🇬🇷 Greece · Crete and the Dodecanese
Crete is not just another Greek island: it is almost a country in itself. The largest in Greece unrolls 260 kilometres of mountains touching 2,500 metres, gorges that cut the rock down to the sea, plateaus of windmills, thousand-year-old olive groves and a coast with hundreds of beaches, some of them pink sand. It was here, more than 3,500 years ago, that the Minoan civilisation flourished, the first in Europe, with the legendary Palace of Knossos and the myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur. But Crete is also El Greco, the Venetians, the Ottomans and the fierce resistance to the German airborne invasion of 1941. Every layer is on show.
Besides history, Crete is an island with a strong character and legendary hospitality. Its cooking — considered one of the healthiest in the world — turns on olive oil, wild greens (horta), cheese, honey, lamb and the raki served to close any meal. Its music, with the Cretan lyra, and its traditions are lived with pride. In the Venetian harbour of Chania at sunset, in a mountain taverna or on a lost beach in the south, the island is enjoyed without hurry.
This guide takes Crete with a practical eye: what is really worth seeing (and what to expect, honestly, from the reconstructed Knossos), where the authentic Minoan frescoes are, how to tackle the Samaria gorge without underestimating it, how to reach the pink beaches of Elafonisi and Balos with their restrictions, and why here a rental car is not a luxury but almost a necessity. Crete rewards those who travel it slowly: behind every mountain bend there is a village, a chapel or a beach that justifies the trip.
Crete is the cradle of the Minoan civilisation, the first advanced culture in Europe, which between 2000 and 1450 BC raised great palaces such as Knossos, developed the Linear A (still undeciphered) and Linear B scripts (deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 as Mycenaean Greek), and dominated the Aegean with its fleet. The colossal eruption of the Thera (Santorini) volcano and the later arrival of the Mycenaeans marked its decline. Then came the Dorians, Rome and Byzantium; then four centuries of Venetian rule (1211–1669) that gave rise to the Cretan Renaissance and to the painter El Greco, born on the island. After the long war of Candia it fell to the Ottomans in 1669, until, following a period of autonomy, Crete joined Greece in 1913. In May 1941 the island was the scene of the Battle of Crete, the first great airborne invasion in history, and of a civilian resistance that became legend. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great island of Crete, cradle of the Minoan civilisation and its palace of Knossos, the scene of the airborne battle of 1941; and the Dodecanese, with the Rhodes of the Knights Hospitaller and the islands that were under Italian occupation until after the Second World War.
Read the history of Crete and the Dodecanese →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Athens, Sparta or Rome existed, the first advanced civilisation in Europe flourished in Crete. We call it Minoan after the legendary King Minos, a name given to it in the early 20th century by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. Between roughly 2700 and 1450 BC, and at its height between 2000 and 1450 BC, the Minoans built a sophisticated, prosperous and surprisingly peaceful society, without the great defensive walls that characterised other Bronze Age cultures.
At the heart of that civilisation were the palaces: Knossos, the largest and most famous, near present-day Heraklion, and others at Phaistos, Malia and Zakros. They were not only royal residences but administrative, economic and religious centres, with enormous stores of oil, wine and grain, workshops, ceremonial courts and water and drainage systems ahead of their time. Knossos came to have more than a thousand rooms around a central court, a labyrinth of corridors and staircases that probably inspired the myth of the Minotaur's labyrinth.
Minoan art is one of its most dazzling traces: frescoes full of life and colour with dolphins, crocuses, processions and the famous acrobatic bull-leaping (taurokathapsia); very fine pottery; gold jewellery; and the unsettling snake goddess figurines. The Minoans were above all a people of the sea: their fleet dominated trade in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, and their influence reached the Cyclades, the Egypt of the pharaohs and the coasts of Asia Minor. It was, in many senses, the cultural matrix from which classical Greece would later grow.
The Minoans left thousands of written clay tablets, and one of the great riddles of archaeology hides in them. They developed a writing system called Linear A, used roughly between 1800 and 1450 BC to record accounts, inventories and religious texts. The problem is that the language behind Linear A remains undeciphered: although part of the signs can be read, we do not know what language they recorded, because it was neither Greek nor any known tongue. Linear A stays mute to this day.
From it came a later script, Linear B, which the Mycenaean Greeks adapted for their own language when they took control of Crete. And here comes one of the great intellectual triumphs of the 20th century. For decades no one managed to decipher Linear B, until in 1952 a young English architect and cryptographer, Michael Ventris, building on the earlier work of the American researcher Alice Kober, showed that Linear B did not record a mysterious language but Greek: it was the oldest known form of the Greek language, Mycenaean Greek, some eight hundred years earlier than Homer.
The discovery was a bombshell. It proved that the Mycenaeans who occupied Knossos around 1450 BC spoke Greek, and it opened a unique window onto the economy and organisation of those palaces: the tablets turned out to be, above all, accounting records (quantities of sheep, oil, weapons, names of gods already recognisable as Zeus or Poseidon). The contrast could not be greater: while the Linear B of the Mycenaean Greeks reads fluently, the older Linear A of the Minoans still keeps the secret of what language the first civilised Europeans spoke.
Towards the middle of the second millennium BC, the Minoan world took a blow it may never have fully recovered from: the colossal eruption of the volcano of Thera, today's Santorini, a little over a hundred kilometres north of Crete. It was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history, which blew away much of the island of Thera and buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri under metres of ash (its frescoes, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, are extraordinary). The exact dating is still debated among specialists, but it is usually placed around 1600–1500 BC.
The eruption must have hit Crete hard: tsunamis that swept the north coast and the fleet, ash falling over the fields, lost harvests and an economic and perhaps religious crisis. For a long time it was thought that the catastrophe had destroyed the Minoan civilisation at a stroke; today most archaeologists believe the process was more complex: the eruption weakened the Minoans, but the definitive collapse came somewhat later, with the destruction of the palaces around 1450 BC.
At that point the Mycenaeans enter the scene, the Greeks of the mainland, warriors and also great traders, who took advantage of Cretan weakness to seize control of the island. They occupied Knossos, imposed their language (the Greek we read in Linear B) and absorbed much of Minoan culture. The centre of gravity of the Aegean shifted for good from Crete to the Greek mainland, towards Mycenae and Tiryns. The Minoans, the first European civilisation, faded out; but their artistic, religious and technical legacy went on beating in the Greece to come.
After the Mycenaean world, Crete went through the Greek Dark Ages and the arrival of the Dorians, and in classical times it stayed on the margins of the great powers, split into small city-states that often fought each other. In 67 BC the island was conquered by Rome and joined administratively to Cyrene (in present-day Libya). With the division of the Empire, Crete came under Byzantium, which Christianised and governed it for centuries, with a brief and turbulent interlude of Arab rule between the 9th and 10th centuries, when Andalusi pirates founded an emirate with its capital at Chandax (the future Heraklion).
The chapter that most shaped the island's present face came after the Fourth Crusade: in 1211 Crete passed into the hands of the Republic of Venice, which governed it as the Kingdom of Candia for more than four and a half centuries, until 1669. The Venetians fortified the towns — from that period come the walls and the Koules fortress in Heraklion, the Fortezza of Rethymno and the Venetian harbour of Chania — organised farming and opened the island to the currents of the Italian Renaissance.
From that crossing of Byzantine tradition and the Renaissance came the Cretan Renaissance, an extraordinary artistic and literary flowering. Its supreme figure was born in Crete around 1541: Doménikos Theotokópoulos, trained in Byzantine icon painting before emigrating to Venice, to Rome and finally to Toledo, where the world would know him as El Greco. His elongated figures and supernatural light have their roots in that Venetian Crete. From the same period comes the great work of Cretan literature, the poem 'Erotokritos' by Vitsentzos Kornaros. It was a golden age that ended in blood and fire.
The end of Venetian rule came with one of the longest wars in history. The Cretan War (1645–1669) set Venice against the Ottoman Empire for control of Crete. Its central episode was the endless Siege of Candia (today's Heraklion), one of the longest sieges in history: the city held out for more than twenty years before surrendering in 1669. With its fall, all of Crete passed into Ottoman hands, and so began more than two centuries of Turkish rule.
The Ottoman period was harsh and punctuated by rebellions. The Cretans, mostly Orthodox Christians, rose again and again through the 19th century, in step with the independence of the rest of Greece (1830), from which Crete was nonetheless excluded. Uprisings such as that of 1866, with the heroic sacrifice of the monastery of Arkadi — whose defenders chose to blow up the powder magazine rather than surrender — moved Europe and became a symbol of the Cretan struggle for freedom.
Towards the end of the 19th century international pressure forced a middle solution: in 1898 Crete became an autonomous state under the guarantee of the great powers, still formally under Ottoman sovereignty but with a high commissioner. In those years the figure of the great Cretan statesman Eleftherios Venizelos took shape, one of the decisive personalities of 20th-century Greece. The dream of union (enosis) with Greece was finally fulfilled in the context of the Balkan Wars: on 1 December 1913 the Greek flag was officially raised in Chania and Crete joined the kingdom of Greece, closing centuries of foreign rule.
In the Second World War, Crete wrote one of the most heroic and dramatic pages of its history. After mainland Greece fell to Nazi Germany in April 1941, thousands of Allied soldiers — British, Australian, New Zealand — and the Greek troops fell back to the island, the last free position. On 20 May 1941 Hitler's Germany launched Operation Merkur (Mercury): the first great airborne invasion in military history.
That morning the sky over Crete filled with German paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) and gliders coming down on the key airfields of Maleme, Chania, Rethymno and Heraklion. The first day was a disaster for the invaders: many paratroopers were shot down in the air or as they landed, and German casualties were extremely high. To the resistance of the Allied troops was added something that surprised and terrified the Germans: the resistance of the Cretan civilian population, who threw themselves into defending their land with hunting shotguns, knives, sickles and even bare hands. Old people, women and priests took part in the fighting.
The course of the battle was decided at Maleme airfield, west of Chania. Through a series of communication failures and questionable tactical decisions by the Allied command, the hill dominating the runway was abandoned, and the Germans managed to take Maleme and use it to land waves of reinforcements. From then on German air superiority tipped the balance and the island fell at the end of May; much of the Allied force was evacuated by the Royal Navy to Egypt, and the rest surrendered or joined the resistance.
Although the Germans won, the victory cost them dearly: the losses among their elite troops were so severe that Hitler banned future large airborne operations. And Crete did not surrender entirely: throughout the occupation the Cretan resistance kept fighting from the mountains, in a legendary guerrilla war — including the famous kidnapping of the German general Kreipe in 1944 — while paying a brutal price in reprisals, with whole villages destroyed. The memory of May 1941 remains, today, an essential part of the island's identity.