Myrtia sits eleven kilometers from Knossos, in the wine country that climbs gently south from Heraklion toward the Cretan interior. Stone houses, narrow streets, the smell of grapes in late summer. Kazantzakis's family had roots here, and so did George Anemogiannis, the scenographer and costume designer who founded the museum in 1983 in his family's old paternal house. The two families had been neighbors for generations. Today the museum occupies the cluster of buildings where Kazantzakis's relatives once lived, expanded and renovated in 2009 into a quietly modern space. Six hundred and fifty exhibits fill rooms where light and shadow alternate by design, drawing visitors through the writer's life in five thematic threads: the man, his Odyssey, his correspondence and friendships, his early and theatrical works, his novels and travel books.

In 1955, the Greek Orthodox Church considered excommunicating Kazantzakis. His novel The Last Temptation of Christ, which imagined Jesus on the cross dreaming of an ordinary life with Mary Magdalene, had outraged conservative clergy. So had Christ Recrucified, which transposed the Passion onto a Greek village, and Captain Michalis, his fierce novel of Cretan rebellion. The top leadership of the Orthodox Church ultimately rejected the excommunication, but the disapprobation lingered, and when Kazantzakis died in Freiburg in 1957, the Archbishop of Athens refused to allow him to lie in state in Athens. He was returned to Crete instead, where the people of Heraklion gave him a funeral the church could not prevent. His own faith, complicated and Buddhist-tinged and never quite extinguished, remained his own. The museum does not flinch from any of this. The letters and diaries are there, the censorship and the controversy laid out alongside the manuscripts.

Kazantzakis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. He never won. In 1957, the year he died, he lost to Albert Camus by a single vote, and Camus reportedly wrote afterward that Kazantzakis deserved the prize a hundred times more. Whether or not the story is exactly true, it captures something about Kazantzakis's standing among writers who actually read him. Zorba the Greek made him internationally famous in 1946, and the 1964 Anthony Quinn film made the title character into shorthand for a certain Mediterranean exuberance, but Zorba was only one face of Kazantzakis. There was also the immense Modern Sequel to Homer's Odyssey, 33,333 lines of Greek hexameter following Odysseus past Ithaca to Africa and the South Pole. There were the travel books from Spain, Russia, China, Japan. There were the spiritual exercises he called The Saviors of God.

The archive at Myrtia began in 1976, when Anemogiannis started collecting. The decisive expansion came when Eleni Samiou-Kazantzakis, the writer's wife, donated a large portion of his personal archives and belongings. She had been his companion through the wars, the wandering, the writing in cheap rented rooms across Europe. What she gave the museum included the letters they had exchanged, the diaries he kept in a tight handwriting, souvenirs from his travels, photographs from places that no longer exist in the form he photographed them. Today the collection numbers about 50,000 objects across ten thematic groupings. The museum also holds Anemogiannis's own theatrical archive, which is itself among the most thoroughly organized in Greece, with set models and costume designs from more than four hundred performances. In 2014, the businessman Evangelos Marinakis pledged 80,000 euros annually for ten years to keep the operation running, a commitment that has since been extended.

Kazantzakis used to talk about what he called the Cretan glance, a way of looking at life that he traced to the bull-leapers of Knossos painted in fresco three thousand years earlier. The Minoan athletes seized the bull by its horns and vaulted over its back, accepting that they might die and choosing to leap anyway. He thought this was the only sane response to existence. The museum sits in a landscape that makes the philosophy feel less abstract. From the village you can see the same dry hills the Minoans saw, the same olives, the same light bouncing off limestone. The documentary the museum produces, available in eleven languages and with a children's version, tries to compress all of this into something a visitor can hold. Most leave understanding that Kazantzakis was less a Greek writer than a writer who happened to be Greek and could not be anything else.