CRETE: The Charm of Chania / Exploring the Wonders of Elafonisi and Kedrodasos on the southwest coast

Chania (Hania) in summertime is a panoply of color and light.

The faros, the iconic Venetian lighthouse (in the background), was started in the 16th century and completed 300 years later by the Egyptians.

The Venetians gave the town its present look, from its mansions to the shipbuilding yards (the neoria) along the port. But also note the minaret in the background. And the Lefka Ori, the White Mountains.

Strata

A tradition that was started a few years ago is still continuing, the once a week strata, from the Italian word “strada” (street). A folklore group walks along the port, playing Cretan music, and ends up at Mitropolis Square where different groups perform Cretan dances.

(Last year it was a village wedding and the “guests” were given gamopilafo (special wedding rice), along with raki and paximadia (rusks).

Take a look at this year’s traveling musicians with their lyra and lauto.

Cretan dancing schools must be doing great — parents want their kids to keep the traditional dances alive.

The dances have their roots from Minoan Greece. You see that when the women twirl around and hold up their arms, looking like the Minoan female statues.

These dancers definitely look a bit fierce.

Cretan music and dancing is still such a strong tradition.

A tradition of a different kind is Iordanis Bougatsa. For 100 years they’ve been making this delicious filo pastry stuffed with local mizithra cheese, and served either sweet or savoury.

Dining

Speaking of food and music (the good things in life), in addition to other places, we rediscovered “Adespoto.” Usually the word adespoto means stray, but it also means “away from others,” a “particular” place. And this place is unique; it’s the shell of an old Venetian townhouse destroyed in WWII, and made into a garden for the restaurant. The place has tables at the front on Sifaka Street (THE place to buy your Cretan knives!), facing the city’s Byzantine walls, as well as tables in the frame of the house under the stars where you listen to the bouzouki and guitar.

Adespoto was used as a filming locale in “The Two Faces of January” in 2012 with Viggo Mortensen.

We were there with son Theo, visiting his old stomping grounds in Chania, where he lived and studied in the Polytechnic a number of years ago, and his friend Elisa.

The atmosphere and setting are unbeatable. And the food isn’t bad!

We started with a house salad with arugala, spinach, carrot, apple, pomegranate, walnuts and sun dried tomatoes, served with garlic bread with cheese and cherry tomato. The aubergine (eggplant) rolls with walnuts and cashews were delicious too.

The fish dishes were especially tasty — fresh kalamari and fresh tsipoura (sea bream family). We also ordered chicken with a sauce with sun dried tomatoes and myzithra cheese, and veal in red sauce.

The kerasma (treat) at the end of the meal with the local raki was coconut pastries. Very light and the perfect complement to the meal.

Adespoto was a fun place with its setting and atmosphere, along with wonderful music of great and well known songs that everyone was singing along with, by composers Theodorakis, Xarhakos, Hatzidakis and others. Musicians Giorgos and Konstantinos played for 3 hours with hardly a break.

Near the back entrance of Adespoto you find yourself in Splantzia, the traditional Muslim quarter. (Follow the cat)

It’s here that we have another favorite restaurant, the “Well of the Turk,” mentioned in other blogs. With its yellow stucco walls and blue shutters, the place specializes in Greek, North African and Middle Eastern cuisine.

Besides the front, you can also sit on the side in the pleasant garden. The food and service are excellent, along with the friendliness of the staff.

We began with mouth-watering starters: a salad with beetroot, sumac and yoghurt dressing, paired with anthi, courgette (zucchini) flowers stuffed with anthotiro cheese, mint and basil.

The aubergine meatballs and baba ghanoush were delicious as well as my personal favorite, sabiyet fatayer, pita with spinach, mizithra cheese, lemon juice, walnuts and raisins.

We would have been happy, left with these wonderful tastes, but the kerasma they brought was exquisite. In fact they gave us two! First, they brought a plate of orange slices, little baklavas and ice cream, to be eaten in that order, along with raki of course, and then a second plate (!) of a kind of coconut cake. (By the way I can’t handle raki after drinking wine, but Elias has no problem!)

Good thing that we do so much walking!

For wonderful vegan tastes I recommend “Pulse,” a place we tried last year for the first time. Near the bottom of Theotocopoulou Street, with a lovely view of the sea, it’s a small unassuming restaurant with tastes that even a serious meat lover would crave!

We had the Superfoods salad, with avocado, pomegranate and quinoa and sweet potato salad and polenta croquettes, crispy and tasty. And a stuffed portobello mushroom that tasted like it was cheese inside, but the stuffing was made of cashew.

The kerasma was carrot cake with a gingerbread flavor, along with the raki.

We planned to return to Pulse to try some more of the menu and talk more to our very accommodating waiter, but couldn’t find a table that night.

So we decided to go to one of the fish tavernas on the other side of the port, the eastern side near Koum Kapi. All the way at the end at “Antigone,” we sat across from the ramparts leading to the faros. What a treat to sit there! Dusk was setting in, and it was as if we were gazing into a painting of sunset pastel colors.

To add to our aesthetic nourishment, we had a green salad with avocado and pomegranate (seems to be popular this year!) and gavros marinato, anchovies marinated in a vinaigrette sauce, with glistrida, a tasty local green.

Then we added zucchini croquettes and a traditional Cretan dish of soupies (cuttlefish) with maratho, which is like dill, and then fresh grilled kalamari.

The kerasma was refreshing karpouzi (watermelon) and halva, a traditional semolina cake, on lovely dishes.

There is no end to delicious cuisine in the old town of Chania. It’s hard to be dissatisfied from what you eat. Toward the end of our stay, restaurants were full everywhere. Prices, like in most places, are higher than last year, but not the crazy, out of reality stories you hear about in heavily touristed Cycladic islands like Mykonos, Santorini, Paros etc.

But Chania is not only food and beauty. Through the centuries it has been a multicultural tapestry of different cultures and civilizations, with Ottoman upon Venetian upon Byzantine upon Arab upon Hellenistic, even back to the Minoans, traces of their civilization which can be found in the hill behind the Mosque. If you like excavations, you’ll love Karnevaro St behind the port.

And modern history intrudes into the town as well. Many are the historical events that haunt us today. One such occurrence that concerned Crete and specifically Chania, is the sinking of the steamship Tanais. A little known event, this wiped out the 2,300 year old Jewish community on Crete.

To commemorate 80 years after the Tanais sinking, the former archaeological museum, in the 16th century Venetian church of San Francisco on Chalidon St. was hosting an exhibit. (Up Chalidon, nearly hidden, with a dainty garden, is a small but attractive Catholic church, St. Mary’s, in use today.)

The story is this. In June 1944, the Nazis (occupying Crete), rounded up the Jewish population, along with a number of Cretan resistance fighters and Italian prisoners of war, and were forced onto the Tanais. In a sad irony, as the ship was surely bound for the extermination camps, the British, mistaking the ship for an enemy vessel, torpedoed it, killing all aboard. The art and educational video exhibit is sponsored by Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life synagogue, which originally dates from the early 17th century and was restored in 1999 as a place of “prayer, peace and reconciliation.” For more information on the synagogue’s history and its modern cultural role in the town, check out http://www.etz-hayyim-hania.org.

Nearby Beaches

With the hot sunny days, you just want to submerge yourself in water during the day. About 10 to 15 minutes walk from Theotocopoulou and the Naval Museum is the long sandy Nea Chora Beach. It looks like the hotels, apartments, air bnbs and restaurants have all been painted this year and look better than I’ve ever seen them.

A little further than Nea Chora, where you can reach easily with a city bus, is Agoi Apostoli beach (2nd beach stop, after Chrissi Akti or Golden Beach, which is very susceptible to any winds). Here it’s always calm and has great shade with its almerikia, or tamarisk trees, on the beach and pine trees right behind them. There’s a pleasant self service place with tables on the beach.

Elafonisi and Kedrodasos

One day we had Theo’s car and decided to give Elafonisi one more chance. This was our 3rd visit. In the southwest corner of Crete, this beach is always on the list of best Greek beaches. (Why?) The 1 1/2 hour drive from Chania takes you through some dramatic mountain scenery like the Topolia Gorge.

Every village has a taverna with “traditional family cooking” and “traditional Cretan products” where handmade dolls and bags sway in the wind next to tables of of raki, olive oil and honey. A sign in one village pointed to an ancient olive tree, 910 years old. (Old yes, but nothing like the one we visited in Vouves in 2020 that’s 3,000 years old and still producing olives.)

Near Elafonisi are a number of signs pointing to the monastery of Chrisoskalitissa, meaning “golden stair.” It’s not particularly historic but the view is superb from the 90 stairs that you climb up from the sea. The legend is that one of the stairs is made of gold but only the spiritual or kind hearted are able to see this golden stair. I remember visiting it in 1998 on our family trip to Crete. It was the day after we climbed through the Samaria Gorge and taking those stairs was more than painful.

As you get close to Elafonisi, you see some parking attendants waving their hands wildly for you to stop and leave your car, where you pay 3 or 5 euros for as long as you like.

You used to be able to park your car right next to the beach (in 2018 it was like this) but the area is part of the Crete Natura 2000, meaning its biodiversity is protected. That means that you’re forbidden to take anything from the beach, no sand, no shells, no pieces of wood.

It’s quite a hike down to the beach now, so be warned. However, that hasn’t stopped hordes of tourists trekking down the path, and I mean “hordes.” Here in Elafonisi (which means “deer island,” though don’t look for any!) is the only place where I really felt what’s been so much in the news this summer, of “overtourism.”

The majority of sunbathers stay on the outer beach and there is a small area to rent sunbeds and umbrellas if available. But since you can’t count on that and there’s no shade, you should have an umbrella with you. However, the day we went was so windy that if we didn’t hold the umbrella, it would’ve blown into the water.

If you want to go over to the islet (the “nisi,”) the only way is to wade through the shallow water and you see people doing this, carrying their stuff. So in this case you don’t want to be weighed down by things! Here it’s undoubtedly less crowded and maybe you can see better the famous pink sand caused by crushed shells.

If you really want to swim, you need to walk a ways out where the water gets deeper. The white sand and sand dunes are pretty but not better than other beaches. From afar the water looks blue, but when you’re in it, it looks like various shades of a translucent green.

Early afternoon, we felt it was time to leave and enjoy a less crowded beach.

Trekking up the path again, now we’re headed for Kedrodasos, meaning “cedar forest.” And indeed it is.

From the main road, from Elafonisos, there’s no sign for Kedrodasos; you just make the first right and on the way, you pass lots of goats nibbling on the dry underbrush, and greenhouses.

Alas, even the remote places have been discovered! When we were here in 2018, this was a dirt road, but since then it’s been paved. That’s definitely brought more cars. We can’t believe the number of cars! It’s also a hike down, a little more steep though a little shorter. You search for shade but a lot of people come and camp out and stake out trees. But it’s a large area, so if you walk for a bit, you can certainly find cedar trees. Just to be sure, you should have a beach umbrella with you and of course plenty of water. At the top now is a small canteen. Of course the water is crystalline, and a deep turquoise color.

Sunset approaching, time to leave the quiet beauty of Kedrodasos and head back to a different beauty, the liveliness of the old town of Chania. Not only the bars, cafes and restaurants but cultural life, including music and theater at outdoor venues. Residents we’ve gotten to know over the years. All together, it explains why we keep returning nearly every year for the past 20 years to this irresistible Cretan city.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Check out my previous blogs on Chania: with an elephant eye, with a visit to the caves of the flower children of Matala, exploring Loutro and the Samaria Gorge, and with a visit to Falassarna, Polyrinia and the ancient olive tree and museum at Vouves.

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Sherri Moshman Paganos is a writer and former educator, inspired by her life in Athens, where she and her husband are happily retired and enjoying their travels in Greece and abroad. You can check out her writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and articles here.