Crete by Barry Unsworth Read Free Book Online

from car radios. They were an expression of popular feeling, many of them political in tone, closely associated with the Left. When, some years later, there was a military coup in Greece and the country was taken over by a junta of colonels, one of the first things they did was to ban the music of Theodorakis. For anyone returning to Athens during this period, as I did, the silence in the streets seemed like mourning. When the regime collapsed, the songs came flooding back again. Songs are like legends: Whether old or new, they are difficult to suppress.

CHAPTER THREE
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CRETAN GORGES and OTHER MATTERS
    Chania is an addictive sort of place with its ancient harbor front, the maze of streets behind, the constant varying of the light as one moves toward or away from the open water, the sense of long-established human presence, almost exuded from its walls. One can spend many days here, closely similar but never quite the same, in a sort of ruminative pottering. It is almost a shock to emerge from the town with its cafés and gift shops and kiosks with foreign newspapers, and find the unyielding Cretan landscape awaiting you.
    Two hours by road—and a very tortuous and vertiginously winding road it is—southward from Chania into the White Mountains, brings you to the gorge of Samaria, which has been a national park since 1962. At eleven miles it is famous as the longest gorge in Europe, and it is perhaps the most spectacular on the island—though about this there are differences of opinion; Crete is home to a hundred gorges at least, all with their own distinctive qualities and their own advocates. However, Samaria is certainly the one most popular with visitors. Many thousands of people set off to walk the length of it, a mistake in some cases: It can be a taxing hike, steep in places, stony underfoot, and much of the way exposed to the sun. Broken limbs, heart attacks, cases of exhaustion are not uncommon.
    The route to the gorge takes you past the village of Alikianos, in the heart of the district known as Portokalachoria, “The Orange Villages,” where the best oranges on Crete—and therefore, Cretans would say, the best in the world—are grown. These villages lie in the foothills on the western side of the range, where the mountains descend more gradually, stretching bony knuckles toward the Chania plain. In the valleys formed by the spreads between the knuckles, the orange groves are bunched thickly together, a separate, secret-seeming world of dark green and gleaming gold.
    But one is never far, wherever one goes on Crete, from the island’s turbulent past. It was here at Alikianos, among what are now peaceful orange groves, that what came to be known as the Kandanoleon wedding massacre is believed to have taken place. The uprising against the Venetians headed by George Kandanoleon in 1527 is one of the great stories of Cretan resistance, the usual compound of fact and heroic legend. He had his base at Meskla and at the high point of his fortunes controlled most of western Crete. One day, for reasons which have remained obscure, he called in person at the house of a high Venetian official named Francesco Molino and proposed the marriage of his son Petros with Molino’s daughter. A harebrained proposal on the face of it, in view of the arrogance of the Venetian rulers and their detestation of this rebel chieftain and of the Greek Orthodox faith to which he belonged. However, the proposal was accepted with seeming pleasure. The wedding took place at the Molino house. Kandanoleon was accompanied by several hundred of his followers. Molino had invited fifty guests from Chania. A hundred sheep and oxen were slaughtered for the occasion. The Venetian plied his visitors with wine, and by sunset they were well on the way to being drunk and incapable. Then a rocket was fired, signal for the approach of a force of Venetian cavalry and infantry that had been waiting nearby. The Cretans by this