No matter how many years I have spent in the Mediterranean in wintertime, I cannot get it into my head that it rains a lot. This New Year in western Crete the rain was biblical save for one magical sunlit day. Chania, in western Crete, seemed to be the vengeful target of black brooding skies and an apocalyptic gale, whipping the sea into drilled lines of foaming waves. Think of Odysseus in his worst nightmare – ‘Zeus sent…screaming winds and giant waves’ – combined with a wine-dark Hokusai painting. The elemental onslaught was evidently not exceptional. The cafes and shops ringing the Venetian harbour were proficiently boarded up as heaving, tormented waters slithered insidiously across the quayside. This explains why New Year is low season here. The erstwhile capital of Crete is empty save for a few brave tourists and military personnel from the Souda Bay base. Protection from the wind tunnels lies behind the monumental defences, in the tight maze-streets lined by tall Venetian and Ottoman houses.
The ferocity puzzled me. Why put a major port here, instead of the relatively sheltered west coast (ancient Falasarna, for instance)? Proximity to mainland Greece is surely a factor, as countless archaeological excavations have tended to show. Ancient Kydonia, as Chania was known to Homer, owes its origins – like Knossos – to Neolithic times. Legend has it that it was founded by King Kydon, a son of either Apollo or Hermes and King Minos’s daughter, Akakallis. Kydonia was identified as Chania in Victorian times by the English economist/lawyer Robert Pashley (1805-1859). The settlement crowned a raised hillock known as Kastelli, immediately east of the Venetian harbour. Kydonia probably occupied more ground than its later Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine iterations, which are marked by well-preserved fortifications.
Nearly a kilometre of these early defences stand proud, having withstood Venetian engineers, Ottoman pashas, and bombing by Stukas in May 1941. These walls are as unexpected as they are fascinating, and they invite careful reading. The bottom courses are fine ashlar blocks, almost certainly Hellenistic in date. Above are inimitable 7th-century defences, the work of magpie builders who teasingly arranged courses that included column bases and spolia scavenged from abandoned town-houses and public buildings. This horseshoe circuit, with its simple squared towers, once extended around 2km. It served Justinian’s troops, Arabic invaders, and Byzantine militia until Frankish times.
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