We flew to Crete on 2nd Oct for 10 days. I had sailed into Heraklion in 1980 and visited Knossos, but knew little more about the island. I learnt a little Greek, but the whole tourist industry speaks English more or less competently, so I seldom had a real conversation where I had to communicate in Greek!
Crete’s history has been one of foreign occupation for most of the past 2000 years. It was the cradle of the first known major civilization on European soil, the Minoan, between approximately 3000 BC and 1450 BC. It was then incorporated into first Dorian and then Hellenistic Greece until conquered by the Romans in 67 BC. On the fall of the Western Empire in the C5th it passed into the hands of the Byzantine Empire (with a century in Arab hands 824-961 AD) until conquered by the Venetians in 1204. They held the island until it was wrested from them by the Turks in the mid C17th. The rest of Greece threw off Turkish rule in 1821, but in Crete the occupiers hung on until 1898, when the island became independent for a few years before it was united with the rest of Greece in 1908. It was held by the German army from 1941 until 1944 when most of the island was liberated. The German garrison in Chaniá held out until May 1945.
We started with a couple of days in Chaniá in the NW corner. It was an important Venetian fortified harbour as the city’s fabric bears witness, although a few mosques and other vestiges of Turkish rule remain. There is a Venetian mole with a lighthouse,
a big “bastion”, city walls, the governor’s palace, monastery, shipyards, etc. We stayed in a little hotel with a view over the harbour
and found the Greeks charming and friendly almost without exception. The city boasts a fine orthodox cathedral,
an architectural museum (in part of an old Franciscan monastery) with a fascinating collection of coins, and a naval museum with a model of the Battle of Salamis, inter alia.
Naturally we looked for places to dance, although on the whole our stay was disappointing in that respect. On the first evening we set out for a long and fruitless walk round the town looking for places where we were assured there would be dancing. On our return, by mere chance we found a bar immediately opposite our hotel
(across a street less than 3 metres wide) with live music – a laouto (Greek lute) and a guitar.
The building had no roof, but with the warm weather that did not matter. A group of about 15 people, apparently an end-of-season office party, came in and before long they were on their feet. Magda joined in one dance, but we were so tired (having got up at 3 a.m. for our flight) that we did not stay for more.
The next day we explored Souda, the modern port in the outskirts. As we were having lunch the guitar player from the previous evening came past so we stopped him for a chat. He said that they were playing again that evening, which was the bar’s closing night of the season. So we went. This time there were three musicians: our friend, now playing the laouta, another playing the oud (a similar but older lute-like instrument) and a third the lira – a sort of three-stringed viella or treble viola played on the knee. It is a typical instrument of Greek folk-music. No one danced!
Our next visit was to Elos, a tiny village in the mountains of western Crete famed for its chestnut festival. There was not much going on but we walked up into the hills among the chestnut trees and found 3 or 4 delightful, tiny country churches. As we came out of the tiniest of the three,
a local farmer appeared with basket of little ripe figs and offered us a couple each. Here my Greek was put to its first serious test! In the village there was a wood-carver with a Mexican flag outside his shop; he explained that there were so many imported Chinese products in Greece that he refused to be Greek until Greece recovered its self-respect.
On Monday we left Chaniá on the 9 a.m. bus for Plakias on the south coast to meet up with Nicholas, an English friend from Chile. He lived in Crete many years ago, owning a sailing boat and a donkey! I went for a couple of good walks in the mountains while Magda spent time on the beach. We had supper in a little place looking over the bay and ate snails as we watched the sun set.
In restaurants you only order the starters and/or main dish (a couple of starters are often sufficient) and wine or beer. Clean tap-water is almost always available and when you order your bill they bring you a small portion of sweet pastry or fruit and yoghurt, and a little decanter of rakis – like Italian grappa. It is advisable not to finish the decanter, even between two of you!
From there we headed east, changing buses in the old-established tourist resort of Agia Galini with its big, smart hotels. We arrived for the night in the commercial city of Mirés, hoping to find a B&B and a hire car. We found neither! Magda went exploring and entered a little restaurant where she explained our problem. Of course – said Ireni behind the counter – we have a friend with a little apartment to let, my sister will drive you there! And so it was all fixed up in a trice.
As soon as we had settled in we took the bus a few miles east to the archaeological site of Gortys, which was the Roman capital of Crete and an important city. There was a 6th century church of St Titus (undergoing restoration) and a fairly well-preserved theatre.
The rest was pretty much heaps of loose stones which reminded me of Easter Island! There was another theatre more or less excavated and recognizable, a forum and some temples, but nothing very easy to visualise. The most evocative sight was an olive tree, estimated to be over 1,600 years old, embracing a piece of Roman pillar!
We returned for dinner – the only customers – at our friendly restaurant where Ireni’s mother Margarita did the cooking. She was one of the last 10 on the Masterchef competition for Greece and in the past has worked as a cook for various VIPs. We ate very well, then Ireni put on some music and the four of us did a couple of dances. It was a delightful evening.
The hire car problem meanwhile remained intractable, so from Phaestós we returned to Agia Galini by bus where we eventually obtained a little car for 48 hrs. In this we set off north into the Amari Valley,
a rural bowl dotted with little white villages and remote churches overlooked by Mt Ida, at nearly 2,500 m the highest peak on the island (at left).
You can visit a cave on its eastern slopes where Zeus was reputedly born, but we remained on the western side. We meandered about looking for somewhere to stay and eventually came to the Aravanes hotel in the little village of Thronos at the north end of the valley.
On arrival I found an oldish man sitting outside shelling walnuts, whom I asked for directions. He turned out to be the owner and on closer acquaintance proved a charming and cultured man who made us very welcome. We shared our table on the first night with a French couple and on the second with our host and two Norwegian women and the Swedish husband of one of them. We explored the valley during the day visiting various villages, in one of which we had our only experience of a rather grasping restaurateuse. We will not be returning to Gerakari. We also found an abandoned monastery which served for a few years as an agricultural college but is now falling down; the church however was perfectly kept. And we went for a beautiful walk down a limestone gorge with a shrine now devoted to St Anthony, but which has been a place of worship since long before christianity. 
We duly returned the car to Agia Galini on the following day. We had a long wait for the bus so I walked an hour along the coast to the little village of Agios Georgios (St George) and back, while Magda went to the beach and round the town.
Our bus deposited us in Rethimnon, another Venetian port in the centre of the north coast. Again Venetian buildings, walls and mole set the tone but there were also a few mosques. We stayed in a “boutique” hotel – a bit above our normal price range but very nice apart from the mozzies… We dined in a restaurant with live music played by a couple of students who, while technically quite competent, lacked spirit. No one danced, so we went back to bed.
On our last full day the south wind was blowing hard up from Africa, sprinkling the island with Sahara dust. I did a good walk up into the hills just inland to a couple of pretty little villages, and passed by Crete’s only fresh water lake, Kournas. I had lunch in a little taverna in the tiny village of Kastellos. When I opened the door, sweaty and wind-blown, the eyes of the “waitress” – the owner’s 14-year-old daughter – opened wide in surprise, but after that she looked after me very well, practising her school English. I was the only non-Greek in the place.
Our last night in Chaniá was spent in another restaurant with live music – very professional – and we were able to dance a bit. We found ourselves next to a Brit in his 80s who has lived in Western Australia for 40 years where he became a Greek Dance instructor!
