Kefalonia, Villages and Beaches

After breakfast we collected the car from the car rental office and set off for a day in the south of the island.  It was unusually overcast first thing but it didn’t take long for the clouds to break up and very soon we were enjoying the sun as we drove through little villages in our white open top jeep.

We drove south past the airport and the further we got away from Argostoli and the tourist strip of Lassi the more we saw the devastation caused by the earthquake.  All along the road there were abandoned villages and houses and buildings that were destroyed by the quake and just waiting for time to take over and their turn to fall over completely.  The 1953 disaster caused huge destruction, with only regions in the north escaping the heaviest tremors and that is the only part of the island where houses remained intact.  Six hundred people were killed and damage was estimated to run into billions of drachmas, but the real damage to the economy occurred when residents left the island.  An estimated 100,000 of the population of 125,000 left the island soon after, seeking a new life elsewhere.

Moving on we reached the Kastro, or St. George’s fortress, which was standing proud at the top of ridge and as we took the winding road to the top the engine of the Suzuki growled as we negotiated hair pin bends in low gear.  Unfortunately like many places in Europe on a Monday it wasn’t open so we just stayed awhile and admired the views out to sea and then went all the way back down again.  I have been caught out by that Monday closing thing several times and it really is most annoying.

We kept to the coast road and to the west of Kefalonia’s highest mountain, Mount Ainos, with an elevation of one thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight metres, which is nearly three hundred metres higher than Ben Nevis.  The top of the mountain was quite green because it is covered with Abies Cephalonica, or Greek Fir trees,  and is a declared natural park.  Forestry is important on the island and its timber output is one of the highest in the Ionian Islands.

The trouble with forests in hot countries however is that they can easily catch fire and forest fires were common during the 1990s and the early 2000s and all along the route there were black scars on the hillsides and these were going to take a long time to heal.  In terms of natural disasters I wondered just how unlucky can one little island be.  Fires continue to pose a major threat to the Kefalonia and in 2007 whole parts of the island had to be evacuated in a summer of fires across all of Greece.

We carried on to the town of Skala at the very bottom of the island and it was lunch time so we parked the car at a little square with its neglected centre piece of a sculpture and had a quick look round.  Once again it was unattractive and functional with lots of concrete and tarmac along a couple of busy streets and, despite strict planning laws, what looked like a lot of unregulated development, there were a few shops, some tavernas and a bar where we stopped for a lunch time drink.  Before we left we walked for a short while along the pine fringed beach next to the water that sparkled with dazzling sunlight and watched little boats going backwards and forwards to a little harbour in the somewhere in the  distance.

I must have liked Skala because we returned there just a few months later in August 2001 and there was football that time as well and I can remember well sitting in the garden of a taverna and watching England beat Germany 5 –1 (yes, 5-1) in a World Cup qualifying match.  It was brilliant.

After we left Skala we drove past around the eastern side of the island and around the other side of the mountain to Poros.  The roads were narrow and I had to pay attention while driving and negotiating winding roads with sheer drops down grey limestone mountain sides into deep ravines hundreds of metres below.  There was a lot of driving today because Kefalonia is a big island, the largest of the Ionian group, and there are long distances between villages.  Poros was nice and we stopped for a short while to stretch our legs and have an afternoon drink and then we cut across the middle of the island as best we could on difficult roads back in the direction of Argostoli.

This took us through the agricultural part of the island where the primary occupations are animal breeding and olive growing together with some grain and vegetables. Because most of the island is mountainous and rugged less than a quarter of the land is arable but we crossed through some bits of farmland on the return journey.  One thing I had never seen before in Greece (or since for that matter) is snakes, but all along the roads there were dead squashed ones where they had been run over while basking in the sun.

Greeks don’t like snakes and that probably goes back to the myth of the Gorgons and Medusa, they are afraid of them and they will go out of their way to kill them, especially when a snake is seen lying in the road.  It is apparently not unusual to see people in a moving vehicle, crossing sides on a road just to run over a snake!  I know why they are so frightened because there is a nasty type of poisonous snake in Greece and that is the adder. It is a small cousin of the rattlesnake and in the early summer they come out of hibernation and warm themselves up on the hot tarmac of the roads and that is where lots of them end their poisonous little lives.

Paradoxically Kefalonia has an annual Snake Festival every August and the Church of the Virgin in Markopoulo is famous because snakes are taken to the church in bags or jars and deposited in the church near the silver icon of Panagia Fidoussa, the Virgin of the Snakes. Pre-earthquake stories say that thousands of harmless baby snakes used to appear at the beginning of August and disappear into the church by the altar but nowadays because of road carnage the snakes are picked up and deposited within the church at the same altar spot that was rebuilt after the quake.   The snakes slither and wriggle all around the icon and then promptly disappear.  Apparently this is a true story although I cannot verify this because this was June and we didn’t see it for ourselves.

We returned to Argostoli across a causeway built by the British and still standing and without stopping went straight back to Lassi and our end of day routines.

Kefalonia, Lassi and Hotel Mediterranee

In the first half of 2000 work was getting onerous and less enjoyable and I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm for working for a company (Onyx UK) that was financed by public taxes but was providing an ever deteriorating level of service.  I had a new boss who I didn’t get on with and I needed a holiday so at the beginning of June I went to the Ionian island of Kefalonia with mum and dad and son Jonathan.  As it happened it turned out to be the last time that I went away with dad because he became too ill to travel soon after that.

I had been to Corfu in 1984 but with an area of three hundred and fifty square miles the island of Kefalonia is the largest of the Ionian Islands in western Greece. The island is named after the mythological figure Cephalus, who was the head of a great family that included the hero Odysseus and there has been recent speculation that this may well have been the actual home of Homer’s mythical warrior hero and archeologists are now busy trying to prove it.

We arrived in Kefalonia and this being a package tour we were met and transported the seven kilometres to the four-star Hotel Mediterranee in the holiday resort of Lassi.  It was a big modern hotel were with an entrance down a driveway off the busy main road and past some tennis courts where some guests were making hard work of a sluggish match under the hot afternoon sun.

Inside there were marble floors and lobby furniture for sitting and chatting, lots of people looking more important than they really were and, once checked in, a nice enough room but without a sea view.  Outside there was a large swimming pool and a covered sun terrace with a view over the bay towards the town of Lixouri and beyond that there was a private pine fringed sandy beach, crystal blue waters and most important of all a well stocked beachside taverna.

Lassi was the first resort to be developed on Kefalonia and tourists have been going there for several years and being the largest resort on the island it is also the most commercial. It is one of those tourist ribbon stretches that develop wherever there is a sandy beach nearby. There is no village as such, just a narrow stretch of road flanked by tavernas, rent-a-car outlets, tourist shops and the odd mini-market.  The two beaches at Lassi are Makris Yialos, which means long beach, and Plati Yialos, which means wide beach.

Even though it is the biggest resort on the island this was not a problem because this didn’t mean that it is a heaving, noisy, lager lout sort of place and although it was a bit scruffy in that untidy Greek sort of way it turned out to be really rather nice.  After we had found our way about the hotel and walked around the pool in that conspicuous pasty legged sort of way that new arrivals do we set about doing the usual things that you do on the first day of a holiday and we went back up the entrance road and out onto the main village road.

The main street also happened to be the main route from the capital Argostoli to the airport and the south and was therefore rather busy and all week we had to keep an eye out for blood sport motorists every time we crossed the road.  The street had bars, shops, restaurants and tavernas (that we wouldn’t need because we were staying half board at the Mediterranee) and we made an inspection both to the left and the right and made a mental note of the likely looking places for a drink later on.  A shop at the end of the hotel drive had cold beers so I filled a carrier bag and took them back to the hotel for pre dinner drinks on the balcony.

The evening meal was adequate without being exciting and we finished the day with a quiet drink in the village where the bars were preparing big screens for the start next day of the European Football Championships that were being held in Holland and Belgium.

Saturday was our first full day and we didn’t plan to do a great deal except go to the beach and later to the terrace swimming pool.    This didn’t take a lot of planning.  After buffet breakfast we walked through the gardens and past the pool, down some steps and through the beach side taverna and onto the beach.  We were quite early so we got to pick a spot that suited us best and selected sun-beds near the sea where there was a gentle cooling breeze and we settled in for a day of doing absolutely nothing except for the occasional swim in the water to cool down and a little walk to the taverna for a top-up Mythos and then walk awhile and cool off in the shade of the nearby pines and cypresses, the slender holm-oaks and the statuesque aloes.

The beachside taverna served a good lunch and Jonathan, who was still a bit of a fussy eater at thirteen, had his favourite combination of French fries and strawberries (yes, very strange) while the rest of us had our first Greek salad.  We didn’t really do a lot else except for a bit of snorkelling and a swim in the pool and then when dad went for his afternoon nap the three of us went back to the village for a late afternoon drink.

Unknowingly we had established the routine for the rest of the week.  We had found an Italian bar/taverna that had already become our favourite and we went back there again after dinner where the atmosphere was getting lively in anticipation of the football.  We watched while the hosts, Belgium, beat Sweden 2 -1 and when we left the barman told us to be sure to come back tomorrow because Italy was playing Turkey and anticipating a win there was going to be a party!

Crete – The Palace of Knossos and the Minotaur

King Minos and the Palace of Knossos…

In 2001 I visited the Greek island of Crete with my son Jonathan and while we were there visited the ancient site of the Palace of Knossos.  This is the largest archaeological site on the island and was the ceremonial and political centre of the ancient Minoan civilization.

According to Greek mythology, the palace was designed with such cunning complexity that no one placed in it could ever find the way out again and King Minos who commissioned the place to imprison the hideous Minotaur kept the architect prisoner to ensure that he could not reveal the palace plan to anyone. 

The architect was Daedalus who was a great inventor and he built two sets of wings so he and his son Icarus could fly off the island and escape.  He warned his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax that held the wings together would melt but Icarus was young and impulsive and flew higher and higher until the heat melted the wax and he fell to his death in the Aegean sea.

Daedalus escaped and gave the palace plans to the Athenian King Theseus who travelled to Crete and found and killed the Minotaur.

The ruins at Knossos were first discovered in 1878  by a local man, Minos Kalokairinos, and the earliest excavations were made.  After that several Cretans attempted to continue the dig but it was not until 1900 that the English archeologist Arthur Evans purchased the entire site and carried out massive excavations and reconstructions. 

Arthur Evans and the Palace of Knossos…

These days archaeology is carefully regulated and supervised by academics who apply scientific rigour (except for Tony Robinson and the Time Team of course) to make sure that history isn’t compromised but it was very different a hundred years ago when wealthy amateurs could pretty much do as they pleased and went around digging up anything that they could find of interest and aggressively reinterpreting it.

Evans employed a large staff of local labourers as excavators and within a few months had uncovered a substantial portion of what he named the Palace of Minos, at the same time applying the description Minoan to the people who lived there.  No one really knows what they called themselves four thousand years ago when the Palace was constructed of course. In the Odyssey which was composed centuries after the destruction of Knossos, the poet Homer called the natives of Crete Eteocretans, which means true Cretans and it is possible that they may have been descendants of the Minoans.

There is much disagreement over the value of Evans’ work because some experts argue that some of his reconstructions are inaccurate, not thoroughly researched and constructed from unsuitable material, including concrete.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the scholars arguments I have to say that it does make the site a whole lot more interesting than just a few old walls and foundations and some of the experts have been forced to agree that in some places the concrete has actually helped preserve the original building, especially on steps that would otherwise have been worn away by thousands of visitors over the last one hundred years.

After considering the issue I think I agree with Henry Miller who wrote in the Colossus of Rhodes: “There has been much controversy about the aesthetics of Sir Arthur Evans’s work of restoration.  I find myself unable to come to any conclusion about it; I accepted it as a fact.  However Knossos may have looked in the past, however it may look in the future, this one which Evans has created is the only one I shall ever know.  I am grateful to him for what he did…”

Walking Tour of the Palace of Knossos…

We left the holiday village of Agios Nikólaos early in the morning and arrived in Knossos an hour or so later and paid our entrance fees.  Once inside we were approached by a local guide who looked as though he was stuck in a 1960s hippie culture time warp and somehow he persuaded me to part with €10 to join his guided tour.

This isn’t something that I would normally do but on this occasion I was pleased that I did because he provided an informative and amusing tour and we learned that the Palace had one thousand interlocking rooms and enjoyed the comforts of an elaborate system of water supply and drainage systems as well as flushing toilets, air conditioning and paved roads. 

The Palace was not the home of one privileged individual but housed a complete community and included artisan workrooms, shops and food processing centres and it served as a central storage point, and a religious and administrative centre for the north of the island.

Even at fourteen, Jonathan was cultivating an impressive mean streak and he became very concerned when two non-payers joined the guided tour and tagged along, he kept trying to draw this to the attention of the guide who eventually responded to the hints and asked them to pay up, much to his satisfaction.  Actually I think freeloading in this way is quite good fun so long as there isn’t a spoil sport like Jonathan around!

The Destruction of the Palace of Knossos…

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture that flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC but it came to a dramatic end sometime between 1550 and 1630 BC as a result of the eruption on the island of Santorini which is about one sixty miles north of Crete.

This eruption was among the largest volcanic explosions in the history of civilization.  It measured six on the Volcanic Explosivity Index which may not sound that much but is just about as big as you can get.  The Yellowstone eruption, six hundred and forty thousand years ago, was the biggest ever and measured eight.  So this would have been a fairly big bang and when it went off you would probably want to be standing well back because it ejected an estimated forty cubic miles of material or about roughly 10,000,000,000 tonnes as it blew the devastated island apart.

To get a sense of perspective try to imagine the county of Essex rising forty miles into the air into the earth’s mesosphere (a terrible thought I agree) and you can get a sense of just how much material that is.  Actually it probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Essex blew up in this way, except we would lose Stansted airport I suppose.

As it happened, sixty miles was not far back enough and the eruption devastated the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri on Santorini which was entombed in a layer of pumice and created a huge tsunami that engulfed the island of Crete and destroyed the Palace of Knossos and many other Minoan coastal settlements.  Archaeologists believe that the eruption created a crisis in Minoan society (well I rather imagine that it would) and with trade and agriculture seriously disrupted they were easily conquered by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece who took their place on the island of Crete.

Athens and Ancient Greece

The Acropolis Museum in Athens