Chania
Overview
Chania is a Venetian harbour town where people still live and work. Around the inner basin, the shaded arcades hold cafes and small ship chandlers, shops that sell supplies for boats. The lighthouse on the western breakwater has worked since the late sixteenth century, through several restorations. At the eastern end of the harbour, the Mosque of the Janissaries is the oldest Ottoman building on Crete and is now a low, domed exhibition space. Behind the waterfront, the Splantzia quarter is the older Greek and Turkish residential maze, and Odos Skridlof, off Halidon, is still a working leather street.
Chania is the centre of the island’s memory of resistance. During the Battle of Crete in May 1941, German paratroopers landed at Maleme, just west of the city. Civilians armed with hunting rifles and farm tools went onto the airfield alongside Allied troops. The 12-day fight that followed was the costliest paratroop operation of the war for the German side. Eleftherios Venizelos, the statesman who shaped the borders of modern Greece, was born in nearby Mournies in 1864. His tomb on the Akrotiri peninsula above the city is a good place to walk to at sunset.
The Samaria Gorge is the famous walk, and the most underestimated. Start at the Omalos plateau and descend 16 kilometres through cypress and pine to the village of Agia Roumeli on the Libyan Sea. From there, take the small ferry along the south coast to Sougia or Sfakia, where a bus runs back over the mountains. Allow a long day: most guests start at 6am, finish in the early afternoon and are not back in Chania until evening. The descent is harder on the knees than the brochures suggest. The gorge is closed in winter and after heavy rain.
Stay two or three nights inside the old town. Book dinner in Splantzia rather than on the harbour, where the menus tend toward tourist pricing. The market hall on 1866 Square is the place for lunch.
House Notes
Arrival
Chania International (CHQ), on the Akrotiri peninsula, takes the scheduled and charter flights. Helistar flies the helicopter route from Athens to Crete in about 90 minutes, with the AS365 Dauphin, H135 and H120 in its fleet. IFLY flies the same route and the short island hops from Mykonos and Santorini.
Casa Delfino
Casa Delfino is a 17th-century Venetian mansion on Theofanous Street, in the walled old town. The Markantonaki family has kept it for six generations, and Margarita Markantonaki is the sixth. It has only 24 suites, a rooftop terrace looking onto the harbour and the lighthouse, and a pebbled inner courtyard that is the quietest room in Chania.
Tamam
On Zampeliou Street in the old port, the Venetians built this building around 1400 as a public bath. After the conquest of 1645 it carried on as an Ottoman hamam, and it has been a restaurant only since 1982. The kitchen cooks Cretan food with Ottoman and eastern Mediterranean touches, and the wine list leans to Crete. Book the room set into the old bath rather than the terrace.
Salis
Salis, at Akti Enoseos 3 on the Old Venetian Harbour, serves modern Cretan fine dining and keeps the most serious cellar in town. It is open from midday to midnight in season. Ask for a corner table on the harbour side, and let the sommelier choose the sequence of wines by the glass.
Ntounias
In the mountain village of Drakona, about 18 kilometres south of Chania and 500 metres above the sea, Stelios Trilyrakis cooks his mother’s and grandmother’s recipes over a wood fire only. The kitchen has no electrical appliances. Vegetables, eggs, dairy and meat come from the farm around it. The pace is slow on purpose, and lunch is the meal here, not dinner.
Vatolakkos
Manousakis Winery, in the village of Vatolakkos in the Platanias municipality west of Chania, planted Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Roussanne in 1993 at 350 metres: Rhône grapes on Cretan ground, organic from the start. The first harvest of the Nostos brand came in 1997, and the native white Vidiano followed in 2010. Ted Manousakis chose the name for “the yearning to return to one’s homeland”.
The Firkas
The Maritime Museum of Crete stands at the entrance to the Firka fortress on Akti Kountourioti, the Venetian bastion that guarded the harbour mouth. Founded in 1973, it holds around 2,500 items in date order: Bronze Age and Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, the Balkan Wars, the Second World War and the Battle of Crete. Its signature piece is Minoa, a working reconstruction of an ancient Minoan trading ship.
The Battle of Crete
The Battle of Crete is commemorated across the western prefecture. The principal services are at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery at Souda Bay, the German War Cemetery at Maleme and the Greece-New Zealand Memorial at Galatas. The closing ceremony at Maleme aerodrome carries a parachute drop by the 1st Paratroopers’ Wing.
Loutro
Loutro is a small fishing village at Cape Mouri on the Libyan coast, 71 kilometres south of Chania. It has no cars and can be reached only by boat or on foot. The ANENDYK ferry from Chora Sfakion crosses in 15 to 20 minutes and serves Agia Roumeli, Sougia, Paleochora and Gavdos from the same quay. The best of the south coast fits into one afternoon: walk the headland and return on the late boat.
The window
Come from late May to late June, or in the first three weeks of September. The Samaria National Park opens at 7am every day from 1 May to 31 October, and outside those dates the gorge is closed entirely. July and August bring double the cruise ships at Souda and crowds along the inner harbour by midday. In the quieter weeks either side, the inland villages, the boats on the south coast and the western wineries keep their pace.
Anchorage Notes
Souda
Souda Bay is where a large yacht berths in northwest Crete: a natural harbour 15 kilometres long between the Akrotiri peninsula and Cape Drapano, and the commercial and passenger port of Chania, 7 kilometres east of the old town. It is also the Crete Naval Base, Hellenic and NATO, so the cruise ships and the ferries share the water with grey naval hulls. A yacht lies at the working port here rather than at the pretty one in town.
The Venetian Harbour
The old Venetian harbour is the picture of Chania: the curve of the waterfront and the lighthouse on its breakwater, a 26-metre stone tower the Egyptians rebuilt in 1864 where the Venetians had first set a light to guard the town. Only fishing boats and small craft lie inside it, and larger vessels keep to Souda. A yacht’s tender comes in to the old port for the evening, with the town at the water.
Gramvousa
Gramvousa is the pair of uninhabited islets off the northwest tip of Crete: Imeri, the “tame” one, crowned by a Venetian fortress of 1579, and Agria, the “wild” one. In the 1820s the insurgents who held the fort took to the sea to survive, and it became a nest of pirates. Below lies the Balos lagoon, the palest water in the west of Crete, and a yacht crosses to lie off the fortress rock among the day boats from Kissamos.
Kissamos
Kissamos, also called Kastelli, is a port and fishing town in its own gulf in the northwest, where the ferry comes in from the Peloponnese by way of Kythira. It is the gateway to the far west of Crete and the harbour the day boats leave for Gramvousa and Balos. A yacht lies in the gulf, with the Roman mosaics of ancient Kisamos in the town museum and the wild peninsula stretching north.
Mythology
Britomartis
Ancient Cydonia, beneath modern Chania, was the centre of the worship of Britomartis in western Crete. Strabo places her Dictynnaean sanctuary on Mount Tityrus and uses it to challenge the eastern setting at Dicte given by Callimachus.
The Sirens
Aptera stood on the Paliokastro hill above the south-east side of Souda Bay, near present-day Chania. Stephanus of Byzantium explains its name, the featherless place, by a contest between the Sirens and the Muses, which he places at the Mouseion near the city and the sea. The name is older than that story. It appears as a-pa-ta-wa on Linear B tablets from Knossos, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC.