Minos and winos: the palace at Knossos and the Iraklio wine country

This post is a bit late in coming.  I'd say it's been hectic, and we've been busy, but that's not really true.  Sure, we've been working like we're supposed to and doing fun touristy things and going to the beach, but the main reason we haven't posted is lack of internet and a certain amount of pleasant laziness.

That actually kind of characterizes our first several days here at the beginning of the trip, as I alluded to in my first post.  We spent most of the time napping, sitting on the verandah, relaxing, eating delicious fresh food, and reading. It took us two days before we even went down the ten minute walk to the restaurants along the beach, and another day until we actually got into the water.

You may be wondering what's wrong with us, spending two days so close to that beach without actually going down to it, sleeping away precious beach and vacation time.  But here's the thing. Actually, here's two things.

First of all -- and this is one of the most important things about this trip -- we're here for five weeks.  The great thing about staying someplace for so long is that there's just no rush.

Second of all, you need to know a little bit about how we actually got here, and what our departure from Tromsø was like.

I won't bore you with the details -- at the time it all seemed very dramatic and interesting, but now it seems like too much trouble to go into it, and I doubt that anybody but us would find it that interesting anyway.  What's important is that, between cleaning our house for a subletter, preparing for a sad leave-taking from Sandhya's parents who'd been visiting, a conference, a big meeting, chapter deadlines, multiple independent itineraries, flight delays and rebookings (apparently because too many of the traffic controllers in Oslo decided to take vacation at the same time.  No, seriously.), when we got to Crete, we had each been going on like 3 hours of sleep a night for several days.  So yeah, we were ready for a break.

But by the end of our first week here, we were ready for some excitement.  So on that first Saturday, we got up early(ish), loaded up the car with drinks and snacks and sunscreen (did I mention that our landlady gave us the use of her car while we're here?) and drove off to...wait for it...Knossos.  If that name doesn't ring a bell, think of the Minoan civilization, as in the mythical king Minos, as in the father of (well, husband of the mother of) the Minotaur, who lived in the labyrinth (not *a* labyrinth, *the* labyrinth) and periodically ate virgins before he was slain by Theseus and so forth.  Knossos is one of the main archaeological sites left behind by the Minoans, a shockingly advanced civilization that flourished in this part of the world between around 2100 and 1500 BCE.  The Mycenaeans took over Knossos after that for a couple hundred years, leaving behind lots of inscriptions in Linear B -- a syllabary that represents the earliest written form of Ancient Greek.  Anyway, Knossos is an extremely large and archaeologically rich site, normally referred to as a palace, but really more of a small city including all sorts of living spaces, storage areas, ceremonial rooms, a sewer system that still works and possibly the world's earliest flush toilet.  It was so elaborate and complicated that it's probably what inspired the myth of the labyrinth.  So yeah, we were excited to see it.  Knossos is about a 30 minute drive from our place, just south of Iraklio (Heraklion), the capital of Crete, super easy to get to if, like us, you have use of a car (did I mention that our landlady gave us her car?).  We got there in the late morning and spent a good two hours exploring with a guided tour and then buying assorted souvenirs and trinkets for ourselves and our moms.  Photographic proof follows below.

Murals at the ceremonial West gate

Storage rooms, with a 4000 year old vase

Sandhya and the hills

Tom and fellow tourists

View across to the East gate

Hats are good when it's hot.

The famous bull-leaping frescoe.  White=woman, red=man

I learned about framing in high school photography class

Bull fresco near the East gate

Fresco of mythical beast in the throne room

Grand staircase

Queen's bed-chamber with dolphin fresco

The bull fresco.  Cool huh?

Then it was lunch time, so we drive a short ways further south to a village called Skalani, which is the home of Elia kai Dyosmos, a restaurant that specializes in contemporary Cretan cuisine.  I had a fantastic lamb shank, while Sandhya had an array of vegetarian appetizers, including the fennel pie pictured below.  Appetizers are the key to being vegetarian in Greece -- all or nearly all main courses on a typical menu will have meat in them, but many -- and sometimes even most -- of the starters are meat-free and delicious.  (Sandhya wants me to tell you that our waiter/sous chef was Pakistani, and was extra nice and attentive to us and flirty with her.  More importantly he understood what vegetarian meant.)

Food porn

Fennel pie is good even if you don't like fennel

Skalani is at the edge of Crete's largest wine region, which spreads south through the hills from Iraklio.  So after lunch we went for a drive through the hills and vineyards.  It was glorious. Grapevines, olive trees, little villages with little Byzantine churches and old ladies in long black dresses.  At some point we ended up lost on a dirt road that went through the vineyards and met a few goats.  After picking up some refreshments and asking for directions a couple times, and then following a comical series of signs through the narrowest streets of one of the tiny villages and across several fields, we found ourselves at the small organic winery run by the family Stilianou.  There we met three generations of the family, and had a wine and olive oil tasting plus tour of the facilities hosted by Ioannis (the middle generation), while his elderly father sat outside and smiled at us and his 12 year old son (that would be Giorgios and Giorgios) fetched things.  They were so friendly and hospitable that we would have bought some wine just out of good will even if it had sucked, but as it turns out, their wine and oil are actually fantastic.  So we got some of both.

Tom-orama

Sandhya in a peaceful pose (with olive branch)

Sometimes this technique works

Olive trees olive trees olive trees olive trees

Byzantine chapel in a village

Mountain goat!

Some of the vines of the Stilianou winery

The Stilianou winery, with two generations on display 

A proud Ioannis with his tanks of fermenting wine

A road through the wine country

After this, we drove around a bit more in the wine country, and though we had originally planned to have dinner in Iraklio, we decided to just head back home to Agia Pelagia for a relaxing evening.  We stopped along the way at a scenic spot to take some photos of the resorts along the coast and Iraklio itself in the distance, and a friendly Finn happened by who was nice enough to take our photo.  It was a gorgeous day.

Resorts on the coast

Iraklio on the right

Thank you Jussi, or Teppo or Teemu or Pasi or whatever

Porches, beaches and Russian boys.

Today's a Friday -- and we've been here in Crete a full 5 days. It's
still amazing to us that we're actually here and we still haven't
gotten tired of actually looking at each other every 3 minutes and
taking turns saying just this.

Our porch (or verandah, we still haven't fully agreed on what to call
it) is without question the nicest one of its kind that I've ever
seen, much less lived in. It has a spectacular view of the Aegean Sea
(see the photos from our previous post, all of which were taken from
the porch) and is both extremely close to the beach (a leizurely 10
minute walk) and completely screened off from its chaos and noise
(it's up on a hillside and accessed via a small, private
road). Densely surrounding the porch is lovely green foliage made up
of olive trees (fun statistic: population of Crete = 630,000; number
of visitors = 2.8 million; number of olive trees = 30 million), some
sort of palm-like tree and a whole bunch of flowering shrubs and
creepers and vines -- well, I don't know what they're called, as you
probably figured out already, but they look and smell amazing. What
with this little curtain-like garden and the terracotta-tiled, low
sloping roof design of the porch, we're completely shaded from the
sun, so it's pleasant to sit out here at all times of day and
night. As for furniture, there's a little hammock right at the edge of
the porch with a dazzling view of the sea through the shrubs, and a
table and three chairs which we use for eating and working. After we
realized that we would be spending 90% of our waking hours in this
porch, we also pulled out the couch in the living room and a small
glass-topped coffee table, so the porch is now a home in and of
itself. Honestly, almost all the time we've been home and not asleep,
we've been out on this porch. We eat, read, work, drink, and nap here;
on hot days, we've even "showered" in the little garden-strip skirting
the edge of the porch with the garden hose. I'm pretty taken with this
space, as this eye-roll-worthy, endless description probably makes
clear. But because I have a problem shutting up once I start, and
partly also because it deserves it, here are a few more photos -- of the porch, the view from down our house, and the beach itself. But isn't it better than listening to me talk? Watch and weep.

When we're not in the house, we've been at the beaches. As Tom
mentioned, the main Agia Pelagia beach, which is a short walk from our
place, is ridiculously loud and kitschy and consists mostly of
well-fed (the bellies! the "moobs"!) and hairy (enough to give the
famed "McFadden sweater" a run for its money!) male, and quite
extraordinarily fit and good-looking female, tourists, mostly from
various parts of Western Europe. German and British nationalities seem
to predominate but, as I learned the hard way yesterday, when a very
annoying child smacked me on the shoulder with a rubber ball and then
ran away muttering something distinctly Slavic-sounding, there are
Russian and other Eastern European tourists, too.

There aren't too many Greeks, though -- the locals tend to favor the
less crowded, more tucked away little beaches on the outskirts of the
town -- can't say I blame them.  Whenever we visit a cafe on the main
beachside or a restaurant or supermarket, we are acutely aware that
the restaurant or supermarket is not actually Greek so much as a
prosperous, and not particularly educated, Western-European tourist's
conception of Greece: faux hieroglyphics, kitschy shot glasses, beach
towels with "CRETE!" printed on them, and authentic looking "local"
ware, you get the idea. If I were actually Greek, it would probably
piss me off -- I get the impression that our landlady, Despina,
doesn't like it at all, for instance. But because I am, at some level,
a naive tourist myself, I'm willing to be conned to a certain extent
and even, at times, find it charming.

Yesterday, we visited one of these beaches -- Psaromoura beach, and it
was fantastic (pesky, ball-throwing little boys notwithstanding):
white rocks and yellow sand, red, gray and brown pebbles and the green
blue sea. It's hard to remind ourselves that we have work to do --
beauty is demanding and requires that attention be paid to it and it
alone. But we're slowly, SLOWLY starting the process of getting down
to work. Already yesterday, I started gathering my books and papers
and today I had a skype meeting with my advisor (mini-dilemma prior to
meeting: is it rude to wear sun-glasses at a meeting with one's
advisor? God, that's the kind of "dilemma" I'd love to have more
often). Now we're back on the porch (after a bracing, cold hose-down
in the garden following our sweaty jaunt to the internet cafe in town
for said meeting). Once I'm done this sentence, I'll take a little nap
on the hammock and then, I plan to start thinking again about these
little pronouns and anaphors that I've gotten quite fond of over the
past few months, perhaps even despite myself.

Crickets and cicadas

I'm writing this from the verandah on our apartment, late in the morning on July 16th.  (Yes, I know, we don't have internet here.  I'm writing it here on the verandah, and will post it at some point when I'm in an internet café down in the village).  We arrived here around noon yesterday, picked up at the airport and brought to the apartment by our helpful host/landlord Despina.  She gave us a quick tour around the place and the village, we had some nice cheese-filled pastry things, and went to sleep for four hours.  More on that in my next post. 


When we got up around 6, it had cooled down considerably, and the weather was perfect for sitting on the verandah.  I won't try too hard to describe what it's like out here, since I won't get it right, and it'll just sound like a tourist brochure.  I'll just say it's beautiful and more or less perfect, and let you look at the photos.

There's something very strange about coming to a place for the first time after having seen pictures of it -- lots of pictures.  We made the arrangements to rent this place months ago, in no small part because of the pictures of it on the AirBnB website.  In the interim, we've spent a lot of time poring over those pictures, as well as pictures of Agia Pelagia on the internet.  So we knew more or less exactly what the village and the beaches and the surrounding countryside would look like, and recognized it immediately when we pulled off the highway.  We knew nearly every inch of the apartment, including the arrangement of the rooms.  So when we came in with Despina yesterday, it took a minute for it to dawn on me that I hadn't actually been here before.  Everything is where I remembered it being from the photos.  The furniture is all arranged the same way.  And the verandah really does look in person the way it does in the photo. Usually you look at photos you've taken after visiting a place, and remember what it was like to be there.  This was the other way around, and it was quite odd.


I had gone to the supermarket with Despina in the afternoon, and we had basic groceries including a bunch of fresh produce.  So for dinner I made a salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and feta, and we had that with good bread, excellent oranges, and even better oil-cured olives.  When we finished, we just stayed on the verandah, moving to more comfortable chairs, watched it get dark and read for hours.  There was nothing to do, and it was perfect.  


Agia Pelagia is a completely touristy place -- it's not an old fishing village where somebody recently decided to add a few hotels and turn the old buildings into tavernas.  The old village (called Achlada) is somewhere further up in the hills, and it was precisely for beach tourism that all of the stuff here in the coves and on the hillsides above them were built in the last few decades.  The main beach below us is crowded with umbrellas and beach chairs, and the beachside is all bars and restaurants and tavernas pack one next to the other.  I got a bit of a glimpse of this yesterday afternoon when Despina took me to the store, and we heard the effects of it last night sitting on the verandah. There's apparently a beachfront club, that plays the strange mixture of beach boys, latin dance and 90s club music that you only get when European adults go on vacation and want to get drunk.  Ace of Bass featured prominently.  Here's the thing though -- it went on like this from about 7 to 9 pm last night, and then it stopped.  For the next hour or so, it was intermittently replaced by things like orchestral versions of Red Army Choir hits (Volga Boatmen, anyone?) and the kind of music you'd expect to be the soundtrack of some 50s movie about beautiful people having dramatic times on the Riviera.  Now, we're about 300 meters up the hill from the main beach, so when the music is really loud down there, it gets to us at a volume where it's just loud enough to recognize the music, with significant variations according
to the breeze.  I think Sandhya may disagree with me on this, but I thought it was quite pleasant.  For me, growing up with yearly vacations to Ocean City, Maryland, a beach holiday means sun and swimming and relaxation during the day, and loud, silly and moderately badly behaved crowds listening to questionable music at night.  I dig that shit.  So this here is just right for me.  Out on the verandah now, it's quiet and warm and beatiful.  All I hear are the boats in the water, a few people splashing, and the cicadas in the olive grove below me.  But tonight, when the crickets take over, I want to be an idiot and drink some Mythos beer and hear about what Fred thinks he's too sexy for.