Day 10: The Gods Were Here. So Were the Anarchists.

For today’s adventure, we once again turned to GetYourGuide, because Tim and I have demonstrated repeatedly that while we are perfectly capable of wandering around a foreign city on our own, there is no guarantee we will understand what we’re looking at.

And that’s the difference a good guide makes.

We could have walked these same streets by ourselves. We would have seen beautiful buildings, taken pictures, eaten something, gotten distracted by a cat and declared the morning a success.

Instead, our guide started peeling Chania apart for us. Suddenly that wasn’t just an old wall. There were pieces of ancient columns buried inside it. That wasn’t simply a beautiful church. Its bell tower and minaret were evidence of two completely different chapters in the city’s history.

That’s why I’m becoming such a fan of booking experiences like this when we travel. Sometimes I want to get deliberately lost. But sometimes I want somebody to point at a pile of rocks and explain why these particular rocks are fascinating.

And preferably get us back without Tim and me accidentally wandering into another municipality.

[See Chania tours and experiences on GetYourGuide →]

This isn’t a paid recommendation. We booked the tour ourselves. I’m mentioning it because we genuinely enjoyed it, and because apparently paying someone who knows where they’re going is occasionally more effective than wandering around saying, “I wonder what that is?”

The history of Chania is complicated. And by complicated, I mean that Chania appears to have spent the last several thousand years being passed around the Mediterranean like a particularly desirable casserole dish.

Minoans. Mycenaeans. Romans. Byzantines. Venetians. Ottomans. Eventually, in 1913, modern Greece.

Everybody arrived. Everybody built something. Everybody conquered somebody else. And almost nobody bothered cleaning up after themselves.

Which, as it turns out, is part of what makes Chania so wonderful.

Our guide led us through the old city pointing out pieces of its previous lives hiding everywhere. There are open Minoan archaeological excavations tucked between modern buildings. Ancient Greek columns were broken up and shoved into later fortress walls as construction material.

Apparently, ancient Egyptians did not have a monopoly on knocking down somebody else’s monument and saying, “Well, these are perfectly good rocks.”

Humanity has apparently been practicing:

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Conquer. We’ve just been doing it for thousands of years without the little green arrows.

And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

Please Select a Civilization

One of our stops was the Church of Saint Nicholas in Splantzia Square.

At first glance: beautiful old church.

Look again.

Bell tower.

Minaret.

Same building.

The church began under Venetian rule, was converted into a mosque during Ottoman rule, and later became an Orthodox church. Today, the minaret still stands beside the Christian bell tower.

Most buildings would be having an architectural identity crisis.

Saint Nicholas seems perfectly comfortable with the arrangement.

Yes, I have a bell tower. Yes, I have a minaret. It’s been a long millennium. Mind your business.

And that’s Chania.

The city doesn’t seem particularly interested in choosing which version of itself is the correct one. It simply keeps adding layers.

Minoan underneath Greek underneath Venetian underneath Ottoman underneath modern Greek, occasionally with a café wedged into the bottom selling Aperol Spritzes.

History here isn’t behind glass. You’re having lunch on it.

And Then We Found the Anarchists

From there we climbed toward Kastelli Hill, where several thousand years of historical layering suddenly arrived in the present day with a large black banner.

Our guide pointed out a historic hotel that has become the center of a long-running dispute over development of the site. The building has been occupied by activists opposed to plans for luxury development.

So there we were, standing amid the remains of ancient civilizations, looking at a historic building covered in political banners and graffiti.

And garbage.

Quite a lot of garbage.

Nothing says timeless Mediterranean civilization quite like several thousand years of human history topped with an occupied hotel and a rubbish pile.

Although, given Chania’s apparent commitment to never throwing anything away, perhaps the garbage was simply waiting to become part of a fortress wall.

Give it 800 years.

Some archaeologist will be thrilled.

Why You Get Up Before the Danish Girls

The other advantage to taking this tour ridiculously early was that Old Town had not completely awakened yet.

The streets were quiet. Morning light hit the old stone buildings. Shopkeepers were beginning to open their doors. We could wander through narrow Venetian alleys without negotiating human traffic.

It was lovely.

Peaceful.

Almost magical.

And, most importantly, there were no groups of tourists staging elaborate photo shoots in the middle of the street.

I have nothing against tourists. Technically, I am one.

I especially have nothing against Danish girls. I’m sure Denmark produces many delightful people.

But there is only so much room in a Venetian alley for twelve women, a selfie stick, coordinated poses, and seventeen attempts at:

“Okay, everybody laugh naturally!”

Nothing has ever looked less natural than twelve people simultaneously pretending someone just said something hilarious.

Early tour: worth it.

And then, descending the grand staircase from Kastelli Hill, Tim and I smelled something.

BEEF.

Not Hmm, perhaps there’s a restaurant nearby.

Not Someone appears to be cooking.

BEEF.

Glorious, salty, beautifully grilled beef.

The smell didn’t gently drift toward us. It kicked down the door to my brain, grabbed me by the shoulders and screamed:

FIND ME.

Unfortunately, we were still on the tour.

There are moments in life when being a responsible adult is deeply inconvenient. So we continued following our guide while the smell of beef slowly faded behind us.

I listened attentively. Probably.

There may have been history. All I remember is beef.

The instant the tour ended, Tim and I began Operation Find That Smell.

• No Google Maps.
• No recommendation.
• No carefully researched restaurant list.

Just two middle-aged Americans wandering through Chania sniffing the air like bloodhounds. And somehow…we found it.

Tal Chalkina. Right on the harbor.

Also not sponsored. We paid for our meal. I just believe restaurants responsible for making me follow a smell through the streets of Chania deserve to be named.

We sat down overlooking the water and ordered picanha, lemon potatoes and Cretan salad.

Now, I am not normally a steak person. I like steak. Steak is perfectly respectable. But I rarely look at a menu and think, Bring me half a kilogram of cow immediately.

Tim, however, wanted steak. And because I love my husband, I agreed to share the picanha. There was a minimum order of 400 grams. We ordered 500.

Apparently, I love Tim 500 grams worth of beef.

I Would Like to Amend My Previous Position on Beef

Then it arrived.

The outside was beautifully seared and caramelized. The inside was tender. They served it with sea salt for dipping. And suddenly I understood why the smell had hunted me down on Kastelli Hill.

It was phenomenal. The sort of food that causes conversation to stop because everyone at the table is temporarily occupied having a private religious experience.

Even the salad was ridiculously good. I’ve eaten a lot of Cretan salad on this trip. Tomatoes, cucumber, cheese and olives should not contain this many opportunities for surprise, and yet apparently Crete refuses to make a boring salad. This one had capers and sea radish.

Sea radish was new to me. My brain heard sea radish and immediately pictured some sort of aquatic vegetable bobbing majestically beneath the Mediterranean.

It is not. It is edible, attractive and mildly interesting.

Basically parsley with a better publicist.

Naturally, There Was Raki

Then came the raki. Not a glass.

A carafe. Because apparently individual servings are for people who lack commitment.

Raki is Cretan jet fuel. It tastes roughly like someone sent moonshine on a Mediterranean holiday and it came home wearing linen. It is also hospitality. You finish a meal sometimes fruit appears. Sometimes dessert appears. However, Raki will ALWAYS appear.

This time we also received a profiterole filled with smooth chocolate cream, which I accepted because I am polite and respect local customs. It would have been culturally insensitive not to eat it.

By now it was still early enough that the Sunday lunch crowds hadn’t arrived. So we sat beside the harbor with the lighthouse in the distance, finishing our dessert and contemplating the remains of our carafe of rocket propellant.

And I started thinking about the morning.

Maybe THIS is the Point

We had spent hours walking through a city built out of its own past.

• Ancient columns inside newer walls.
• A church with a minaret.
• Venetian streets beneath modern apartments.
• Ottoman buildings beside restaurants.
• Political arguments taking place inside historic buildings while tourists photograph all of it and somebody nearby grills half a kilogram of beef.

Chania doesn’t erase its previous lives. It builds on top of them. Sometimes literally. And maybe that’s why I love old cities so much.

They’re messy. History is messy.

People conquer things. Buildings change purpose. Religions come and go. Governments change. Someone knocks down a column and another person looks at the rubble and thinks, I could build a wall with that.

And somehow, centuries later, we’re sitting beside the harbor eating picanha and drinking raki in the middle of all of it.

The past isn’t gone. It’s holding up the building next door.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Conquer. Eat beef.

Apparently that’s civilization.