This singular absence of ancient ruin indicates a peculiarity in the civilization of that section of the island which history gives no clue to.

Northward, near the sea, there are the remains of great Pelasgic cities, of which when I first traveled in the island the walls were in stupendous condition, but of which at this visit I had found hardly a trace--the islanders had pulled them down to get stone for their houses.

The site of Polyrhenia, connected in tradition with the return of Agamemnon from Troy, was one of the finest Pelasgic ruins I have ever seen when I first visited it, but on this visit I could hardly find the locality, and of the splendid polygonal wall I saw in 1865 not a stone remained.
Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in the "great insurrection"-- that of 1837--to punish them for assembling to petition the Sultan for relief.

It is one of the most ghastly of all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans, pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot.
According to the statement of the consul, not less than thirty of the chief men of that district were so executed.
But the history of the Venetian rule shows that it was no less cruel and even more treacherous, and Pashley gives from their own records the story of the slaughter of many of the chief people of the same district to punish refractoriness against the government of that day.
Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic world--rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary.

Yet in 1865 it had been reckoned at 375,000, Christian and Mussulman.