Crete: Discovering the 'Great Island' (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

Freely wrote this book while living for several months in the old Venetian port city of Chania in western Crete. One of the main things you will learn in the book is that Cretan history didn't end with the Minoans. Freely covers all the best-known Minoan sites thoroughly, of course, and he will also apprise you of lesser-known but intriguing sites like the mysterious palace at Kato Zakros, the small farming town of Gournia, the necropolis at Armeni, or the Minoan refugee community at Karphi overlooking the Lasithi Plain. But Freely is also excellent on the Venetians and on the various nineteenth-century Cretan revolts against the island's Turkish overlords. He also has a an obvious love for Cretan folkways and traditions.

Freely wrote this book in an engaging first-person style, and he makes for an agreeable companion. He clearly loves the outdoors, particularly hiking and beach-going, and the book is full of excellent recommendations on both. You'll be determined to do the famous hike from the Omalos Plateau through the Samaria Gorge to the south coast after reading Freely's account of his hike through the gorge with his son. Another lesson that Freely clearly teaches is that a traveler to Crete should learn to savor the comparative merits of the island's beaches just as a visitor to England should develop an appreciation of the merits of different cathedrals or country houses. If I hadn't read Freely, I might well not have sought out the beaches at Preveli, Phalasarna, or particularly Elafonisi. The first two were unforgettable, but Elafonisi was in another league altogether: no wonder Freely chose to end this book with a visit there. Let me end this review by quoting from Freely's description of it, which shows his vivid and engaging style:

"This is the most beautiful beach on all of Crete, a long, lagoon-like scimitar of pink-white sand where the waves of the Aegean merge with those of the Libyan Sea, the isle of Elafonisi looking like a South Sea coral reef shimmering in the shallows just offshore, so close that we swam out to it and sat there for an hour. . . . Then we swam back to shore and set up our picnic in the shade of a tamarisk tree, its branches twisted into a Medusa's head of tortured limbs bent back by the terrible Livas -- the Libyan Wind -- the furnace-blast that blows straight across from the sands of Libya over 230 miles of open sea a few days each summer, striking the Great Island here at its most exposed promontory."

The book has useful maps of the Minoan sites and the island's various regions. It doesn't offer much in the way of recommendations for hotels and restaurants, however, so you will need to supplement it with another guide for that.