Two skulls at one farmhouse (first looks like a ram, second a Cretan goat/ibex/kri-kri ?). A one-off, or were these displays common (as in, having significance to the Cretans)?
My wife and I were staying in a very old farmhouse in North West Crete. The owner had a number of skulls he'd picked up on forays into the mountains. It's not unusual to see skulls adorning properties in Crete - if it moves the Cretans will shoot and eat it. We, being collectors of the weird and wonderful, rather naively commented that we found his skulls to be objects of great beauty and thought no more of it.
A couple of days later the owner arrived at our door with a very smelly plastic carrier bag in hand. He told us he'd been visiting the mountain village where he was raised and had been talking to the local Pappa (Priest) who had told him of the sacrificial slaughtering of a ram for the local holy day celebrations. The plastic bag contained the skull of the ram, he had boiled and removed most of the flesh - the cheeks of course saved as a delicacy. My wife then spent the next two days trying to remove as much of the remaining flesh as possible using vast quantities of bleach in an attempt to reduce the smell and flies. Towards the end of our stay we popped the skull together with a fly or two into a cardboard box and posted it off to our home address thinking it'll never get through UK customs and it would be the last we'd see of it. Lo and behold on our arrival back at home there was the box on our doorstep still attracting flies! It took many sessions with bleach and many months in quarantine in our greenhouse before ending up in pride of place on the shelves of our living room amongst similarly weird and wonderful ephemera.
And the moral of this story, be careful what you wish for!
Images shot in 2012 with Hasselblad H Series.