Day 36: We Are Moving to Heraklion, Crete

Deep breath, mom.  I’m kidding about moving to Heraklion, Crete.  Mostly.

There are places that are great to visit. Then there are places that you can imagine yourself living.  Rich and I spent less than 24 hours in Heraklion, and, I’ll speak for both of us, we were ready to settle down.

Why Heraklion

I love being at the beach– my mom called this whole year of travel “our beach trip”– but with the beach come tourists.  Landing in a spot where it felt like most of the people we crossed were locals going about their regular day-to-day business was really refreshing.

Heraklion is the largest city in Crete, and the fourth largest city in Greece.  While there is a ton of history here– we visited the site of a palace from the Bronze Age— there are also lots of shopping and restaurants, along with the hustle and bustle you would expect in a vibrant city with young people.

Our Day in Heraklion

We traveled from Agios Nikolaos to Heraklion via bus. Our wonderful AirBNB host, Anthi, let us drop our bags at 11:00 AM and gave us a quick orientation on how to navigate Heraklion.  Anthi also provided outstanding advice on our itinerary, encouraging us to head to the Archaelogical Museum during the hottest part of the day and explore Knossos later in the day when there would be fewer tourists.  Smart!

The Archaelogical Museum in Heraklion

The Archaelogical Museum was unreal.  This trip has already given me a new perspective on how big the world is, and yet, how similar people are everywhere.  The museum gave me some good context on how old the world is.  People have really been living the same kinds of lives and liking the same kinds of things for a long, long time.

For example: the Archaelogical Museum holds remains of ancient board games and small soldier dolls from 1700 BC– ancient GI Joe’s more or less.  There are huge wine vats because for a long time, people have enjoyed alcohol.  In America, we have the NFL and college football.  In Heraklion, people enjoyed bull leaping.  People are people.  We are but a small blip on the radar of time.

The Venetian Fortress

From the Archaelogical Museum, we walked to the Venetian Fortress.  Present-day Heraklion was founded by Arabs in 824, then came under the control of the Byzantines in 961, and then was bought by the Venetians in 1204.  The Venetians wanted to hang onto their investment, so they built a huge, striking fort in the harbor.

Smart thinking. The Ottomans then waged a seige on the city for twenty one years from 1648 to 1669.  The Ottomans proved victorious, but the Venetian Fortress still stands proud today.

Our Beautiful, Most Favorite, AirBNB

While this is perhaps of lesser historical significance, upon leaving the Venetian Fortress (and maybe after a quick trip to the first H&M we had seen on our travels), we got checked in at our beautiful, fabulous, wonderful AirBNB.  Our host Anthi was incredibly chic and gracious, and after our small hotel room in Agios Nikolaos, we felt like we were spreading out in heaven.  And these views!

We showered and rejoiced in its comfort!

Knossos

A day or two before we headed to Knossos, I wanted to google it to learn more so I asked Rich to spell it.  Rich’s reply: “Did you even study history?”

So maybe if you are a history person, you know everything there is to know about Knossos already.

I surely didn’t so I will share a little bit about what I learned: Knossos, also known as the Palace of Minos, is sometimes referred to as Europe’s oldest city because it is believed to have been settled in the Neolithic Period (7000 BC !).  The Minoans built the first Cretan Palace on the sight around 2000 BC.

At the height of its development, nearly 100,000 people lived in the palace and just beyond its gates.

The site was discovered in 1878, and a British Archaeologist, Arthur Evans, led the excavation efforts starting in 1900.

In my humble, non-archaelogical opionion, Arthur Evans was really allowed to have his way with Knossos.  He rebuilt structures, named rooms, and determined how various buildings had been used– he even got to name the Minoan civilization!  I’m not professing to be any sort of expert, it just didn’t seem like Evans collaborated with anyone to make broad claims about how people lived thousands and thousands of years before he was born.

Still, we found the site to be totally cool and interesting.  And we saw a peacock!

The St. Minas Cathedral in Heraklion

We could see the cathedral from our balcony so we decided to check out the inside too.  Beautiful!

Dinner + Wine Down in Heraklion

We ate dinner at a delicious kebab fast food restaurant near the Lion’s Fountain, enjoyed Monday night people watching, and then headed home.

Anthi had left us with a bottle of local dry white wine, and we enjoyed it on our balcony, listening to the city below.  We reflected on our time in Greece before catching a flight to Malta in the morning.

We love the friendliness of the Greek people as well as their joie de vivre.  The country is beautiful, and the Greeks have the luxury of being laid back about all they have to offer.  Theirs is the confidence of having existed as a civilization for hundreds of thousands of years, and knowing they may have figured out a thing or two about how to live.  We can’t wait to move in! 🙂