Introduction 2023
This account of a two weeks snatched holiday, in drachma days before our retirement with Modestine in 2005, was narrated from Jill's manuscript travel diary with only minimal editing. Some of the errors from the speech recognition software may have escaped, and it has not always been possible to identify all the pre-digital photographs precisely. It may be possible to add a map later, but Crete is an awkward sausage shape and the precise routes taken impossible to ascertain twenty years on. Just enjoy Jill's inexhaustible enthusiasm for our travels, gripes and all.
Sunday 20 May 2001
Tomorrow we go up to spend a night in Croydon and leave the car at Aunt José's whilst we take a two-week flight from Gatwick to a Mediterranean island, much as we did when we went to Corsica two years ago. This time however we are heading for Crete, where we have booked an apartment for a week towards the eastern side of Iraklion at Annasaris and another week towards the west in a village not far from Chania. We have arranged to hire a car for eleven days of our stay so we can explore each end of the long island and get up into the villages and hills in the interior of the island. We have made a rather weak attempt to learn a few words of Greek and the Greek alphabet but apart from “please”, “thank you” and “I would like some red wine, please”, we have not made much progress. If road signs are written in the Greek alphabet, I'm going to be relying rather heavily on Ian's map reading skills.
Monday 21 May 2001
A beautiful sunny morning, and we are at José's, with superb views out over the surrounding wooded gardens. Being situated on the top of the hill we also enjoy distant, misty views across Croydon and beyond, if we lean precariously out of the window and look left.
We arrived about 7 p.m. yesterday. Uncle George and Mary were already here and we spent a lovely evening, the six of us together, with a quiche salad and white wine, watching three foxes playing on the lawn in the gathering dusk around 9:30 p.m. - two young ones and a much larger one. José put scraps on the lawn near the window and they came right up close, though always keeping a wary eye on us all. They were really beautiful and I've never seen them so close for so so close for so long. I wonder if we'll have an experience to equal it in Crete.
Tuesday 22 May 2001
I am writing this at one in the morning Crete time, which is 2 hours in advance of British time. I've got a concrete bed, which feels really comfortable. We have to put out put our used paper in a bin beside the toilet rather than flushing it away. There is only time for a general impression after a reasonable journey. It seems cooler here than in Britain. After the usual delays, we arrived at our apartment about one and a half hours late. Everywhere was in darkness as we left the airport, so we have no impression at all so far of Crete other than following the coast along from the east to land at Iraklion. Annasaris is about 30 minutes east of the airport, and we we can hear planes coming into land now. I hope it won't disturb us generally.
As the courtesy coach pulled off the main Iraklion to Agias Nikolaos road, our hearts sank. A little track past building works and general rubble led to the Elma Apartments. However the place is nicely laid out with a lot of flower beds, crickets singing, and pretty moths fluttering in the lamplight. The apartment is very pleasant with cool concrete walls and tiled floors. There is a kitchen with a fridge and hotplate, a shower, a breakfast area and a patio with a swimming pool beyond. The only trouble is that it seems generally isolated from anywhere. The nearest town is Iraklion – 3,000 drachmas for a taxi. There is an open-air bar with a delightful young man who cooked cooked us a pizza, as we have had nothing much to eat all day, and we didn't fancy a taxi into Iraklion to find a restaurant. He also served us sme local wine which was dry and sharp but tasted okay. We sat by the pool with a table lamp, eating and drinking with crickets singing. The young man was very sweet about our efforts to learn Greek and made us repeat phrases after him. We did manage to ask for our two glasses of red wine and a pizza and be understood - language is magic isn't it! Then he disappeared, and a lady who turned out to be his mum took over. We asked her for two more red wines which worked perfectly, and then she asked if we spoke French. Two hours later she is now our best friend and we've discussed all the places of common interest in France. She worked there for five years in her youth, and she's now 65. She helped us with Greek pronunciation and vowel sounds, and it turned into a really friendly evening. Her son speaks very good English but has never visited England. He has been explaining, with a map, a number of nice nice places we should visit whilst we are here.
Wednesday 23 May 2001
I'm really weary so I will probably finish this account tomorrow. We awoke late, Crete being two hours ahead of UK time. We sat outside on the patio, sipping Earl Grey. The sky was overcast but there was a hot, sultry heat that was stifling. As we discussed what to do, the person arrived to deliver the car, a day too soon, but we reached an agreement with the owner which suits all of us, so we are now the adoptive owners of a little Fiat Cinquecento with a soft roll back sunroof which seems fine on all the hills and twisting roads.
We set off in the direction of Kasteli, turning off via Gonies and Krasi, where we stopped for fresh pressed orange juice and rice stuffed in vine leaves. From there we continued to the windmills, a whole line, mainly ruined, above Kera. We continued down to the plane of Lasithiou, laid out in little fields and plots with small vineyards scattered amongst them. The whole plain is ringed with mountains. It is strange to discover such a flat area that around 700 meters high.
At Psirho, which means ice cold, a run-down little town selling ceramics and Cretan rugs to the many tourists passing through, we turned off up to the Diktian Cave, reputed to be the birthplace of Zeus. We parked, and had to walk the last bit. In today's unwelcome heat this was an exhausting experience but at least we feel fitter for it. Zeus is said to have been born and raised in the cave in secret because his father had a rather bizarre habit of eating all his children at birth due to a fear he had that one of them would overthrow him and become king in his place. That one turned out to be Zeus. His mother gave her husband a nice juicy stone to eat instead, and it would appear that his father Chronos never even realised it wasn't a newborn baby. Either the writers take us for total idiots to believe all this, or the gods are a short-sighted load of highly gullible wallies, to judge by the things that are supposed to have happened in Greek mythology.
The cave itself is superb, descending vertically from an opening through which from the bottom you can see look up look up to see sunlight streaming and nesting birds soaring. There are supposed to be Mediterranean bats here too, highly likely but not in evidence. You descend down well laid concrete steps to a lake at the bottom. On all sides are limestone stalactites and stalagmites which is really the main feature of the cave. They are magnificent and well illuminated, so it is easy to imagine faces and figures in their contorted twists and flows. The greatest joy however was the icy coolness that struck ever stronger, the deeper we descended. The lake is about 44 meters down.
Later we continued along the level plane of Lassithiou and then up eastwards, stopping for an ice cream at Vigla with views down across the hazy plain. We got into conversation with a Danish retired couple who were back in Crete for the second time in five weeks, they love it so much. We then descended the Potamos Valley, a descent that seemed to continue for ever. As we rounded a bend, a little white haired man barred our way, forcing us to stop. Gesticulating, he informed us that he was Greek and asked our nationality. Then, using an odd mixture of disconnected words in Greek, English and German, he told us it was good we were English - he didn't like the Germans – and he not only insisted on shaking our hands wildly, but kissing us both and giving us oranges. We asked in embryonic Greek how much for the oranges, but he was adamant that they were gifts. Lots more hugs and kisses, flowers put in my hair, and we were allowed to leave. Maybe in an isolated place it's excitement whenever any stray tourist finds their way through. I've had the feeling already that German people are not really liked by the older Cretans here. They were occupied during the war and they are old enough to still remember. However it is no more fault of young Germans today than it is that we should take the credit for the events of the war. In neither case were any of us even born at the time. It is hard to explain that to a little man kissing you with his great moustache and a smell of cigarettes when you don't speak the language.
We continued via Neapoli, which looks a very pleasant place, and then joined the new road back through Malia along the coast towards Iraklion. At Hersonissos we stopped and stocked up on food and drink at a supermarket bursting with Nescafé, Fairy Liquid, Boddingtons ales, and other products essential to the well-being of the British on holiday. We managed to find delicious loaves of very dark brown Cretan bread, Greek yoghurt, local honey, peach juice, Cretan red wine, beer, taramasalata, cucumber, tomatoes, fruit, and salad stuff. Ian had a headache and dusk was falling. We had to find the Elma studios, as we had left by a back route, so headed for home. Ian had a sleep while I went for a swim in the pool - sheer heaven. The water fairly steamed as I jumped in. I had it to myself and could swim with a view down to the actual sea some quarter of a mile away. A few people turned up to sit by the pool and watch. Everyone here is English, very pleasant and friendly.
By the time I returned to our apartment and showered, Ian was feeling much better, so we had a delicious salad on our patio and enjoyed the cooler evening air, though still hot, with all sorts of interesting moths and bugs of the night attracted by our patio lamp.
My personal impression of Crete so far is that it is astonishingly arid. It is a miracle anything is produced here at all. There are very few flowers, no grass, bits of scrub, but generally up in the hills there is nothing but grey scree with outcrops of white limestone rock with the occasional scrubby bush clinging to maintain a foothold. In most places even goats are not in evidence. Lower down and in the plains they are tethered along with donkeys on the edge of the villages beneath olive trees for shade, but even here there seems nothing for them to eat. Fields seem barren, pale yellow earth, filled with rocks and nature's rubble. We have not seen a stream or any running water since we arrived. The earth is incapable of holding water; how the country supports so many tourists as a mystery. I assume, being limestone, that there are underground reservoirs, and that the many windmills we saw operating on the Lassithiou plain are used for raising water to irrigate the little fields. The roads seem fairly good. Off the beaten track one has to navigate potholes, but the roads are generally fine, reasonably wide, without a lot of traffic, and most of that seems to be tourists, so there is not much hassle. Compared with Corsica the roads are excellent and twice the width.
To tell the truth, I cannot yet see that Crete can hold a candle to Corsica. I have seen little so far, on our first full day, that is particularly beautiful or impressive compared with Corsica or green Spain. Much work has been done opening up new roads and improving old ones. This means that all roads seem like scars across the landscape, with rocks and boulders piled beside and beneath the newly surfaced, wide roads. It is a massive engineering programme in such heat but, with the land too arid for natural vegetation to grow, the scars remain as ugly tons of stark, bare, yellow rock along the roadside.
What must be said though is that the people seem really nice and friendly, not only the ones who give oranges. Those whom we have encountered today speak English, and are both charming and friendly. It's made me lazy, and I'm hardly even even bothering to try with the language now, though Ian is persevering. I think if this was my island home I would resent such an overwhelming invasion by tourists from all countries of the world, though predominantly English and German. However they are definitely the most profitable crop; even the ubiquitous olive must be a poor runner-up.
Thursday 24 May 2001
There was a breeze this morning and the weather was much fresher, thank heavens, although there is still bright sunshine. After a patio breakfast of yoghurt with Cretan honey, sitting in the sunshine beneath our peach tree, overlooking the little olive grove and swimming pool with the blue Mediterranean Sea beyond, we took the new road to Iraklion, where the traffic got steadily busier as we approached the town. We turned off, and made our way through the suburbs to Knossos. Despite the site being packed with tourists from around the world, it is surprisingly large, and absorbed everyone comfortably. It is laid out covering several acres, surrounded by barren hills, an impressive site of the Minoan civilisation. It was discovered and extensively restored by Sir Arthur Evans and remains the island's most important site, although many of its artefacts are now either in the museum in Iraklion or in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We seem to have some vague recollection that Sir Arthur Evans had connections with Boars Hill near Oxford. Its main period of cultural activity was from 1700 to 1450 BCE, and it was destroyed by fire around 1400 BCE. It was an enormous centre of culture and, together with the town that developed around the palace, some 100,000 people are thought to have occupied the site - about the size of Exeter today.
Much has been reconstructed from scant remains and I have to confess that, from a distance, the shell of the city with its cement reconstructions and ruined chambers make it look remarkably like Kosovo or some war damaged town of Central Europe today. Everywhere is dry and dusty, exposed to the sun. A few citrus and olive trees provide a little shade at the edge of the site. There are some facsimiles of wall frescoes, the originals having been removed to the museum in Iraklion. The city seems to have had a sophisticated drainage and plumbing system which can still be seen today; it seems little progress has been made on the island since the fall of Knossos on that front at least!
Our visit lasted several hours, but with a gentle breeze, sun hats and sunglasses, it was quite bearable and very interesting. I was surprised how very substantial the walls were. They appear to be constructed primarily from local limestone but they were bright white stones here and there of rough alabaster topped with jagged crystals. There were also whole slabs of tightly packed crystals, which I presume to be gypsum, except that is a soft stone. Ian said it is easy to imagine that the palace of Knossos is actually the labyrinth in which a ceremonial bull was kept chained, the origin of the legend of the Minotaur living on the human flesh of those that got lost in the labyrinth. Personally I'm not convinced; I wish I could remember more about Mary Renault's book The king must die. The central courtyard of Knossos is though to have been where the bull dancing took place, with the athletes being tossed between the horns of the sacred ball to somersault lightly from its back. The bull figures very highly in Minoan culture. We left the site and lunched in a taverna on the main street with a delightful young waitress who spoke excellent English while her mother did all the cooking. I had moussaka and salad while Ian had stuffed tomatoes, peppers and vine leaves. It came to around £8 for two with drinks and we felt really full afterwards.
We continued along the road beyond Knossos. It soon emptied out and rose in a series of bends up into the surrounding hills with views down onto a fascinating landscape of olive trees and vines showing green against the white bare soil beneath, forming an intriguing patchwork in green and white. No other colours existed. We went on through a pleasant countryside through little, crumbling villages with ladies dressed entirely in black, including headscarves, sometimes bent double, looking very aged and talking to neighbours on benches by the roadside. Small groups of elderly village men sat smoking or drinking in the shade, against the wall of their home, or under an olive tree on the dusty roadside. Some played backgammon or sat swinging their worry beads. Everywhere were tiny cats and even tinier kittens. Beneath the peach or orange trees in the roadside orchards, chickens scratched the bare earth for anything they could find to eat.
We discovered a few miles further on a wayside shrine dedicated to saints Damian and Kosmos with votive candles flickering and a little altar with Greek icons of the two saints. The site overlooked a small ravine with views to the mountains rising beyond, a pleasant place to linger with nobody else around.
Then eventually we reached Hersonissos where we parked on the edge of town and wandered along the main street with its jewellers, amusement centres, fast food stores, car and scooter hire companies. It was noisy, brash, and thronging with tourists of all nationalities. All the signs are in English, German or Dutch; there was no sign of the Greek alphabet anywhere. However the atmosphere struck us as pleasant and friendly - if you like that sort of thing. A total contrast the life up in the villages behind.
The seafront is nothing but restaurants. Here the custom is to have touts outside each one, trying to get you to eat in their restaurant. It is quite bullying and very alien to our traditional way of thinking. The sea was surprisingly rough, with a small, sandy beach. After pottering for an hour, we decided to head for our apartment. Once there I had a swim in the deserted pool while Ian prepared a salad and taramasalata on Greek bread, to eat with red wine on the patio. I then shared the shower unwittingly with a three inch millipede, which proved itself an excellent swimmer. Then a pleasant evening chatting and drinking red wine on the patio. It is now midnight and Ian has gone to bed. I think I'll follow.
Friday 25 May 2001
The weather was cooler still today, overcast and grey but still comfortable, and more to our liking. After our usual breakfast on the patio of yoghurt, honey and bananas grown in greenhouses at Malia a few miles east of here, we set off to visit the palace at Malia. This is beautifully set with views of the sea to the north and the Diktian Mountains, dark and arid, to the south. Here there have been no reconstructions like at Knossos, and excavations seem to have been conducted by French archaeologists. The site is wonderful, far nicer than Knossos, although smaller. What you see is what was found and, having seen Knossos, it was easier than it would have been otherwise to interpret.
I must confess that much was difficult to disentangle, although Ian seem to understand and enjoy it greatly. I found myself interested in the scrubby plants, withered grasses and magnificent thistles surrounding the site. Olive and citrus trees lined the fringes, and a huge tamarisk gave shelter from the sun, when it chose to emerge, at the entrance to the side. One thing that has struck me is the number of birds in Crete. There is a perpetual cacophony of sound as they flit among the olive trees. There appear to be varieties of sparrows and buntings as well as birds about the size of a thrush with a feathered crest. It is very pleasant that, no matter where you are, there is birdsong. On the other hand I have been surprised that there do not appear to be lizards or even snakes. Everywhere in southern Italy and Corsica we saw lizards, and I expected the same here, scuttling amongst the ancient walls, but there was nothing. Ian rounded off his visit in style, using the ladies’ loo, not realising they were not unisex, and having the misfortune to open the door (not all toilet doors have locks in Crete) on a lady. We decided to move on quickly before they took him off in a van to a Greek funny farm.
We decided to go to Kritsa, where we had read there is a little church with the best frescoes in Crete. However when we arrived they had hidden it so well that, by the time we discovered it, it was closed. We admired its setting and its simple white-washed exterior, and lamented missing the treasures within.
Kritsia is a rather pleasant little town, if somewhat commercialised. We parked below the town and made our way up past shops with open fronts, selling local handicrafts: leather goods, sandals, lace, embroidered table linen, rugs and carpets, and much besides. There was also a range of restaurants so, our efforts to find a little church actually benefited us as we plunged into side alleys off the tourist track and found ourselves in a labyrinth of narrow passageways flanked by white-washeded flat roofed houses in various stages of decay and dilapidation. On a bench an elderly lady dressed entirely in black was making lace. A little tourist family stopped to look and admire her work. As they moved on she looked after them with an expression of total contempt on her face. I was sorry and sad that she should feel like that as the family has seemed so nice. I suppose in some ways it is understandable but really I would rather not be in a country where people felt like that about me. However she was probably an exception, and we later passed a genial face man aged around 70. Being polite, we said “yassos” which we assume means “hello”. He beamed at us, corrected our pronunciation, and asked where we came from. We said “angliki”, meaning we were English. Again he beamed, and with signs and rubbing his index fingers together, said in Greek “Greek English army” signifying that we fought side-by-side in the War. He too indicated that Germans were not good. It is such a pity they cannot forgive modern Germans for the past and pour unearned credit on us. Maybe that's what makes them so forgiving to the British lager louts in Malia every evening; that is more what we British are like nowadays. Then we discovered the town church, high up on a promontory reached by steep steps down from the old town’s passageways. From the little square to the right there are views down over Agios Nikolaos and the Bay of Mirabella with the island of Psira out in the bay. The lady came to tend the candles as we stood outside, so she unlocked the church and let us in. It was a dazzling ornate spectacle of three gold coloured chandeliers with painted icons of saints all around, suspended by huge chains from the ceiling. There were many clearly depicted Greek icons of the various saints. The church seems to be dedicated to St George, with an icon of him slaying the dragon painted on wood, very much decayed and surrounded by white ribbons and bows. The were also a number of more recent copies hanging in the church. It was all very opulent and heavy, but very much an example of a typical Greek Orthodox Church.
We descended to the town again and stopped for lunch on a terrace overlooking the nearby mountain with its rocks and scrubby bushes. On the roof of the building opposite the restaurant an alsatian dog ran back and forth along the parapet, looking down into the street below. It did detract somewhat from our enjoyment of our meal, as at every moment we expected him to fall. Needless to say he didn't, but it is a strange way to keep a dog, locked out on the roof.
We then drove three kilometers along a little road through olive groves, irrigated by hoses run from a central standpipe by the roadside. Elderly ladies in black hacked at the dried earth beneath the trees with mattocks, and donkeys stood patiently waiting, wearing heavy wooden saddles. At one point we passed such a lady, riding her donkey with a big bale of grass stacked up behind her. Seen against the backdrop of the bare mountains it was something from another world - or perhaps it's us who are from another world. Can we be in the 21st century? Eventually we rounded a bend and had a spectacular view down into the Kritsa ravine with the mountains rising all around in awesome grandeur. Beyond us lay the archaeological site of Lato. The gates were barred as the guardian went home at three in the afternoon. It had definitely been worth the drive for the truly magnificent view, and what a site for a settlement! As nobody was looking at the time, we climbed over the wall and quickly disappeared inside among the ruins which spread back steeply up the hillside in a series of terraces. This civilisation was later than than the Minoans, being Doric, dating from around 700 to 400 BCE. The site was breathtaking in the beauty of its setting and the skill with which the inhabitants had created a large settlement on the saddle between the two peaks of the mountains, surrounded on one side by the towering heights of the Diktian range and on the other with views down over Agia Nikolaos and the sea beyond. How though could they have survived such in an inhospitable location; no land to grow produce or keep animals, everywhere totally barren, dry and arid? Where did they obtain water? We lingered longer than we should, reluctant to leave such a pleasant and interesting place.
On the hillside opposite we watched a car, tiny as a Dinky model, edge cautiously along a narrow track above the ravine with a sheer drop down. It took 20 minutes to edge along and negotiate the twists and turns of a steep descent into the valley at the further end. On one occasion we saw a car trying to ascend from the further end, and sat watching from our vantage point on the other side of the ravine, waiting to see them meet. However the ascent proved too steep, and the vehicle was forced to descend backwards all the way down before it could turn. Thus the other vehicle never knew how it missed the disastrous encounter.
