What Not to Do if the God of the Ocean Gifts You a White Bull
Lessons learned during our Greek honeymoon
The Greeks had a way of telling stories that we just don’t get anymore.
So there once was this guy named King Minos who was gifted a white bull from Poseidon, the god of the ocean, and man, this white bull was awesome. Like really, really fucking great. So great that instead of sacrificing this white bull to Poseidon like he was supposed to, King Minos thought, “why would I want a perfectly good white bull to be slaughtered, let’s use one of my shitty bulls instead, Poseidon probably doesn’t even know what a good bull looks like. He’ll never know.” So that’s what he did.
But guess what, Poseidon noticed. And he was really fucking pissed.
Whereas the Judeo-Christian God would just make you wallow in your guilt and shame, or send plagues of locusts and murder your first born child—Poseidon was a bit more cunning. He knew he had to get King Minos back for thinking he was too stupid to notice that the dead bull thrown into the ocean wasn’t the kickass white one he really wanted. I mean, he was really counting on that thing being slaughtered for his pleasure. But Poseidon was a crafty son-of-a-bitch. He had a plan. King Minos was about to get soooo fucked.
That white bull was still chilling in whatever pen King Minos kept his best bulls, and every so often the queen would go down and admire this really, really awesome white bull. So Poseidon did what any pissed off god-of-the-ocean would do: he made the queen—the wife of King Minos—fall in love with that white bull.
And we’re not just saying she admired the bull. We’re talking insatiable physical lust for this beast. Like the sight of this bull would make her swoon. She stayed up late at night having nasty thoughts about all the things she wanted this white bull to do to her.
But the problem was, this bull just wasn’t feeling the same way about her. He was a bull after all, not some weird pervert.
But the queen was determined, and just as crafty as the angry god-of-the-ocean who put an interspecies love-spell on her.
If you remember the Trojan horse, the Greeks have one foolproof way of getting what they want: they build a wooden animal and sneak inside it. It’s the top play in their playbook.
The queen went to a guy named Daedalus who was awesome at building stuff—and imprisoned on Crete for being kind of a dick— and asked him to make her a really, really life-like cow. But not just any cow, this one had to be hollow inside so she could sneak inside it while—you guessed it—the white bull fucked her.
And this dude built it.
Now artists and historians differ on the exact design of this wooden cow sex-doll, but at a minimum it had a butt-flap or something. I also don’t know how long it took to build, but suffice to say to do the job properly it probably takes at least enough time for the average person to think, “welllll… maybe not. Maybe I don’t want to have sex with a white bull.”
But nope, no second thoughts here. No cold feet. By the time Daedalus was done with the heifer sex-suit, the Queen was still in heat.
And the cow suit worked great.
Worked so well in fact, that the Queen became pregnant.
Pregnant with a half-man, half-bull that you may affectionately know as: The Minotaur.
And Poseidon just laughed his ass off.
King Minos, on the other hand, was understandably a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. I’m not sure if his wife ever came clean, but I’m pretty sure that once the kid was born he knew he probably wasn’t the father.
To hide his shame, he made Daedalus build a crazy-ass maze and forced his mutant stepson to live in it. It was the most obvious option he had. And luckily, Minos had another, top-half and bottom-half, human son. But then the Athenians killed him. Holy shit King Minos was pissed about this. He waged war on the Athenians, kicked their asses, and made the losers participate in a fucked-up, Hunger Games-style human sacrifice game. Each year seven boys and seven girls were forced into the labyrinth so his weird-ass stepson could chase them and eat them.
And things were finally going great for the King. At least until a dude named Theseus pulled a Katniss Everdeen and volunteered for tribute to ruin his weird game.
The problem this time was that King Minos’s daughter had the hots for Theseus, which is pretty inconvenient but way less weird than the time her mom made a wooden cow-suit to get banged by a white bull. I’m also getting the feeling that King Minos wasn’t much of a family man. The Princess gave Theseus a ball of thread, which she got from our homeboy Daedalus, which was the least weird thing he ever did for the royal family, and Theseus tied one end of the string to a doorpost. He hid his sword (I guess Minos’s henchman never thought of checking for swords), got some clues from the Princess on navigating the labyrinth, and found a sleeping minotaur. He cut off the poor monster’s head, found the other kids stuck in the maze, and followed the thread out the exit. He took the Princess and sailed away from the island of Crete—only to promptly dump the Princess once he got back home.
But don’t worry about her, she rebounded by hooking up with half-man, half-god Dionysus.
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As captivating as this love story is, this tale wasn’t the reason I wanted to go to Crete for our honeymoon. It was because Crete was in a Bible verse. I was really into Bible verses when I got married. Granted, it wasn’t like, a famous Bible verse—not like the ones we used to justify our trip to the Areopagus or the ancient city of Corinth—but it was still in there and we had a week’s itinerary to fill while in Greece.
Acts 27: 12 -13
“Since the harbor was unsuitable to winter in, the majority decided that we should sail on, hoping to reach Phoenix in Crete… when a gentle south wind began to blow, they saw their opportunity and sailed along the shore of Crete.”
OK, not super exciting, but not all Bible verses can be winners.
There’s also one in Titus that said:
“One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons.”
Which seems a little harsh. Sure, they make cow-suits to get fucked by cattle and sacrifice children to mutant bull-monsters, but no one ever said they were “lazy.”
Thoroughly intrigued, my new bride and I hired a Greek travel agent named Dora and decided to find out for ourselves.
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Crete is an island off the southern tip of Greece, and though it’s been featured in a Bible verse, it’s typically not the Greek island you go to on your honeymoon. My wife wanted to go to those islands, but once I started throwing out Bible verses she knew she was going to have a tough time winning the argument. We compromised and agreed to do nothing that she wanted to do, and in exchange, maybe we’d go back for our ten-year anniversary. Luckily, our actual wedding had enough drama to distract her from caring too much about our honeymoon itinerary.
After eating a gyro with a hamburger patty at the airport McDonald’s, we picked up a diesel-powered, manual transmission, Peugeot from the Chania rental-car stand. We weren’t sure why Dora had booked a hotel in the city of Chania since the main attraction in Crete was a several hour drive, but she insisted and told us we would need need this rental car. We didn’t ask a lot of questions, she seemed to know the riddle of Cretan vacations. We checked into our shockingly swanky honeymoon suite and got dinner at a restaurant inside a decommissioned Turkish bathhouse. They just served food now instead of sweaty, naked men, but we had a functional Turkish steam run in our honeymoon suite to make up for any inconvenience this presented. Upon return, we thanked the concierge for the excellent dinner recommendation and asked for advice for when to leave for the city of Heraklion the next morning.
Heraklion is the capital of Crete and the only reason we went there other than Bible verses. Around the year 1900 AD, an archaeologist named Arthur Evans got super into the labyrinth myth and started looking for it. Like most Greek mythology, the weird stuff blended with the historical record like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, and this Arthur Evans dude was convinced the labyrinth was real. And after digging around in a hill in northern Crete, I guess he was right. Sort of.
He didn’t find a maze that housed a half-man, half-bull monstrosity who feasted on the prepubescent bodies his dad fed him for fun, but Evans did find an insanely elaborate palace that had a bunch of confusing hallways and a big ass mural of kids jumping over a bull. But it was like a full-bull, without any half-man parts.
History said, “close enough” and now the bulk of Crete’s tourism dollars come from tours of this “Palace of Knossos” and the purchase of replica pottery with pictures of kids jumping over a bull. We had already bought a pot at a gift shop, now we just needed to see this temple. But we needed some help navigating there from the concierge.
“Don’t go tomorrow, it’s too crowded. Go the next day.”
Well, I guess he knows more than we do. Instead we made plans to visit a beach resort so my wife could do something other than just the things I wanted to do.
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We had declined the €17.00 per day insurance on the diesel-powered Peugeot, and after learning the state of the Cretan highway system, we second guessed the decision. You still drove on the same side of the road and all that, but the concept of highway medians or two-lane traffic could not have been more foreign to the Cretans. There were no lanes, just a long patch of unmarked asphalt. But despite this lack of painted road markers, they managed to cram as many rows of cars, side-by-side, heading in both directions of traffic, as the width of whatever patch of asphalt you were on could manage. And then a couple more for good measure. If you needed to pass the car in front of you, there was no point in waiting for oncoming traffic to be clear. It would never be clear. Instead, you held your breath and punched the gas—counting on any potential collisions to be avoided by a last minute swing into the gravel shoulder by either you or the bat-out-of-hell screaming toward you. You got really good at eyeballing just how wide a diesel-powered Peugeot is. It turns out you don’t need as much room as you think. And all that was before factoring in the wind, road debris, and winding mountain pathways with blind corners.
But after a while, I got comfortable enough to turn on the radio. The seat mate on the domestic flight from Athens to Chania insisted that we listen to the local Cretan music. He said it was unique from any other region of the country and we were in for a treat. He couldn’t give much for explanation, but the station we found with the clearest reception between mountain ranges was playing acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. The rendition had very deliberate enunciations and a spoken word, thick-Greek-accent style of singing. They played the song multiple times during our ride. I’m not sure if this was the particular song our single-serving travel companion had in mind, but it’s the only sampling I needed.
He was right, I had never heard anything like it.
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The wind and the beach of Elafonisi was biblical. And since this exact wind was mentioned in one of the Bible verses I read while planning this trip, I’m using that phrase correctly for the first time in my life. It was also the offseason for this allegedly bustling beach property. There was no one else on the beach to block the wind from pelting exposed cheeks with grains of sand. Whatever beach chairs available for rent had been chained together and vacated, any public outhouses sealed and put into hibernation. It was dangerous to remove your sunglasses for fear of sand grains tearing a pinhole gash in your cornea, but the beach itself looked pretty through the UV-tinting.
We brought a couple of beach towels. We weren’t planning on swimming, but my bride was hoping to do some reading while I paraded the beachside looking for something to do. We decided to give it a go, but as we unfolded the beach towel the wind caught it and blew it as horizontal as Donald Trump’s comb over. Paige tried to make the best of it while I scanned the sand at my feet for sea glass, but as the Apostle Paul himself had learned during his time on Crete, the weather just wasn’t willing to cooperate. The Lord had other plans. And I really had to take a shit.
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We already knew the status of the sealed off porta-potties, but we spotted a sprawling beachside restaurant near where we parked. We yanked on the door. Closed for the season. There wasn’t a single available toilet on the entire beach. I guess people weren’t supposed to come here when it’s terrible out.
We mounted our diesel-powered Peugeot and headed back into town. We didn’t find anything that resembling a public restaurant or public toilet, but there was a house with some tables in the front yard and a vinyl sign advertising beer specials. It felt promising. And there were a bunch of feral cats hanging around. The feral cats probably knew the best spots to eat in Elafonisi.
As we parked and greeted the woman who seemed to be in charge using the only Greek we knew, I immediately inquired about a toilet while Paige pet a stray cat. I was told the riddle to the bathroom, going around the house and through a back alleyway, before discovering the most disgusting place I had pooped thus far in Europe. Having slain my foe, I followed the stray cats to where my wife was seated and ordered a beer and something made of pork. The pork arrived lightly seared and pink in the middle. We left the raw meat for the cats, settled our tab, and braced for another journey through the Cretan highway system before rewarding ourselves with the steam bath in our honeymoon suite.
Our assault on the labyrinth would have to wait until tomorrow.
