery, and the Germans keep up the cemetery.  This is an interesting response to such a violent and horrific part of human history.  Far from justifying any violence from and the invasion by the Germans, the cemetery stands as a symbol to honor the lives that were lost—even of the “other” or the enemy—and it also exists as a way to move beyond grievances and violence to healing and repairing relationships between countries. 

One of the programs that Maleme is involved in is called Volksbund.  Young people from around the world work together to keep up memorial sites in various countries, learn about what war meant to those in the country and others, and develop relationships with other young people from other countries.  The hope of the program is to work for peace by teaching the horrors of war and nurturing relationships across national and ethnic lines.  It was powerful to see pictures of the program and see teenagers tending the grounds and the graves of this site.

Christos, the history faculty member who planned this trip, talked with the kids about the German youths who died (many 19, 20 or 21 years old) at Maleme and likened their death to the myth of Oedipus.  He tied the reflection together by noting, “If these young men were born knowing what they would do and for whom they would die, they too would probably rip out their eyes as well.”

This visit was a poignant end to the trip to Greece.  There is so much history here, and, inevitably, that history—thousands and thousands of years of history—is filled with beauty and wonder and human creativity and ingenuity, and it also possesses the violence and destruction that humans are still so capable of meting out.  Programs that focus on working for peace and developing relationships of understanding across different peoples and cultures is so important.  I would hope that this trip, in its own way and the breadth and depth of the experiences, has impressed upon the students a greater perspective of the world, the irony of history, the complexities of human societies and living well, and the importance of attending to and participating in the life of society.

We leave tomorrow morning at 4AM from our hotel, fly to Athens and then onto New York.  We will miss this wonderful country, but look forward to returning home and life in Stamford.