Greece
Chania, Crete - August 2007
We flew to Crete from Warsaw aboard a strange looking aircraft which as I read on the laminated emergency instruction sheet (made to look like a cartoon strip to remove it a few degrees from the realm of the real and by implication the possible - just like the British Airways animated safety demonstration) was a McDonnell Douglas built aircraft which I have never travelled on before. In fact, I don't think I'd ever heard of them and the fact the engines were at the back of the plane made me feel a little uneasy. I don't pretend to know how planes work (I'm happy that they just do) but it always seemed necessary to have the engines near to or underneath the wings; apparently not. (I have since discovered that they (McDonnell Douglas) made the DC-10 of which I have of course heard). Anyway, the flight there (just as it was back again) was one of the smoothest I have experienced, and Central Wings were nothing short of very efficient.
One thing I have noticed recently at airports is the drive toward fully automated 'everything' in the toilets (indeed I discovered this trend extended to the 'restrooms' of various hostelries in both Poland and Crete). Nothing it seems must ever be touched by human hands, at least that is what I believe the desired effect to be. For a long while taps have been automated so that simply waving one's hands beneath causes the water to pour (or rather dribble like perspiration) onto the small globulous spit of soap that ten tugs at the dispenser finally delivered. But, to be honest a bar of soap and a tap one turns or even presses isn't beyond me and makes me feel at least a bit more human. However, now, even flushing the loo is considered too risky these days and so one has to wave at the flush sensor as if one is waving goodbye to that which has recently been discharged. Yet, with all this technology, making a lock which is both practical and which actually works still seems completely beyond any designer's comprehension. Perhaps they will start making us wave to do that too?
So, automatic taps and automatic flush... of course automatic hand driers have also been around a long while (pressing a button was, I suppose also considered, too dangerous or bothersome), yet these asthmatic machines, which often did little more than cough politely on one's hands with a single morning-breath have been superceded by the 'air blade' (dries your hands by cutting them off) and the all new paper towel. Yes, the paper towel has been re-invented thanks also to waving. Of course pulling out the green towels from the dispenser has always been fraught with danger, particular when cleaners have put them in the wrong way up and so one has to pull out a great wadge instead of just one or two. Now however, one simply has to wave in front of a machine at which it will click, whir and dispense a single sheet which invariably tears in half and which is not at all adequate for drying one's hands. So, one stands and tries to get another, but no matter how frantically one waves (I felt like I was waving goodbye to loved ones whilst aboard some ocean liner, about to embark on a round the world cruise) nothing happens; it's as if the machine knows you've had one and is somehow chastising you for being wasteful.
The whole process of visiting the bathroom now involves something akin to Tom Cruise's absurd 'vogueing' in Minority Report. But then, at least through all that waving, one's hands do eventually dry.
So, we landed on Crete at Chania and made our way to our hotel in Kalamaki, a small resort some 6km from the picturesque town of Chania. Although the beaches aren't up to much here the sea more than makes up for it, being warm and very clear. In fact I had a very enjoyable Polish lesson in the sea, repeating the names of various fruits and vegetables which would come in very handy when ordering a grape (winogrono) and peach (brzoskwinia) ice-cream back in Poland. And it was on one of Kalamaki's beaches we witnessed a very interesting spectacle which for those involved was clearly very moving (as it was for those of us watching, wondering what on earth was going on).
A group of about 15 people, half men, half women appeared at the water's edge. The men were in casual clothes and the women mostly in black. They stood looking out to sea, lost in their own throughts for a moment. One of the men held a half-empty bottle of red wine in his hand, whilst others began pointing at various points in the distance. Quite what they were doing we couldn't tell but the man with the wine began emptying its remaining contents into the water. Flowers were then thrown onto the waves and it was clear this was all part of an act of remembrance. The men took off their shirts and took to the water, swimming out to the point they had no doubt been discussing, followed by an older couple who, fully dressed also walked into the sea. All their actions had a purposefulness about them which was somehow very dignified and indeed, very moving.
The 'ceremony' lasted some 15-20 minutes after which, back on the beach, they all stood, talking quietly amongst themselves. For that short time they had changed everything around them - the beach and the sea, not only for themselves, but for everyone who was watching. One couldn't help but be a part of the act and consider the person who was missing. Clearly someone had died - perhaps they'd drowned (our tour guide suggested this was the case), when we couldn't know, but the gap left by their passing was clearly visible.
A while later we walked up the beach and found some of the flowers washed up on the sand.
And further down a few had been used as decorations on a sandcastle, about which there was something very poetic.
It was on another beach - a beautiful one at Elofonisi - that we saw an altogether different spectacle involving a Greek family who having planted their umbrella on a patch of sand, much like an astronaut plants a flag on the moon, proceeded to get ready for a swim of sorts. The two portly heads of the family, both in their fifties, got ready their diving masks, snorkels and gloves, and if this wasn't enough, each strapped a knife to their legs, clearly intent, not so much a swim, as something resembling maritime slaughter. Quite what they were hoping to catch I couldn't say but a clue came in what was the crowning glory of their aquatic apparel... a harpoon.
So here we were, on a beach with a number of families, couples playing with raquets and balls, children building sandcastles and two men intent on eating Moby Dick for their tea. I can't imagine such a scene on a beach in England, not so much because of the obvious differences in conditions (water and weather), but for the fact that both would have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws for sporting flippers and masks let alone brandishing a spear whilst people cowered behind their windbreaks.
We never saw what they returned from the depths of the sea with; we had moved away by then.
Chania is in many ways like an old man; something of an eccentric, who wears the clothes of bygone days, frayed at the edges, patched up and discoloured. It is the man who lives alone in the house with its overgrown garden and a dozen cats. You can hear him muttering as he passes by in the street, half-whispers in a language of his own devising.
At night it becomes a different place altogether; it is this mild eccentric's dreams of long lost youth and, as such, it shakes beneath the humid and oppressive air of its own unreality. At night, there is a confusion in the city which belongs entirely to the world of nocturnal fancies. It turns this way and that in the face of thousands of faces, loses itself down dark alleys to then find itself, all of a sudden gazing out at the sea, above which turns the sky, almost as old as Crete itself. A light house and those which pepper the heavens know something we don't know, and warn us against sailing too close to the past whose rocks and crags are everywhere.
Often in towns and cities, the past is ghettoised; it sits neatly defined as architecure; churches, cathedrals and old walls amidst the modern sprawl. Yet in Chania (and in Rethymnon which we also visited), there are no such boundaries; the town is a true palimpsest where the borders between was has been, what is and what will be are blurred. There is something about a place with such an ancient provenance that reveals the future more starkley than even the most modern of conurbations (by future I mean a time when we will not exist); one can, in such ancient surroundings, more readily imagine one's own non-existence than in amongst skyskrapers and shopping malls.
Whilst sitting on a beach in Kalamaki, I traced the line of rocks jutting into the sea, and the shape of the mountains behind me. It is a line which since ancient times has barely changed, if at all, just like that of the horizon beyond the sea. And it takes little imaginative effort to remove the trappings of the modern world and see the world as it was hundreds, if not, thousands of years ago. One hears the waves crash upon the sand and is suddenly made aware of the fact, that the sea has always made that sound; it's always sparkled like this, broken the sun and mirrored the moon.
The artist El Greco, one of the island's most famous sons would have known that sound and where I might struggle to find him in Rome or Venice, I can clearly see him looking out across the waves. Cities might change beyond all recognition such is why the past and its inhabitants are so difficult to imagine, yet the rocks and constant sea paint the painter clearly within my mind.
So, as we sat in a bar in Charnia, as the town became pink with sleep, I could well imagine across the waves, that Queen Elizabeth I sat on the throne of England and Pharaohs were building their pyramids along the magic Nile. Such is the size of the past here (and never was the scale of the past made more visible - along with the future - than in Samaria Gorge, pictured above) that events which we might think of as history are compressed to become a part of the same blink in eternity's eye as today.
On 29th May 1944, the Jews of Chania were woken to the sound of loudspeakers ordering them into the street. The small neighbourhood in which they lived was blocked by trucks - the Final Solution had come to Crete. They were not allowed to take anything with them and were assembled at the southern end of Kondylaki Street (pictured above) in the small square and in the square adjacent to the harbour in the north. Within an hour they were driven to the prison of Ayas not far from Chania and the Jewish quarter immediately looted. After two weeks of imprisonement at Ayas with little food and no changes of clothes, the Jews of Chania were driven east to Herakleion. The official count is that 265 men, women and children arrived there on the 9th June and were put aboard a converted tanker that set sail for Athens that evening from where they would eventually arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, the following morning at 3.15am, the ship was sunk by a British submarine and all onboard, including 600 Greek and Italian prisoners of War were drowned.
94% of the Jews of Greece perished in the Holocaust.