The Light There

The Venetian section of the city, the old quarter, was exactly what I had hoped it would be. Passing through a light-filled archway, I came upon a crescent shaped harbor lined with hotels, taverns and shops in a harmonious balance of shapes and colors—the waterfront in Chania on the island of Crete. Picturesque locations are never without their racks of postcards displaying scenes usually distant cousin to the real thing, but postcards like any captured image, can be only half the picture. The deception is that appealing postcards result from several rolls of film used in an expensive camera by a professional photographer who sometimes goes overboard with filters and Photoshop. Exaggeration was not so obvious in Greek postcards. I had seen hundreds and bought dozens in past days and I was surprised at how accurately they reflected the actual scene. Could it be that the photographer working in Greece has the advantage of good light?

In The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller’s hymn to Greece, he wrote enthusiastically of Greek light, saying more than once that it was a quality of light incomparable to any other. During a stay in Crete he expressed it this way:

‘The happiest man on earth is the man with fewest

needs. And I also believe that if you have light,

such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated.’

I didn’t always agree with Miller on things Greek, but it wasn’t too difficult to see that the Aegean sun has blessed Greece with a bounty of serene light. As well, the landscape seems to bend that light in a purer form. Colors, line, the edges of shapes are recast by the sweep of that light, and appear to be enhanced. Still, despite the sunny vista, sunglasses at this time of year are a soothing balm.

For lunch I sought out a cool and shadowed patio overlooking the old Venetian harbor. Under the shade of a blue and orange striped awning, I found a retreat, temporary at least, from the power of that Greek light. The food was good, but too much for a hot afternoon. It was a combination plate heaped with four different casseroles and served with two side dishes. Most of the time I enjoy a healthy appetite, but I couldn’t finish a lunch of such hearty proportions.

Back to the hotel for a shower and nap. I now had a shower curtain, my first in this country. I had gradually grown accustomed to turning bathrooms into wading pools, but this time I stepped from the shower onto a dry floor.

After the nap I strolled out and wandered once more down to the old harbor, hoping I might find the sun just as it began its descent into the sea. I sat on a wooden bench in a cool breeze blowing off the water, a spot from where I could see the old lighthouse and its shadow twin reflected in the water. A handful of people fished from the stone walls and steps at its base. It was a peaceful half hour I sat there, absently watching a young woman paint a complicated design onto the hand and wrist of another woman. Not my first time to see henna tattoos, but my first experience of seeing the artist at work.

A dark woman appearing to be Indian handed me a small printed card as I passed her corner, winding an aimless path through narrow streets.

‘This small palace was built in the 15th century by

the Venetian family, Renier. It was a two-storied

building with a courtyard and a Catholic family

chapel dedicated to St Nicolas. It is the only existing

chapel in Chania. In 1608 the Renier family coat of

arms, bearing a Latin inscription was added to the

building. In 1695 the palace was occupied by a Turk,

a high government official, who separated the courtyard

from the road. This was done to prevent passersby from

looking in at the women of his harem. For this reason the

palace came to be known as Sultana’s House.’

This curious description was on the back of a restaurant card pointing to a small house tucked into the next turn ahead. It was a restaurant hidden in a maze of streets and alleys not far from the waterfront, and likely one of the simplest and most beautiful garden settings I had ever seen. Large terracotta urns sat about the courtyard, some upright, others tilted on their sides, spilling out clusters of red geraniums. Moonlight shone through wooden beams entangled in grape vines, casting filigree shadows on the marble tabletops. I sat at a small table, three small cats at my feet begging for scraps. A glass of white wine, a plate of calamari, Greek salad and broiled swordfish, all excellent, but I couldn’t help feeling that it played only a supporting role to the atmosphere of the old sultan’s moonlit courtyard. Like the sun, this moon too spilled its light in a glow less ordinary.

A Watery Hell

The swarming dock was a busy waterfront scene, stock footage from an old MGM movie, the harbor filled with inter-island ferries along with a mass of other shipping; cranes groaning under heavy loads of cargo being lowered onto decks crawling with shouting sailors, while off to the right cars and trucks disgorged from the belly of an enormous ferry leaned on horns and revved engines. People weighted with suitcases, shopping bags and birdcages dodged and scrambled through holes in the traffic to reach the harbor entrance. My ferry was anchored on the far side of the harbor.

By the time I got there it was 9:00 p.m., still daylight, and an hour before sailing. Crowds of people were already onboard, many of them settled in, but the ship so crowded, so crawling with people, I couldn’t find a place to sit. Not an unclaimed seat anywhere on my very big ride to Crete. I wandered the decks for twenty minutes carrying my bags, weaving in and out of other meandering travelers in the same chair-less muddle. All out of options I dropped the bags against a wall and flopped exhausted onto the floor, muttering about my poor choice of buying the cheapest ticket.

Some few minutes passed, my eyes unglazed and focused on a woman just in front of me, lounging all alone on a plump sofa, her bag placed across that portion she wasn’t sitting on. An hour later, the ship underway, the woman’s bag still rested on the seat, while I stared at it from the floor. In the gentlest voice I could muster, I asked the woman if she spoke English. In answer she mumbled something that could have been Lithuanian for all I could tell. A crew member happened along and I asked if he spoke English, would he mind inquiring about the ‘empty’ seat? After an short exchange between the woman and the crewman, I got the translation (of an obvious fabrication) that her daughter would be returning soon from the snack bar. With perfect politeness the man suggested that I might just sit in the daughter’s place until she returned.

The crewman moved on, I began to rise from the floor and the woman, completely unrelenting, made not a move to shift the bag, but continued to ignore me. A moment passed and then I stood, gently lifted her bag off the seat and placed it on the floor near her feet. I sat down in the bag’s place and as I settled into the cushions, the woman, as though I’d sat in her lap rolled her eyes and groaned.

The blatant selfishness shocked me. Wandering numbers of people all about the ship with no place to sit for the next eight hours and here this woman wanted to roost with her suitcase propped up on the cushions beside her. Now I was comfortably propped up on cushions, ignoring the adjacent moans.

2:30 a.m. somewhere in the Aegean. I sat in idle torment, breathing blue air and comparing the ferry and an earlier long-haul bus. I figured the bus ran a close second, that the boat was worse. A nearby concession had been selling cigarettes hand over fist from the moment we weighed anchor and I guessed all of those cigarettes were being smoked in my immediate vicinity. Two chain smoking women behind me chattered like magpies on amphetamine, while all around people tried in vain to sleep. Ten meters down the hall the game arcade was doing turn-away business, belching out the electronic crash and zoom of car races, the roar of soccer matches and the clatter of bowlers throwing 300 point games. A stuck record of unending and repetitive crashes bouncing off the ship’s steel hull. It was like a party gone wrong on the Love Boat, and I was the reluctant guest.

Eventually I figured out why the woman next to me wanted the extra seat—she had hoped to stretch out and sleep on the sofa, getting a bed for the price of a chair. I noticed that a man across the way had managed to hoard a complete sofa for himself and slept there stretched out. My initial thoughts about this night crossing of the Aegean to the island of Crete had been full of romantic notions, and I had arranged to take a ‘deck-seat,’ the cheapest ticket offered. Each upgrade doubled the ticket price, but more than that, I thought it would be memorable to sprawl in a deckchair throughout a night crossing of the ‘wine dark sea’ under the light of the stars. I thought of it as payback for six and a half hours on a rural bus the previous week.

Little did I know. The long hours slowly but mercifully unwound and near sunrise we arrived in Chania, a charming town on the northwest coast of Crete.

Cicadas and Salad

Into the silence

sound pierces the rock—

a cicada shrills

Matsuo Bashô, 17th century Japanese haiku poet, wrote these lines about his visit to Yamadera, a mountain temple in Yamagata Prefecture, northern Japan. He might just as easily have written about the cicadas on the island of Crete. I visited Yamadera some years back and listened to Bashô’s cicadas and I know now they can never surpass the incredible shrilling of their distant cousins at the site of Knossos. Entering the compound of this old city site on Crete, I am almost swept off my feet by a harmonious and gathering surge of sound coming from the pine trees around me. Hundreds of insects sing in absolutely perfect synchrony and pitch, with undulating waves and stops altering and breaking the rush of sound. I am thrilled, but afraid to look over my shoulder for fear of seeing someone behind glass manipulating dials in a sound studio.

Some hours later, walking along a road the air still ringing with the sound of cicadas, I stop to look carefully into the branches of a roadside tree, thinking I can spy one of them up close. At the moment I stare into the tree the sound abruptly stops, almost as if the insect were looking back at me and halted its rasping out of shyness. As soon as I move off down the path the cicada’s song picks up again just where it left off.

Lunchtime and I stop at a sidewalk cafe, a tabepna in Greek. A tavern. Here I have the first of many Greek salads which I will eat over the next two weeks. The menu lists it as a ‘country salad.’ This isn’t the elaborate Greek salad we often see in places other than Greece, but simply tomato, cucumber, a few leaves of lettuce, red onion, green pepper, a couple of Greek olives, a slice of feta cheese, a sprinkle of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.

………………

Salads are a favorite I enjoy in all varieties, preferring most often the standard Italian green salad. Over the years I have learned how to make what I believe is a flavorful salad. Greece turned out to be a Utopia for the kind of salads I enjoy. It was also a modest salad-classroom, each restaurant offering a tip, simplifying some of my ideas on mixture. The variety of salad made depends upon where you are, what is in season and to some degree a knowledge of, or feel for what goes well with what. I discovered anew the true Greek salad, and learned that it differs greatly from other so-called ‘Greek salads’ I have eaten outside of Greece.

Recipe for a simple but delicious salad:

Ripe tomatoes cut into pieces

Cucumber sliced

Red onion sliced or roughly chopped

Green pepper sliced

5 or 6 Greek olives

Feta cheese sliced or cubed

A handful of fresh basil, or some lettuce (a small amount)

Salt, pepper, lemon, olive oil