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Excursions

During the Crete Writing Workshop we will offer participants the opportunity to explore Crete through several excursions, carefully chosen to provide them with a canvas for their creative writing.

Excursions, fall into three categories:

  1. Ecotourism
  2. Culinary classes (including wine and olive oil tastings), and
  3. Cretan natural history and civilization

Ecotourism

“Visiting a farm on the island of Crete, the southernmost part of Europe, and mucking in with the chores was part of the experience. So I found myself feeding the cows in the mountain retreat of Milia in Chania, which promises “silence, spring water, fresh air and organic food”. Some 27 years ago, a group of people decided to restore the mediaeval settlement and try to sustain as much of Crete’s natural environment as possible. Now Milia has 13 guest-houses, with each one built from the foundations of the old village houses with local materials such as chestnut wood and stone. I soon discovered the comforts at Milia were basic. You won’t find any televisions here and guests rely on solar energy to provide electric power.”

~ Tina Miles, New York Times

Culinary classes

  • Taste and learn how to prepare basic traditional dishes through mediterranean cuisine and cooking lessons at Xylas tavern.

Cooking classes, photos by Katerina Voutsina

The elementary agricultural research in Crete begins from Chania in 1907. The Institute for Olive Tree and Subtropical Plants was founded in 1959 and since then designs and executes research, pilot programs and demonstration projects on the problems and modernization of the cultivation of olive and citrus tree, and subtropical plants.

 

  • Cretan natural history and civilizations

Samaria gorge starts at an altitude of 1,250m at the northern entrance and ends at the shores of the Libyan Sea. In the “Iron Gates” the sides of the gorge close in to a width of only four meters and soar up to a height of 500 m.

“Between the mountains and the Libyan Sea is a land riven by precipitous gorges, Samaria being the best known. Others, such as Imbros, Aradena and Irini, offer nestling villages, pine-shrouded hills and more intimate surroundings. During the heat of a summer day, shade in those deep clefts is a blessing. But, in the relative cool of spring and autumn, bare mountain peaks and exposed pathways linking coastal villages offer alternative pleasures.”

~Denis Coghlan, The Irish Times

  • Discover why the Minoan civilization played an important role in Greek history. Wander around to the Palace of Knossos.

Knossos Palace, photo by Nenyaki

“Archaeology is an inexact science, as Sir Arthur Evans, a flamboyant early practitioner, knew. However painstaking the digging process, an excavator can always promote an extravagant theory under the guise of interpreting the finds. As he started to unearth a prehistoric mound at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the 20th century, Evans put his imagination into high gear. He rebuilt parts of a 3,500-year-old palace in modernist style using cement and reconstructed fragmentary frescoes to suit his views on Bronze Age religion and politics.Evans boldly argued that the Minoans, as he called the early islanders, shunned warfare, conveniently forgetting about the ruined watchtowers and fortification walls he had already identified elsewhere in Crete….Among those who swallowed the Knossos myth were Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, though none of them visited the site. Others who toured the reconstructed palace, including Evelyn Waugh, were more sceptical. Yet the magic persisted. A later generation, among them Crete’s 1960s hippy residents, saw the Minoans as an early blueprint for feminism and anti-war protests.”

 

~ “Sir Arthur Evans’s romantic ideas about the Minoans”, The Economist

“When I arrived in the town of Chania it was warm; the average daily temperature was said to be a comfortable 26C (78 F)….Chania is split into Old and New Towns, so its deep history is clearly delineated. In the matrix of alleyways that make up the Old Town, a stooped widow leads a donkey. Houses adjoining walkways had their doors, windows and lives flung open for all to see. The Cretan people, I found, were friendlier than anywhere else in Greece. No visit to their homes is complete without being offered at least two courses of food and a coffee. I found myself in long conversations with philosophical locals who often spoke good English and wanted to know a lot about me: they returned the favor with stories of their own.“

~ Eleni Hale, Sunday Telegraph (Australia)

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