"Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 73"
The Mediterranean sun cast golden light over the whitewashed villages of Crete, where olive groves climbed terraced hills and the ruins of Knossos Palace peeked through cypress trees. Su Yao's car wound along coastal roads, passing women in black headscarves hanging laundry on stone walls, until it reached a mountain village with views of the Aegean Sea. In a courtyard shaded by an ancient olive tree, a group of weavers sat on wooden benches, their hands moving with deliberate grace as they wove wool into thick, colorful blankets. Their leader, a 72-year-old woman with silver braids and a woolen shawl draped over her shoulders named Eleni, looked up as they approached, holding a finished koumeli—a rug decorated with spiral motifs and bull heads in deep reds, golds, and greens, patterns that seemed to pulse with ancient energy. "You've come for the koumeli," she said, her Cretan dialect musical like a lyre, gesturing to piles of blankets stacked beside earthenware dye pots.
The descendants of the Minoan civilization on Crete have crafted koumeli for over 4,000 years, a craft rooted in the island's mythic past. The koumeli—a handwoven wool blanket—serves as both a practical covering and a vessel for stories: its spirals represent the labyrinth of King Minos, bull motifs honor the Minotaur legend, and marine patterns recall the Minoans' mastery of the seas. Each piece requires up to five months of work, with weavers aligning their projects with the Kourotrophos (child-nurturing goddess) festival to "infuse the wool with life-giving energy." Dyes are made from plants and minerals native to Crete: saffron from Lasithi for gold, ochre from the White Mountains for red, and olive leaves for green, with recipes guarded by village elders through secret chants. The process begins with a libation to Rhea, the Minoan mother goddess, and weavers sing mantinades (poetic songs) while working to "awaken the ancient spirits in the wool." Su Yao's team had traveled here to merge this mythic craft with their seaweed-metal blend, hoping to create a textile that honored Minoan traditions while adding durability to the wool fibers. But from the first conversation, it was clear that their understanding of "mythic resonance" and "innovation" was as different as the island's rugged mountains and the calm Mediterranean.
Eleni's granddaughter, Maria, a 26-year-old who curated a Minoan textile museum while studying classical archaeology, held up a koumeli with a pattern of dolphins and lotus flowers swirling around a central labyrinth. "This is for the Minoan Festival at Knossos," she said, tracing the motifs that tell the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. "My grandmother spun the wool during the Anthesteria (flower festival) when Demeter walks the earth—too many bull heads, and the cloth brings wrath; too few, and it loses protection. You don't just make koumeli—you weave the island's myths into wool."
Su Yao's team had brought computerized pattern generators and synthetic dye blends, intending to mass-produce simplified koumeli patterns using their seaweed-metal blend for a "Mycenaean luxury" home decor line. When Lin displayed a prototype with machine-woven labyrinth motifs, the women froze, their wooden shuttles clattering to the stone floor. Eleni's brother, Nikos, a 75-year-old shepherd with a crook carved from olive wood and a face etched with sunlines, stood and thumped his staff against the ground. "You think machines can capture the pneuma (spirit) of our ancestors?" he said, his voice rough as gravel. "Koumeli carries the breath of Minoan queens and the courage of Theseus. Your metal has no breath, no courage—it's a shard of pottery, not a living myth."
Cultural friction deepened over materials and rituals. Cretan weavers shear sheep during the Thargelia (harvest festival), offering the first fleece to the earth by burying it beneath ancient olive trees to "feed the roots of memory." The wool is washed in spring water said to flow from the cave of Zeus, where women leave honey cakes as offerings to the nymphs. Dyes are prepared in copper cauldrons over fires of olive wood, with each color mixed according to the phases of the moon—red is dyed during the full moon for "passion," gold during the waxing moon for "growth." The seaweed-metal blend, despite its marine origins, was viewed as an intrusion. "Your thread comes from seas that swallowed our ships," Eleni said, placing the sample on a table carved with Minoan seal stones. "It will never hold the labyrinth's magic."
A practical crisis emerged when the metal threads reacted with the saffron dye, turning it a dull orange and causing the wool fibers to weaken. "It angers Poseidon," Maria said, holding up a ruined swatch where the dolphin patterns had frayed. "Our koumeli grows more powerful with each generation, like the olive trees that outlive empires. This will crumble like ancient pottery, erasing our connection to the Minoans."
Then disaster struck: wildfires swept through the Cretan countryside, destroying olive groves (some over 1,000 years old) that supplied both oil and dye materials, and damaging the weavers' looms—some carved from wood salvaged from Minoan ruins. The stored wool, kept in a stone hut, was singed by flying embers, and their supply of rare purple dye (made from sea snails collected on the south coast) was incinerated. With the Rethymno Folk Festival approaching, when new koumeli are traditionally displayed, the community faced a crisis of both heritage and economy. Nikos, performing a ritual to calm Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, by burning olive branches and reciting Homeric verses, blamed the team for disturbing the natural balance. "You brought something cold from the north to our sun-warmed island," he chanted, as smoke from the ritual fire curled toward the mountains. "Now the gods are angry, and they burn our olive trees."
That night, Su Yao sat with Eleni in her stone house, where a clay pot of moussaka bubbled in the oven, filling the air with the scent of eggplant and cinnamon. The walls were hung with koumeli blankets and framed reproductions of Minoan frescoes, and a small shrine held a terracotta figurine of a Minoan goddess and a bowl of olives. "I'm sorry," Su Yao said, sipping raki ( Cretan brandy) from a small glass. "We came here thinking we could honor your craft, but we've only shown we don't understand its soul."
Eleni smiled, passing Su Yao a piece of dakos (rusk with tomato and feta). "The fires are not your fault," she said. "Crete has always burned and been reborn—that's the cycle of our myths. My grandmother used to say that even singed wool can be rewoven, like the phoenix rising from ashes. But your thread—maybe it's a chance to show that koumeli can tell new stories, without losing our ancient heart. Young people buy machine-made rugs from Athens. We need to show them our weaving still speaks to the gods."
Su Yao nodded, hope flickering like the oil lamp on the table. "What if we start over? We'll help replant the olive groves with fire-resistant varieties, repair the looms, and salvage the singed wool. We'll learn to weave koumeli by hand, using your mantinades songs. We won't copy your sacred patterns. Instead, we'll create new ones together—designs that merge your labyrinths with our ocean waves, honoring both your myths and the sea. And we'll let Nikos bless the metal thread with a libation to Poseidon, so it carries the gods' favor."
Maria, who had been listening from the doorway, stepped inside, her sandals clicking on the stone floor. "You'd really learn to weave the triskelion (three-legged symbol) pattern? It takes years to master the symmetry—your eyes will cross, your back will ache from leaning over the loom."
"However long it takes," Su Yao said. "And we'll learn the epic songs you recite while working. Respect means honoring your myths."
Over the next four months, the team immersed themselves in Cretan life. They helped plant new olive saplings in terraces reinforced with stone walls, their hands blistered from digging, and traveled with Nikos to collect wild saffron from the Lasithi Plateau, learning to harvest the delicate stigmas before dawn. They sat on wooden benches in the courtyard, weaving wool until their fingers were raw, as the women sang mantinades about love and loss that echoed Minoan poetry. "Each thread must follow the labyrinth's logic," Eleni said, showing Su Yao how to create the spiral pattern. "Too chaotic, and it loses meaning; too rigid, and it loses life. Like our myths—they change but stay true."
They learned to dye wool in copper cauldrons over olive-wood fires, their clothes stained red and gold as Maria taught them to add olive oil to the saffron dye to "make the color shine like the sun god Helios." "You have to crush 150,000 saffron stigmas for one pot of gold dye," she said, weighing the threads in a wooden scale. "Each one is a gift from Demeter—waste them, and the color fades." They practiced the double weave that creates the koumeli's reversible patterns, their progress slow but steady as Eleni's 90-year-old mother, Katerina, who remembered stories of the German occupation, corrected their work with a sharp eye. "The triskelion's legs must balance like the three Fates," she said, her gnarled fingers adjusting a thread. "A crooked leg brings bad luck to the household."
To solve the reaction between the metal threads and saffron dye, Lin experimented with coating the metal in a solution of olive wax and mastic resin, a mixture Cretans use to preserve ancient artifacts. The wax sealed the metal, preventing discoloration, while the resin added a subtle fragrance that Nikos declared "smells like the temples of Knossos." "It's like giving the thread a Minoan soul," she said, showing Eleni a swatch where the gold now blazed against the metal's shimmer.
Fiona, inspired by the way Crete's waters connect to the Atlantic through the Pillars of Hercules, designed a new pattern called "Labyrinths of the Deep," merging spiral motifs with wave patterns in seaweed-metal thread. The labyrinths gradually transform into ocean currents, symbolizing how Minoan myths spread across the seas. "It honors your ancestors and our sailors," she said, and Nikos nodded, pressing his hand to the fabric in a gesture of blessing. "The old gods ruled both land and sea," he said. "This cloth understands their kingdom."
As the olive saplings took root and the looms hummed again, the community held a celebration at the ruins of Knossos, with musicians playing the lyra (Cretan fiddle) and dancers performing ancient rituals. They unveiled their first collaborative koumeli in the throne room of the palace, where it caught the light of torches like a relic from Minoan times. The rug featured the "Labyrinths of the Deep" pattern, its wool fibers strengthened by seaweed-metal thread that glowed like sunlight on water, and traditional bull-head borders that seemed to charge with mythic energy.
Eleni spread the koumeli on the stone floor, as village elders chanted ancient prayers to Rhea. "This rug has two memories," she said, as tourists and locals alike gasped at its beauty. "One from our Minoan past, one from your ocean present. But both are threads in the same labyrinth."
As the team's car drove away from the village, Maria ran alongside, waving a small package. Su Yao rolled down the window, and she tossed it in: a scrap of wool dyed gold with saffron, stitched with a tiny triskelion and wave in seaweed-metal, wrapped in olive leaves. "To remember us by," read a note in Cretan Greek and English. "Remember that myths and oceans both connect us—like your thread and our wool."
Su Yao clutched the package as Crete's coastline faded into the distance, the sun setting behind the White Mountains in a blaze of crimson. She thought of the hours spent weaving among olive trees, the mantinades songs that seemed to carry the voices of Minoan priestesses, the way the metal thread had finally learned to dance with the wool. The Cretans had taught her that tradition isn't about being trapped in the past—it's about keeping the conversation with ancestors alive, letting old myths evolve while staying rooted in the island's sacred soil.
Her phone buzzed with a message from the Jeju team: photos of Mi-yeon holding their collaborative haebok at a diving festival. Su Yao smiled, typing back: "We've added a new labyrinth—Cretan seas and your ocean, woven as one."
Somewhere in the distance, a lyra played a haunting melody that echoed across the hills, a reminder of the music that connects all Mediterranean peoples. Su Yao knew their journey was far from over. There were still countless myths to honor, countless stories to weave into the tapestry of their work. And as long as they approached each new place with humility—listening to the gods, honoring the ancestors—the tapestry would only grow more mythic, a testament to the beauty of all things bound by thread and time.