Sabotage and Cheese Salads

It was too windy to swim today so I decided to visit the Historical Museum. They had a special exhibition called Sabotage, whilst I’m not a huge fan of memorabilia, this has been done very sympathetically. Documents and items connected with the event during the Second World War, tell of the heroic attempts made by a small group of French, Greek and British special soldiers to save lives. Throughout Europe people were saved but it was very moving to read the last written letters from Cretan people executed by the Germans as revenge for the sabotage.

The second exhibition sent me into map heaven. This is an extensive and very well presented display of cartography of Crete during the 16^th and 18^th century. Unfortunately all of the exhibition text is in Greek but the maps are certainly works of art worth seeing.

The exhibition finishes on 31 October 2006.

The mini shop in the museum has some elegant books and printed material for sale. I bought a collection of postcards entitled Crete in 1900. These cards were first published at the end of the 19^th century. Mikros Nautilos Editions in Heraklion have reproduced as four collections; Xania, Everyday Life, Cities and History.

The period from the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th was a time when the island passed from Turkish domination to self-government and subsequently to its long hoped union with Greece. During this crucial time in Cretean history photographers toured the island and recorded aspects of the cities, the costumes of the inhabitants and the way of life. This created an important archive of photographic documents.

These two postcards are from the Everyday Life series (kathimerini zoe).

The first is a group of Turkish whirling dervishes and the second is another posed image, of a woman reclining after smoking from a hookah. One hundred years later and us girls still like the hubbly bubbly!

Historical Museum of Crete
Venizelou 27
Heraklion

Across the road from the museum is a restaurant called Elies, Greek for olives. No matter how ultra modern the interior, Elies along with many other restaurants and bars in Crete’s cities, always has the ubiquitous man in a corner flicking beads and smoking a cigarette. The house salad with a local cheese comes highly recommended. I just wish we could get tomatoes to taste the same in the UK as they do in the Mediterranean. I always buy the most expensive ones and still they taste of water. Does water have a taste?!