60 Fun Facts About Crete

Which island is one of only four in the Mediterranean larger than Crete?

Corsica edges Crete for fourth place, behind Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus. Big as Crete is, mountains fill most of it and leave little level ground to farm.

On which coast of Crete does its capital, Heraklion, stand?

The north coast slopes gently to natural harbours and plains, so Heraklion and Crete's other main towns all grew up along it; on much of the opposite shore the mountains rise from the sea like a wall.

Which sea lies to the south of Crete?

The Libyan Sea is older than the country: its name comes from Libya as the ancient Greeks used the word, for the coast of Africa west of Egypt, which faces Crete across the water.

Which island group lies directly north of Crete, across the southern Aegean?

The Cyclades, in the tradition Thucydides recorded, fell to King Minos of Crete, who built a navy, drove out the Carians living there and installed his own sons as governors.

Which god is Crete famous as the birthplace of in Greek mythology?

Zeus was hidden in a cave on Crete as a baby because his father, Cronus, swallowed each of his children at birth; Cronus was handed a stone wrapped in baby clothes instead and gulped that down.

In Greek myth, which giant made of bronze guarded Crete by circling the island three times a day?

Talos had one weak point, a single vein that ended at his ankle, and he died when it was opened as the Argonauts sailed past, in most tellings through the sorcery of Medea.

Which master craftsman of Greek myth escaped from Crete with his son on wings of feathers and wax?

Daedalus chose the sky, in Ovid's telling, because King Minos blocked every way out by land and sea. His son Icarus flew too near the sun, the wax melted and he drowned.

Who began large-scale excavations at Knossos in 1900 and rebuilt large parts of the palace?

Arthur Evans's rebuilding lets visitors picture the palace as it stood, but it has long been criticised as resting on educated guesses more than on the evidence he dug up.

Knossos is widely called what?

The oldest city in Europe outlived its palace: after the Bronze Age palaces fell, Knossos stayed inhabited and thrived through the early Iron Age, importing goods from as far away as Egypt and Italy.

The sprawling palace at Knossos may have inspired which structure of Greek myth?

The Labyrinth may owe even its name to the palace: one long-held theory reads the word as 'house of the double axe', the labrys, though linguists now call that link speculative.

Which creature of Greek myth did Theseus slay at Knossos?

The Minotaur was fed on a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens sent from Athens, and Theseus sailed among them, in most tellings as a volunteer, to kill it.

What daring ritual, shown in Minoan frescoes, is thought to have had religious meaning?

Bull-leaping has modern counterparts: athletes still vault over charging cows in the course landaise of south-west France, and over bulls in Spain's recortes.

Which Minoan script remains undeciphered?

Linear A can be sounded out but not understood: most of its signs carried over into the later Linear B, yet the language they spell matches none that scholars know.

Which English architect deciphered the later script of Knossos's clay tablets in 1952, proving it recorded early Greek?

Michael Ventris had expected the tablets' language to be related to Etruscan, since scholars had ruled Greek out; his own decipherment proved them, and himself, wrong.

Which Minoan site gave its name to a clay disc stamped with a spiral of signs nobody can read?

Phaistos: each of the disc's 45 signs was pressed into the wet clay with its own ready-made stamp, a tool made for repeat use, yet none of the stamps has ever been found.

Which Aegean island's Bronze Age eruption, long linked to the fall of Minoan Crete, buried the town of Akrotiri?

Santorini: unlike Pompeii, buried Akrotiri has yielded no bodies, a sign that its people had warning and fled before the final blast.

Crete's Gortyn law code is carved boustrophedon, its lines reversing direction like which animal turning at the end of a furrow?

An ox: boustrophedon is Greek for 'turning as an ox in ploughing'. The code survives because Roman builders reused its inscribed stones when they put up an odeon on the spot.

Which empire won Crete back from an Arab emirate in 961?

The Byzantine Empire had failed in several earlier attempts. Its general Nikephoros Phokas blockaded the emirate's capital through the winter of 960-61, and two years later he was emperor.

Under Venetian rule, Crete and its capital city were both known by what name?

Candia began as the name of the fortress-capital, and Venice's officials stretched it over the whole island, which is how 'the island of Candia' reached Europe's maps.

How long did the Ottomans besiege Crete's Venetian capital, in one of history's longest sieges, before it fell in 1669?

21 years: the Ottomans dug in before the walls in 1648, and the Venetians under Francesco Morosini gave in only in 1669, after a French relief force failed and sailed home.

On Crete, the young El Greco trained as a painter of what?

Religious icons: one of his, a Dormition of the Virgin, still hangs for worship in a church on the island of Syros, where his signature on it went unnoticed until 1983.

Which poet, probably a Venetian-Cretan noble, wrote the verse romance Erotokritos?

Vitsentzos Kornaros, whom most scholars identify with the Venetian-Cretan nobleman Vincenzo Cornaro, wrote the long rhyming romance in the island's Greek dialect rather than Italian.

How did the shipowner who led Crete's Sfakia revolt of 1770 against Ottoman rule die?

He was skinned alive in 1771 after his revolt collapsed: Russian agents had urged him to rise against the Ottomans and promised support, but the help never came.

What did the defenders of Arkadi Monastery do in November 1866 rather than surrender to the Ottomans?

The defenders blew up their gunpowder stores as Ottoman troops broke in: a villager, Kostis Giampoudakis, is credited with firing the barrels, killing attackers and those sheltering inside alike.

What was Crete's political status from 1898 to 1913?

Autonomous under nominal Ottoman rule: the sultan kept only his title, while Prince George of Greece governed as high commissioner for the Great Powers, whose forces had expelled the Ottoman troops.

Which conflict brought Crete into Greece in 1913?

The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 finished what Crete's own deputies had begun: they voted for union with Greece in 1908, but no foreign power recognised it until Greece's victories settled the matter.

Which Cretan-born statesman, many times prime minister of Greece, gave his name to Athens airport?

Eleftherios Venizelos began as a rebel at home: in 1905 he led an armed revolt against Crete's high commissioner, Prince George of Greece, and forced the prince to leave the island.

Germany's seizure of Crete in May 1941 was the first invasion in history carried out mainly by which kind of force?

An airborne force of paratroopers and glider troops took the island in under two weeks, but its losses were so heavy that Hitler curtailed large airborne operations from then on.

What was the German codename for the 1941 invasion of Crete?

Operation Mercury won Hitler's approval only on condition that it would not delay Barbarossa, his invasion of the Soviet Union, which began three weeks after Crete fell.

How did the Allies learn Germany's plans to invade Crete?

Decoded Enigma messages laid out the German plan, yet the defenders were under strict orders not to show that they knew.

Which singer-songwriter joined the cave-dwelling hippies of Matala, Crete, in 1970 and wrote her song Carey there?

Joni Mitchell first sang it in one of the cliff caves, as a birthday present for Cary Raditz, the American cook she had taken up with; a year later it came out on her album Blue.

Which airfield's loss on the second day of the 1941 Battle of Crete let the Germans fly in reinforcements?

Maleme was given up rather than taken: the New Zealand battalion on the hill above it, out of touch with its forward companies, pulled back overnight, and the Germans found the airfield undefended.

What is the highest mountain on Crete?

Mount Ida (Psiloritis) drew worshippers from Minoan to Roman times: they climbed to a sacred cave on its slopes and left offerings of carved seals, ivory and bronze.

How long is Crete's Samaria Gorge, which runs from the White Mountains down to the sea?

16 km: about halfway down, walkers pass the deserted village of Samaria, which its last residents left when the gorge became a national park in 1962.

Which rare animal survives mainly in the mountains around Crete's Samaria Gorge and on a few offshore islets?

The kri-kri, or Cretan wild goat, is not truly wild: DNA tests show it descends from domestic goats that early settlers brought to the island and that later ran free.

Which islet off Crete, a Venetian fortress, served as a leper colony from 1904 to 1957?

Spinalonga outlasted Venetian Crete itself: when the rest of the island was surrendered to the Ottomans in 1669, its fortress stayed in Venetian hands and held out until 1715.

Which beach in south-west Crete is famous for its pink-tinted sand?

Elafonisi is really an islet: in calm weather visitors reach it on foot, wading through a shallow lagoon or crossing the narrow strip of sand that links it to the shore.

Which islet near Crete's Balos lagoon became a pirates' base in the 1820s?

Gramvousa's pirates began as rebels: Cretan insurgents seized its old fort during the Greek War of Independence and lived by raiding the ships that passed.

Which island off Crete's south coast is often described as the southernmost point of Europe?

Gavdos was picked out in antiquity as Ogygia, the island where Homer's nymph Calypso held Odysseus captive: the poet Callimachus made the link, and it has stuck.

Tsikoudia, the clear Cretan spirit also known as raki, is distilled from the leftovers of making what?

Wine: once the grapes are pressed, the leftover skins and pulp are left to ferment and then distilled in cauldrons, a village ritual that follows the grape harvest each year.

The Cretan salad dakos is built on a soaked slice of what?

Barley rusk is bread dried so hard that one Cretan nickname for the dish is kouloukopsomo, 'puppy bread', said to come from the dry crusts that were fed to puppies.

Which herb, native only to Crete, was said in antiquity to draw arrows out of wounds?

Dittany: Aristotle passed on the story that wounded animals on Crete went looking for the plant, which was said to make arrows fall from their bodies.

Which bowed instrument leads the traditional music of Crete?

The lyra once kept its own beat: the bow was hung with small 'hawk bells' that jingled with every stroke while the player bowed the melody.

The ancient Cretan prophet Epimenides is remembered for saying that all Cretans are what?

Liars: since Epimenides was a Cretan himself, the charge undercuts his own word, a knot logicians still call the liar paradox. His line is even quoted in the New Testament.

In Greek myth, which daughter of King Minos of Crete gave Theseus the ball of thread that guided him to safety?

Ariadne sailed away with Theseus, but in most tellings he left her behind on the island of Naxos, where the god Dionysus found her and made her his wife.

Which Cretan writer wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ?

Nikos Kazantzakis was put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years, the last of them 1957, the year he died, and never won it.

How does the epitaph of Zorba's author begin?

'I hope for nothing' opens the lines on his plain grave, high on a bastion of Heraklion's old walls; churchmen who called his novels sacrilegious had come close to excommunicating him.

Who played Zorba in the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, shot on Crete?

Anthony Quinn, born in Mexico, became so identified with the part that he went back to it almost twenty years later, touring and playing Broadway in a revival of the musical Zorba.

Which dance did the 1964 film Zorba the Greek make world-famous?

The sirtaki is no ancient tradition: it was put together for the film in 1964 out of the slow and fast steps of older dances, and only afterwards became a symbol of Greece.

Which city was the capital of Crete until 1971?

Chania took the title around 1840, when the seat of government moved there from Heraklion, the old Venetian capital, which won it back only in 1971.

The white-sailed windmills of Crete's Lasithi Plateau were built from the 1920s for what purpose?

Irrigating the fields: they are wind-pumps rather than mills, raising groundwater for the crops, and most now stand idle because diesel pumps took over the work.

Which saint's winged lion is carved on the walls of Heraklion's Koules fortress?

Mark's winged lion was the emblem of Venice, whose builders sank old ships filled with stone to widen the platform the sea fort stands on, and finished it in 1540.

The beach at Vai in eastern Crete is famous for a wild forest of which trees?

Palm trees: they look like a tropical import, but they are wild natives, a species known as the Cretan date palm that grows in only a handful of places.

Which Friends star's father was born on Crete in 1933?

Jennifer Aniston's father, born Yannis Anastassakis, left the island at two, when the family emigrated to Pennsylvania; as John Aniston he played Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives for decades.

Crete narrows to just 12 km across at an isthmus that meets the south coast beside which town?

Ierapetra looks out over a plain covered in plastic greenhouses, where farmers raise vegetables for export to the winter markets of mainland Europe.

Venice gained Crete after which crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 instead of reaching the Holy Land?

The Fourth Crusade's leaders shared out the conquered lands among themselves: Crete fell to Boniface of Montferrat, who promptly sold the island to Venice.

Which animals lived on Crete during the Ice Age?

Dwarf elephants evolved there because an island offers little food and few predators, so big animals shrink over generations: Crete's dwarf mammoth stood only about a metre tall at the shoulder.

Which apostle's ship sheltered at Fair Havens on Crete's south coast during his voyage to Rome?

Paul warned that sailing on would end in disaster, but the centurion guarding him trusted the ship's pilot and owner instead, and the storm struck soon after they left the harbour.

The international airport serving western Crete is named after whom?

Daskalogiannis was a nickname, 'John the Teacher', which Ioannis Vlachos is said to have earned for an education abroad paid for by his wealthy father.

Which region of mainland Greece is Crete's nearest neighbour, about 100 km away across the sea?

The Peloponnese is linked to the island by a chain of stepping stones; one, tiny Antikythera, gave its name to the geared bronze 'computer' raised from a Roman shipwreck there in 1901.