Heraklion

Heraklion is a working port and the largest city on Crete, and most travellers driving from Chania to the eastern beaches pass straight through. That is a mistake. Its Archaeological Museum is reason enough to stay a night, perhaps two, even if the rest of the city holds you less than Chania or Rethymno will.

The museum holds the definitive collection of Minoan art. The snake goddess figurines from Knossos, the bull-leaping fresco, the gold and rock-crystal jewellery, the Phaistos Disc with its undeciphered spiral of stamped symbols and the bull’s-head rhyton (a ritual vessel) from Zakros are in no other museum. Knossos itself, 5 kilometres south of the city, is the visit to pair with it. Sir Arthur Evans began excavating the site in 1900 and rebuilt parts of it in concrete and red paint, and conservators have argued about this ever since. The result is more vivid and more controversial than a typical ruin. Go in the morning before the tour buses, then come into town for the museum after lunch.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, later known as El Greco, was born in or near Heraklion in 1541. He trained as an icon painter in the Cretan tradition and left for Venice in his twenties, eventually settling in Toledo. The city has only one of his paintings, the small View of Mount Sinai in the Historical Museum near the harbour. The Koules fortress at the harbour mouth, built by the Venetians and recently restored, is open and you can walk it.

Stay in the old town, near 1866 Square and the Morosini Fountain. Have lunch at the Agora market or the small bakeries on Daedalou. Cretan cooking means dakos, wild greens, mountain cheese and the rough Liatiko red. Allow at least two nights if you want to see Knossos and the museum slowly, on separate days.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Heraklion International (HER), named for Nikos Kazantzakis, is the city’s working gateway. Helistar runs the helicopter route from Athens to Crete in approximately 90 minutes from its base at Koropi. Its fleet includes the Airbus AS365 Dauphin, the H135 and the H120.

  2. The address

    GDM Megaron is the one serious address inside the old town. It stands on the waterfront at D. Beaufort, overlooking the Venetian harbour and the Koules fortress. The 1925 building is listed as a historical monument, with 58 rooms across five storeys. Its fifth-floor bar opens through the summer season and has the best view of the harbour mouth. Ask for a Koules-view room on a high floor.

  3. Peskesi

    Peskesi occupies the restored Venetian mansion of Captain Polyxingis on Kapetan Charalampi street. The kitchen draws on its own farm at the village of Charasso, set up by Panagiotis Magganas in 1998 and built around 240 native Cretan varieties of vegetable, pulse and grain. The dishes worth the table are the slow-cooked lamb with askolimbrous (wild golden thistle) and the wild-asparagus omelette. Reservations are essential.

  4. Lyrarakis

    Manolis and Sotiris Lyrarakis founded their winery in 1966 at Alagni, 480 metres up, south of Heraklion. They rescued three native Cretan white grapes, Dafni, Plyto and Melissaki, from near extinction. The first plantings of Dafni and Plyto, in 1992, were in the family’s Psarades vineyard, where the 1.5-hectare Plyto plot remains the largest in the world. The estate became fully organic in 2020. Cellar tastings run by scheduled tour, April to October.

  5. Phaistos

    The Minoan palace at Phaistos lies 55 kilometres south on the Mesara plain. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list on 12 July 2025, as one of six Minoan Palatial Centres. Unlike Knossos, the site is unreconstructed: the walls of the first, Protopalatial palace show beneath the later Neopalatial ruins, and the architecture reads against the landscape rather than red concrete. Luigi Pernier found the Phaistos Disc here on 3 July 1908, in the basement of room eight, building 101.

  6. Gortyna

    The Gortyn Code is inscribed on the curving walls of what may have been a public civic building in the agora at Gortyna, 50 kilometres south of the city. It runs to 12 columns and roughly 600 lines of boustrophedon, alternating in direction. It is the most extensive monument of Greek law before the Hellenistic age, from the first half of the fifth century BC. Federico Halbherr unearthed the main columns in 1884. The early Christian basilica of Saint Titus, first bishop of Crete, stands on the site.

  7. The bronze shields

    In 1885 Federico Halbherr excavated the Idaean Cave, on the eastern face of Psiloritis. He recovered bronze votive shields and a bronze tympanon (a drum) showing Zeus among the Curetes: Geometric work of the late 8th and 7th centuries BC, decorated in concentric zones of Assyrian influence. The shields now line a gallery of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, at Xanthoudidou and Hatzidaki. The cave itself, at 1,538 metres, holds snow until late May, and the paved road climbs from Anogeia past the Nida plateau.

  8. Kazantzakis at Martinengo

    The writer Nikos Kazantzakis is buried on top of the Martinengo bastion, the highest point of the Venetian walls. Michele Sanmicheli and Giulio Savorgnan designed this circuit of seven bastions, begun in 1462 and built across a century. Excommunication closed the cemeteries to him after his death in Germany in October 1957. The grave has a wooden cross, no marble, and the epitaph he ordered: “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.” Go at dusk.

  9. Agiofarago

    The Agiofarago gorge, the Gorge of the Saints, lies 75 kilometres south of the city, beyond the 14th-century Odigitria monastery. It narrows for a mile and a half between cliffs cut with the cells of early Christian hermits, then opens onto a pebble cove on the Libyan Sea. The chapel of Agios Antonios stands near the mouth, and you can swim through the limestone arch in the water. From a yacht, it can also be reached by caïque, a traditional wooden boat, from Kali Limenes.

  10. Cretaquarium

    Cretaquarium is at Gournes, 15 kilometres east of the city, on the old American base. It is run by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, the largest marine-science centre in Greece, under the name Thalassocosmos. Its tanks hold around 2,000 organisms of some 200 Mediterranean species, in volumes from half a cubic metre to 600. The institute’s research stations stand on the same site. It opens at 9.30am, and is the serious alternative to the beach when the meltemi, the strong summer wind, closes the water.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The Venetian Harbour

    The old Venetian harbour lies at the heart of Heraklion, guarded by the Koules, the Castello del Molo that the Venetians built across its mole (the harbour wall) between 1523 and 1540, with the winged lion of Venice cut into its walls. The inner basin takes the small craft, and the larger yachts lie off the eastern mole. A yacht’s tender comes in under the fortress that has guarded this harbour for 500 years.

  2. The commercial port

    East of the old harbour lies the working commercial port, built by the British engineer Sir Robert McAlpine and finished in 1928. It is an important shipping and ferry dock, with boats to Piraeus and across the Aegean to Santorini, Mykonos, Paros and Rhodes, and it takes the freight and the cruise ships. A yacht has no use for it: it is the busy working front of the island’s capital, kept apart from the old town’s water.

  3. Dia

    Dia is an uninhabited island 13 kilometres off Heraklion, 5 kilometres of limestone with four coves along its southern shore (Agios Georgios, Kapari, Panagia and Agrielia) that have been used as anchorages since Minoan times. Cousteau dived here in 1976 and found an ancient harbour in the water between the island and the coast. It is a Natura 2000 sanctuary, part of the European Union’s network of protected sites, with Eleonora’s falcons on its cliffs, and a yacht crosses for the day and leaves at dusk.

  4. Kali Limenes

    Kali Limenes, “Fair Havens”, is the natural harbour on the south coast, 70 kilometres from the city near the island’s southern point. Here, as the Acts of the Apostles tell it, the Apostle Paul’s ship put in on the voyage to Rome before the storm drove it west, and a small church keeps the memory. The bay is a tanker bunkering station, where ships take on fuel, and a yacht passes it by.

Mythology

  1. Amalthea

    In the Idaean tradition, Zeus drank Amalthea’s milk in the cave on Crete where he was hidden. Finds from that cave, including bronze shields used in rituals honouring Zeus, are kept and conserved at the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion.

  2. Daedalus

    The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds the lintel from the main door of Temple A at Prinias, carved with two seated goddesses and dated to 650 to 600 BC. The piece is in the Daedalic style, a seventh-century Cretan style that modern scholars name after Daedalus; no ancient source links the work to him.

  3. Eileithyia

    At Amnisos, east of Heraklion, the Odyssey names a cave of Eileithyia, and that cave lies behind the Cretan claim to her birth. Excavation found a sacred space inside, used for a long time and laid out around large stalagmites.

  4. Europa

    Gortyn, south of Heraklion, linked the arrival of Europa to its evergreen plane tree and put her story on its coins. The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds silver coins called staters that show Europa riding the bull and seated among the branches of the tree.

  5. Medea

    When the bronze guardian Talos keeps the returning Argonauts away from Crete, Medea calls on destructive powers and fixes her gaze on him. Talos wounds his weak ankle and falls, and the Argo can reach the island.

  6. Talos

    The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds a silver stater of about 360 to 330 BC and a bronze tetrachalkon of about 250 to 200 BC, both coins struck at Phaistos. Both show the winged Talos, legs braced, throwing a stone, with the bull he guarded on the other side. Phaistos made Talos, rather than Heracles, the father of the city's founder, Phaestus.

  7. The Cretan Bull

    Silver coins of Phaistos, now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, show the Bull of Crete among five Labours. They make the labour part of Crete's own ancient images, and not only a scene from Olympia.

  8. The Curetes

    The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds a bronze tympanon and shields left as offerings in the Idaean Cave. Modern scholars read the scene on the tympanon through the myth of Zeus and the Curetes.