Agios Nikolaos

Most luxury guests visiting eastern Crete do not stay in Agios Nikolaos. They stay 10 kilometres up the coast in Elounda, where a chain of resort hotels on the Mirabello bay faces a cleaner stretch of water and looks across to the island of Spinalonga. Agios Nikolaos is the working town. Come down for a market morning, a meal by the lake or the launch boat to Spinalonga. Knowing the difference in advance saves a planning conversation.

The town is built around Lake Voulismeni, a small, almost circular bowl of deep water joined to the sea by a short canal. Cafés step down to its edge, and visitors overfeed the swans. The lake is 64 metres deep at its centre and was long held to be bottomless. Local tradition held it sacred to Athena. Walk around it once at dusk.

Spinalonga, on a rocky islet across the bay, is the one visit not to miss. Its Venetian sea fortress was completed in 1579 and held out against the Ottomans for nearly 50 years after the rest of Crete had fallen. From 1903 to 1957 the island was Greece’s leper colony. Victoria Hislop’s 2005 novel The Island, drawn from the lives of the people who lived and worked here, brought the place back into public view. Boats run from Agios Nikolaos and from the village of Plaka opposite. Wear a hat, because the site has no shade.

Inland, Lato is a Doric ruin on a saddle between two hills above Mirabello. Few people visit, and it is worth the short detour. The village of Kritsa, 20 minutes from the coast, has the small Byzantine church of Panagia Kera, with frescoes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Stay at least three nights on this coast, or four if you base yourself in Elounda.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Helistar flies helicopter transfers from Athens to the hotel helipads at Elounda, and publishes the flight to the Blue Palace at about 85 minutes. By plane, Heraklion (HER) serves the wider Mirabello coast, around an hour by road from the bay. Sitia Public Airport (JSH), at the eastern end, takes domestic flights from Athens with Sky Express and Olympic Air for guests staying near Vai and Zakros. Confirm slot clearance, the airport’s permission to land at a set time, before routing any private aircraft.

  2. The address

    Elounda Mare, in Elounda, is owned by the Mamidakis family and is credited with bringing private-pool bungalows and villas to Greece. The shared Six Senses Spa on the same headland has 2,200 square metres, 23 treatment areas and an authentic Turkish hammam, or steam bath. It serves Elounda Mare and its sister properties, Porto Elounda and Elounda Peninsula, on the Elounda S.A. estate.

  3. Migomis

    Migomis Piano Restaurant fills a former 1890s house on the cliff edge directly above Lake Voulismeni in Agios Nikolaos. Floor-to-ceiling windows face the bowl of water, and a pianist plays on the lower floor. It opens from early April to late October. The room is pre-war in style, with wood, white linen and brass, and suits a booked dinner more than a passing aperitif.

  4. Domaine Economou

    Yiannis Economou returned to the village of Ziros in 1994, after years in the cellars of Château Margaux in the 1990s and with the Nebbiolo houses of Piedmont. Ziros sits on a circular plateau ringed by mountains, at 600 metres in the Sitia interior. The estate works a small-berried Liatiko clone found nowhere else. It sells off any vintage the winemaker is not satisfied with rather than release it, and bottles when the wine is ready, not when the market expects it. The wines are PDO Sitia.

  5. Toplou

    Toplou Monastery, on the Sitia peninsula, was founded in the fourteenth century. The Kornaros and Mezzo families rebuilt it after the 1612 earthquake. The church holds Ioannis Kornaros’ 1770 panel Megas Ei Kyrie: 61 separate scenes set around the Great Sanctification of the Waters, on a single board 1.33 by 0.85 metres. The monastery’s organic estate makes a Thrapsathiri-Vilana white, a Liatiko-Mandilari red and Sitia PDO olive oil from the Koroneiki groves around it.

  6. Gournia

    Harriet Boyd-Hawes excavated Gournia from 1901 to 1904 with a crew of more than 100, the first woman to direct a major field project in Greece. She uncovered the most completely preserved Minoan town yet found: 50 houses, a cobbled grid, a small palace around a central court and a monumental shipshed on the harbour below. The site sits on a low ridge above Mirabello Bay, about 19 kilometres south-east of Agios Nikolaos on the old road to Ierapetra.

  7. Zakros

    The Minoan palace of Zakros is the easternmost of the four palace centres and the only one found unlooted. It lies where the Gorge of the Dead meets the sea, a descent of 2 to 3 hours from Pano Zakros. The gorge takes its name from the Minoan burials in its cliff caves. The palace covered roughly 8,000 square metres around a central court, in use from the seventeenth to the fifteenth century BC. Its rock-crystal rhyton, a ritual vessel, is among the masterpieces of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

  8. Vai

    Vai, between Cape Sidero and Cape Plaka on the eastern Lasithi coast, has Europe’s only native palm grove: Phoenix theophrasti, the Cretan date palm, a survival from the Pleistocene. It became a national park in 1985, is part of Natura 2000 and joined the Sitia UNESCO Global Geopark in 2015. The cove fills in July and August. Go in May or October, and walk the headland north to the Hellenistic and classical ruins at Itanos.

  9. Mochlos

    The fishing village of Mochlos lies 150 metres across the water from a small islet that was once a peninsula of the mainland, and boatmen on the front take guests across when the sea allows. Richard Seager excavated the islet’s early Minoan cemetery in 1908, from the period before the palaces, and found more than 20 built tombs. Ta Kochylia, a seafront taverna in the same family since about 1910 and now run by Giorgos and Despina, cooks the fish the Mochlos boats bring in.

  10. The window

    Eastern Crete is the warmest part of the island. Off the Mirabello headlands the sea holds around 25 degrees through September and into early October. The meltemi, the summer north wind, blows from mid-May to mid-September and is strongest in July and August. Mirabello is more sheltered than the open Aegean coasts, though not exempt. Come from late April to mid-June or in the first three weeks of October. Spinalonga closes from 1 November to 31 March.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The marina

    The Municipal Port Fund of Agios Nikolaos administers three waters, the Lake, the Bay and the Port, and berths craft in all of them; an owner who wants a place in any of the three applies to the Port Fund itself. The marina lies in the middle of the town and is run for the Fund by DAEAN, the municipal company. It is the harbour on this coast built for the visiting vessel.

  2. Lake Voulismeni

    A boat can lie inside the town: the lake is one of the Port Fund’s three waters, joined to the harbour by a channel first cut between 1867 and 1871 for Kostas Adosides Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Lasithi. The French Army widened it between 1905 and 1907 and hung a lifting footbridge over it so vessels could be loaded within the basin, and a concrete road bridge replaced it in 1954. Small craft still lie against the rim, with the town standing over them.

  3. The port

    The town was founded in the mid-1860s because eastern Crete needed a port and had none. The commercial quay the Port Fund keeps still takes the working traffic, and first-class cruise traffic with it. Four Seasons brought its first ship alongside, 207 metres long, on an itinerary that touched two places in Crete and no others.

  4. Agioi Pantes

    Agioi Pantes stands 580 metres off the harbour: an uninhabited, two-lobed rock owned outright by the State, where the kri-kri, the Cretan wild goat, was gathered and kept through the last century. Two chapels stand on its heights, All Saints to the north and Saint Anthony to the south, and the islet of Mikronisi lies 50 metres beyond its northern point. Nobody lives there and nothing is ashore, so a yacht lies off it and admires it from the water.

  5. The yard

    Behind the berths the marina keeps a working yard, with a travel lift (a crane that lifts boats out of the water) for up to 65 tonnes, hardstanding for boats ashore, and local agents for hull and sail work. Fresh water and 220/380-volt power reach every berth, and a mini-tanker brings fuel and oil to the quay at any hour. Craft lie here in winter as well as in the season, which is the practical reason a vessel working this coast makes the town its base.

Mythology

  1. Rhea

    Apollodorus places Rhea’s secret birth of Zeus in a cave of Dicte, and has her give the baby to the Curetes and the nymphs Adrastia and Ida. The cave above Psychro was later identified as the Dictaean Cave and excavated in 1899 to 1900.

  2. The Dictaean Cave

    The cave above Psychro on the Lasithi plateau is the main modern candidate for the cave of Dicte in Apollodorus, where Rhea gives birth to Zeus and the Curetes guard him. Excavation showed a long-used sanctuary, but neither the text nor the finds prove that this is the cave Apollodorus meant.