This oil found everywhere in the kitchen

Can open a book of recipes or search the miracle formula in a women's magazine for unlocking the secrets of the Cretan diet. The safest way to do perhaps remains to go on-site, browse this large island of 260 kilometres long 56 to widest, across the Aegean Sea, last indent before the Libyan coast.

The first illustration of the benefits of the scheme... is the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, among the treasures at the voracity of visitors: two statuettes of 35 centimetres high, three thousand five hundred years old, found in the crypt of the central sanctuary of the Palace of Knossos. We see for themselves that the contemporary of the Minos had no concern for overweight. Two goddesses to snakes, arms raised, bare chest buildup of a very fitted bodice, a long skirt and apron complement clothing. The size is fine as a mannequin on glossy paper. As to confirm this demonstration of slimness, the Museum deploys on its walls of the Minoan frescoes where ephebes thin and graceful dance, run, processionnent or domptent bulls. There is even a picture amazing freshness, colours, of a young smiling girl, Goddess or Priestess, the discoverer of Knossos, sir Arthur Evans, named "La Parisienne".

But where lies the secret of these beautiful health Needless to traverse the streets of the old Candia, get lost in the streets of downtown ceintes massive ramparts high by the Arabs, deployed in redoubts and forts by the Venetians, reinforced by the Turks. It is better to take the road to Knossos, in a chaotic traffic, and find its direction as boards with fantasy by facetious road. Past a kind of industrial suburbs, the route moves during 5 kilometers between vineyards and olive trees. The "Palace" is a low Hill on 21,000 square metres. At the height of its splendour, he had 1,300 rooms on 5 floors. The propaganda of the Greeks from the Mainland are housed Minotaur in the labyrinth designed by the architect Daedalus. These same Greeks, tired of paying tribute, sent Theseus rid humanity of this monster mi-homme mi-taureau. Believe the attic, the Cretans were eating of human flesh, iron hand directed by a tyrannical Minos. Fortunately that to offset this legend, ethics Plato chose Crete as "Laws", recalling that Minos, exemplary and wise King "ruled in 90 cities", and that good son, he went all nine years in the cave where his father Zeus had hidden his love with the beautiful nymph Europe removed on the shore of tyre, after having joined the island to swim into a bull.

Vegetables, olive oil and wine

In any event, Minotaur was not the son of Minos... but his wife Pasiphaë seduced by a bull. Often sacrificed animal since the priests with a double axe, "labris", a Cretan word found in "Labyrinth", the Palace of the double axes... A Palace discovered and reconstituted in the early 20th century by sir Arthur Evans. Restoration with paint and cement armed force has the merit to enlighten the poor secular tourist on the gloss of past centuries. All had been buried and upset over the centuries by the customary earthquakes of the island and, especially, burned and submerged in the explosion of the volcano of Santorini fifteen centuries before our era. No need to breadcrumb to find the corridor of the processions, the throne room, basin said the Queen, to engage in the maze of carefully reconstructed rooms (the frescoes were reproduced the same after having been filed at the Museum of Heraklion)... Only the painted cement pillars and ceilings do not illusion and hardly evoke the lightness of the wood used in antiquity.

But where so hides the secret of the Minos System In the stores of course! Twenty-two to be exact, with 150 large jars that contain 78.000 litres. The stewards of the Palace are stored grain, oil, dried vegetables and wine. The Minoan means fed first of sheep or goat milk (Amalthea had been feeding to Zeus, child hidden by his mother Rhea in a cave in the nearby Mount Diktè where Minos went on a pilgrimage every nine years), but also vegetables and fresh fruit, eating fresh fish, tasted little meat, was eating snailsassaisonnait olive oil and aromatisait with wild herbs of the scrubland of the Mount Ida. Cretan vocabulary of everyday life has bequeathed to the Greek peas, mint, absinthe, oil, wine... and also rose, hyacinthe, the narcissus. Life flowed, quiet, cholesterol-free and without stress, the shadow of the olive, and fig trees, oranges... in the song deafening of cicadas.

The remains of the other cities and palaces excavated on the island are less dramatic, without replenishment, the sections of wall clad with gypsum plates do little beyond height of man. Malia, under a relentless Sun, has the impression of wandering on a vast Plaza where the stores are only identified. Gournia, cited established on a hill on the Aegean, the streets are still visible, bordées stalls, barns and homes, climbing fig trees and Thistles modest Palace site. On the South coast to Phaestos and Agia Triada, the ruins are hidden between trees, offering the visitor a providential shadow: palaces, villas, agoras draw blank harmonious ensembles of any reconstruction. Cellars and warehouses are still full of huge jars with "pitharia" (the ancestors of the amphorae), evidence that

also the storage of food, oil, honey and wine.

Do not forget Kato Zakros, Crete, on the Libya sea, ancient Europe last Sentinel in the extreme southeast. The site deserves: the road wound turns and the hairpins from Sitia, jumping from one paying the other Hill, crosses the villages forgotten world to lead after a few kilometres of desert mineral in a verdant oasis, along a gravel beach. Discovered in the 1960s, the city unfolds hillside, at the outlet of a gorge known as the Valley of the dead because of the many tombs occupying its flanks. After Adravasti, a marked path descends between the cliffs from Ano Zakros to the most daring.

The descendants of the subjects of Minos retained their culinary habits over the centuries. The Greek occupants then Romans was introduced even at the "minoan way of life." Thus Athénée, writer Greco-Roman gourmet, has bequeathed to us the recipe of two complicated cakes made of "pétimèzi" (from the grape juice Syrup), honey, dried fruits, sesame seeds and poppy. Under Byzantium, the population of the countryside retained his diet of fresh vegetables, olive oil and wine. She survived the successive occupations of Arabs (824 to 961), Venetian (from 1204 to 1669) and Turks (1669 in 1898).

Many centenarians

Today are marvels of the low rate of mortality due to cancer and cardiovascular disease. The Centennials are legion: it is enough to stop in a mountain village to see the old sitting at "kafeneon", all dressed in black, the scarf with fringe on the head, black leather boots, telling their hand against the Ottoman kicks. Unless this is those of their father or grandfather... It seems that this longevity is essentially given by the olive and oil. The latter protects the heart and liver, reduces cholesterol, oxidative action and analgesic qualities. Dietary panacea in some way. And the Cretan consumes 35 litres per year, fifty times more than the French! Suddenly, the island is a haven for the miraculous tree: 35 million olive trees that flourish... with manna from the European Community.

This oil, found everywhere in the kitchen. Starting in the pan bagna local, the dakos, a bread black ring made of barley, wheat and rye, to the consistency of étouffe-chrétien if it fails soak it oil relieved oregano, wearing a beautiful tomato crushed, successful myrithra, a fresh sheep's milk cheese. To give good conscience, the local dietitian ensures that this bread contains all vitamins and fibre are essential to the digestive system and the brain!

But attention to the Cretan culinary temptations. Succeed in retaining the Minos line fed kitchen at olive oil is not obvious. How to resist the kalitsounia, fried spinach and wild grasses, Macaroni skioufikta, snails boubouristoi, cuttlefish with fennel and olive, the rabbit with lemon and thyme, the Skafia rissolé lamb stew The trip to Crete, with better resolutions, can quickly make speeds of circuit gourmet, rich in sugars and fats. While the breakfast taken in the shade of a treille in the "Panorama" the property named, over the long white sand beach with pink tints of Falasarna, in the extreme west of the island, appears to be reasonable: orange of the growth pressed, yoghurt topped honey of the White Mountains and fresh goat cheese fritters. But how to resist the sprayed metzedes of ouzo on the port of Chania before the old mosque of the janissaries, or escape to a stock "xirino me sèlino" (pork with celery), and a "kotopolo me règani" (chicken with oregano) at the foot of the Ottoman Citadel of Rethymnon, for it has succumbed to a baklava running honey on the Jetty of Sitia to accompany a "hit". Not to mention the "special snails" in the "Napoleon" of Ierapetra where it remembers the night spent in a house in the port by Bonaparte returned from Egypt.

To find the Cretan simplicity and forget the stress (which most certainly use urban), better is worth to stop in the countryside. As in Koutsounari e.g. from Ierapetra to Sitia. The innkeeper of the "Rodos Taverna" does not put that "Le Routard" has sticky it of his shelves, he likes to present his garden vegetables, offer its best watermelon full sugar and Sun with a glass of raki dessert after a slice of swordfish grilled in return... with a little oil olive and lemon. The country of Zorba, legendary frugality of the palikares, these proud independence fighters celebrated by Nikos Kazantzaki in "Freedom or death", is therefore not deserted places. Jacques Lacarrière, who was working for years in Greece and Crete, noted in "Greek summer": "first as a country to talk to you, it is by what it organically introduced you to new substances, whimsical liquids." Crete taught me all of this montane food, dry cheese, its olives, its spelt boiled, his black bread, rosé wine and other flavors that I discovered: grains and sesame oil, fennel dried in the Sun, fresh basil, honey of resin, and everywhere that smell of goat which covers to clothing by sleeping in the villages on boards covered with skins...

Then Ready to the Minos System