The Cons of Crete

Home now...
Which means my husband will not have a seizure if I reveal that I've been in Crete for two weeks. I can unlock my holiday entries!

I had to stop writing these in Chania because the physical pleasure of writing is severely curtailed by doing it on a phone. It's cramped and irritating.

The cons of having a holiday in Chania Old Town are twofold.
1) Mosquitos. I was so pleased that they didn't find me,but then they did. I haven't been bitten so severely since I was in Egypt. My buttocks look like the last two currant buns in the bakery.

2) Graffiti. It's everywhere. I suppose one way to look at it is that in millennia to come, archeologists may find this stuff as exciting as we find the viking graffiti in the neolithic tomb of Maeshowe. I like street art, but most of this stuff is just tagging and political complaint. There are whole paragraphs of indignation, probably quite erudite. There is political activity in town, we saw a march of a few determined looking communists, who then gathered in some town hall; megaphones blaring into the night, while the rest of Chania shrugged and partied. It was one of the two days that the seas grew rough and clouds gathered; the megaphones made the communists sound like strange cultists trying to invoke a storm. R chuckled when I said so.

'That's exactly what they are,' was his reply.

The storm never came. Instead, the sky grew ever more relentlessly blue and the sun mastered us all. Some might call that a third con; the need to be mindful, sun factor 50+ and mighty hat, cos it's a kindly heat, neither arid nor humid, and it is never so still that it chokes, but still it will toast you.

But of course, some call that the first pro; the light and warmth that opens hibiscus flowers round the doors and draws people down to the smiling harbour where you can spend all day watching folk and the sea. There's history if you want it, so much history, plus food, drink, markets, beaches...

Just beauty and life.

Crete: Morning into Night

And there's the holiday basic, beautiful, easy, cheap if you want to just go to the nearby market and stock up, then sit on a beach or read in the shade. But who does that? Can't help but want to eat out, visit stuff, hire a car for a couple of days (no trains on Crete) spend some cash here and there. Covid, lockdown etc sent businesses tumbling and bills soaring all over the world. Time to follow the example of Zeus, the ultimate bon vivant, and explode in a shower of gold!

R and I were so tired we did almost nothing for about a week. Then, a little exploring had to happen, and we made our way to a couple of monasteries up in the mountains; so interesting, full of extraordinary art in places too sacred for photography! I was intrigued by much of the imagery and symbolism; a huge ceiling portrait of Christ looking down, the light within the chapel descending from a rope/cable that ended in his forehead, as though to exemplify the light shining down upon the viewer directly from his logos; A wooden chair with a four-winged cherub (these turned up a lot) above a tiny carved green man, demons licking humans suggestively, penitents coughing up black slugs of sin in confession, real rolexes left as gifts within the frames of icons. And then to the outside, where vineyards, olive groves and beehives cover the wildflower hills, and all you can hear are cicadas punctuated by the occasional goat.

We barely experienced the mountains and caves, being just too tired for that; proper mountains need proper headspace. However, after around 50 years, I finally managed a return to Knossos. Alas, they've closed some of the lower rooms since I first roamed the palace, but these days you do get a stronger sense of its labyrinthine structure, remarkable enough to impress R, who bore the monasteries with a genial sense of Doing It For The Missus . He loved Knossos and the glorious art in the museum, snake ladies, the Phaistos Disc, the exquisite bee pendant, too detailed for my phone camera to capture. But then there are the bulls heads, a symbol to me forever of Crete. Propaganda from Athens and other begrudging tributaries might have distorted it into the minotaur, but that's politics for you. Beauty doesn't care.