A ramble
I’ve been walking a lot since I got to Anopoli, such as to the church of St Catherine and Aradena mentioned in the last couple of posts, and down the winding road to Sfakia. But I’ve also just wandered with no particular destination in mind.
The grandeur of the White Mountains beckon. They’re ever present, tall and mighty, but reaching a summit, amazing as I’m sure the experience would be, would take days and I don’t really have what you’d need to get along up there. They’re serious stuff. But their lower slopes spill out all around the northern edge of Anopoli’s plateau, and I took off towards them yesterday.
It took a while to leave what you might call Anopoli’s suburbs, a few kilometres of well-spaced homes dotted along the plateau’s vast acreage of olive groves. They thin out the further on you go and eventually give way to pine woods spread all over the mountains’ lower slopes. Even in the woods there are still a few smaller homes, although steadily more ramshackle and isolated. I suppose they’re the cheaper end of town, where fewer, poorer folk scratch a living from what little they have. Of the few people I did see they were older, bent by years of toil and evidence of prosperity seemed to wither the further from the centre I walked.
Approaching the thinning homesteads you invariably hear the sound of a barking dog, or worse, more than one. There’s a frisson of anticipation bordering on terror as every step brings you closer. Some are tethered but others bound out and towards you with crazed excitement. You’re never quite sure which way things might go. Despite the temptation to step back, run for it or clamber up a tree, based on the notion that dogs smell fear, which I’ve never been sure to be true, I tend to hedge my bets. It might be, so I try to act unfazed at the prospect of being torn to bits and stride on.
I’ve never been bitten, although once in rural Lanzarote I felt the wet breath of a great bear of a dog on my calves and turned to it frozen rigid, with arms raised and a fixed stare. It worked in that it retreated slightly but then every time I turned my back and carried on it did too, until eventually its owner came running and it chickened out. It seems to me that with most dogs it’s all gong and no dinner, although I always skirt around them if I can. You never know.
Gradually the pine woods thin out as the plateau’s life-giving earth becomes scarce, giving way to higher, drier and rocky terrain where only the hardy survive.
I came across the structure below as the trees thinned and clambered over the rocks for a closer look. I’m surprised that the picture came out because at the moment I took it I leapt back in shock as a startled billy goat bounded out, equally shocked by my presence as he’d been dozing in the shade of its dark interior. Had he been in the company of young kids things might have been different, but he scarpered over the rocks like lightening and I wandered on.
I followed a dusty track that presumably lead somewhere, winding ever upwards, with each turn revealing yet another up ahead. Perhaps it went all the way to a summit but the day was getting hotter and my pace slowed. After an hour or so I stopped for a while in the narrow shade of a spindly tree, taking in the view below, and then turned back.
I’ve always enjoyed walking and these days there’s much talk and mounting evidence of its benefits, not just from the physical exercise of putting one foot in front of the other, but also from the positive effects on the mind, particularly when out in places like this, with only the cleansing sights and sounds of nature around you.
As I’d walked, although I wasn’t really conscious of a need to cleanse my mind, in the empty silence I’d started to think on and off about the people I’ve met and of the influence of hundreds of years of the island’s occupation by the Venetians and Turks. And even of recent history. In 1943 German troops massacred more than 500 people in eastern Crete. Germans are welcome visitors today, although no doubt there’s unease as they pass the monuments to those who died in every one of the 20 villages their countrymen burnt to the ground.
I’d also thought about how, a few evenings ago, I’d been chatting to Dimitri in Anopoli. His birth name is Mahdi and, as he told me, he came here from Syria fifteen years ago in search of a better future. Nobody could get their tongue’s round Mahdi, so he became Dimitri. He speaks fluent Greek now and has settled in this beautiful place. His nephews have done the same in Chania and his remaining family fled Syria for Turkey when Assad and Putin turned their homeland into rubble.
On a more positive note I’d thought about how, the other day, I’d gone down to Chora Sfakion, where I used to work. I’d planned to go on a 9.00 am bus that never came and thought I’d chance hitching a lift on the seven mile walk down. I was lucky after a hot hour thinking I wouldn’t be, and a lovely Austrian couple touring the island picked me up. They were regular visitors and on their way to Matala where the hippies used to live in its caves in the 60s, including Joni Mitchell for a while. She was playing on their stereo and, although too young, I think they wished they’d been there too.
On the way back, as earlier, the bus never turned up and I set off walking the seven miles back up into the mountains in searing heat. It took a while longer but eventually another kind couple picked me up, in part for directions. They were driving to Loutro, a village to which there are no roads, but I put them on the right track to Finix, a beautiful spot as near to Loutro as you can get, and their route passed through Anopoli anyway. They were delighted. Although now both German citizens they both had roots in Asia Minor, his in Izmir and hers in Kurdistan. And deeper still his forebears’ extended into Syria, and specifically to Aleppo, a city I’d visited many years ago before its demolition.
We’d shared our mutual disgust at Assad and Putin’s brutality, and at the latter’s continuing destruction and bloodshed in Ukraine. And then we talked about the beauty of Crete and its people, sharing stories of both as we wound our way up to Anopoli, where they dropped me off in the square.
That same evening as I sat in the square, around which children played, people stood around chatting and locals pulled up in cars that they parked for the night, unlocked and with windows open, I’d decided to go on the walk I’ve just described. It’s description has turned into a bit of a ramble in itself but I suppose I’ve been processing (I actually prefer mulling over), my experience of Crete’s tangled web of people and cultures, still being spun today. I’ve nothing profound or particularly interesting to conclude from this lengthy post, but that’s what I did yesterday.
As when I set off on my walk, this post wandered with no particular destination in mind, but tomorrow morning I’m leaving the mountains and going back over them on the 6.30 bus to Chania, assuming it comes.
Here are a few pics from my walk
