/ 25 July 2009

No cons in Crete

Entranced visitors keep coming back to the Greek island's south coast -- and especially to one remote taverna, writes Aida Edemariam.

Most people who come to Taverna Agia Fotini have stumbled upon it, searching for a path to the sea or exploring the villages that cling to steep slopes covered in olive trees, eucalyptus and a parched lushness of golden grasses. We know it’s there, somewhere, but it’s still a cool surprise: a shady blue-and-white porch facing the sea at the front, a low building shrugged up against the cliff behind.

By the end of our stay we can see why many who find it keep coming back: the Irish lawyer who has holidayed on Crete since the early 1970s and has been returning to Agia Fotini for most of the past decade, as have a couple from Somerset (they’re staying just down the coast, but come for meals and to swim); the Swiss couple who are on a second visit because it’s one of the few places on overdeveloped Crete that “feels as it would have 30 years ago”.

It is very much a family business. Stavros and Vicki Perakis, who own and run it, show me a fading black-and-white photo, taken 85 years ago, of his family in Sunday best, grouped precariously on the rocks. For years the building was a high-ceilinged carob storehouse; there were no roads, so ships would stop by to take the crop to market. But then the market collapsed and in the 1950s Stavros’s parents started a kafenio — serving fresh fish, a bit of salad, drinks and watermelons (which they floated in the sea to keep them cool).

Just along the south coast, Matala attracted hippies — “campus Guevarists in Fidelista fatigues”, as one visitor described them, “sexual leftists and sanyasins in long-flowing robes … Prometheus-poseurs of Hip” — who occupied the caves and artists such as Joni Mitchell, who sang of the village’s Mermaid Cafe.

But at Agia Fotini it was the locals who came down from the villages by donkey to take a summer break from farming and swim in the sea. They still come, from the nearby hamlets of Kerames, Drimiskos and Agalianos, even though it is now a full taverna, and there are four rooms for tourists, the 6m-high storehouse having been split into an upper and a lower floor.

It is unusual for tavernas to have rooms, but at a place this remote it is something of a necessity. It is a good 30-minute drive, on unlit mountain roads, to the nearest sizeable town, the touristy but charming Spili; less far, but still a good distance, to the taverna at Ligres. (Kionia Apartments not far along the beach also provide a place to stay, but you’d still have to come to Agia Fotini to eat.)

As it is, the sea is literally at our feet — our dinner was occasionally seasoned with salt spray — so you can have a late-morning swim from the small, rocky beach, splash on to the veranda for lunch, then retire upstairs for a nap. And do it all again. And again. Or sit on the balcony reading or sleep in the cool high rooms.

Vicki and Stavros met in Australia, in Wollongong, 60km south of Sydney, where she, the daughter of Greek immigrants, grew up and he worked as a sandblaster. She was 18 when they married; he was 22. They had two children, Vaggeli and Evgenia, but Stavros was always homesick and finally persuaded his wife to come to Crete and run the old kafenio. “I promised her we’d come for two years, just to try. And after two years I said just another year, and then another year, and after five years …” That was 14 years ago.

Apart from a few speedily corrected slip-ups (Vicki has a rueful story about the time Stavros decided that fluorescent strip-lighting would be a great idea), they have modernised the place sympathetically. The bedrooms are simple, wood and whitewashed stone; the French windows and balcony look out over rush matting (picked in the vicinity) to the water. Last year, when a wildfire cut them off from the mainland and threatened to overwhelm them, they — and a Hungarian guest, staying with her daughter — fought it with buckets of Libyan Sea. Vicki looks traumatised even at the mention of it.

Stavros does almost all the cooking. My favourite were spinach pies (spanakopita), triangles of pastry filled with fresh spinach, wild greens, dill and wild fennel, but we also had good fish — silver bream and a red snapper we were invited to inspect before it was grilled. Stavros often does the fishing himself, but this was brought by fishermen from Timbaki, who drop their catch off at the beach. They grow their own onions, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers — the Greek salads could not be fresher — and the olive oil is from their own trees. Breakfast is basic — toast and coffee (orange juice, freshly squeezed, is extra), but they have a nice habit of giving you free dessert: fresh cherries, Greek yoghurt with stewed cherries or slices of cold watermelon — and always a glass of raki.

If you’re feeling energetic (or dutiful), there are sights to see, such as Festos — Minoan ruins outdone in size and importance only by Knossos and attended by a mere fraction of the visitors the latter attracts. You can have whole theatres, servants’ quarters (where I found the small stone implements rather moving) and queens’ chambers to yourself. Ayia Triadha, the Minoan summer palace just down the road, had only one other visitor. The artworks found there have been moved to the Heraklion Archeological Museum, but in the quiet at the top of the hill (now surrounded by fields, but then by sea) you’re free to imagine cool corridors, bustling tradesmen and the fire that destroyed it in 1450BC.

There is a choice of more expansive and dramatic beaches —Triopetra, Ligres, Palm Beach — but my favourite day trip was to the Amari valley and a whole other world of whitewashed villages, cocks crowing, birdsong, terracotta roofs, a profusion of roses, honeysuckle, geranium and bougainvillea, orange groves and hillsides of yellow broom that provided a respite from what can be an exhaustingly arid, eroded landscape.

At Thronos an elderly woman let us into the frescoed medieval chapel (built on the site of a Byzantine church), made us coffee to drink on a balcony facing Mount Ida and tried to sell us some crocheting. You can feel the clocks slowing down — and not just because the roads are so narrow that you have to be careful not to drive into people’s bedrooms and so erratically signed that you have to keep backtracking to find your way.

I didn’t think that much about Joni Mitchell’s line: “The wind is in from Africa/ Last night I couldn’t sleep”, but now I know what she meant. The week before we arrived was calm, but for most of our four days Mel-temi winds from the south lashed the water and spray was whipped out to sea. Ligres beach was largely deserted — perhaps because to sit on it was to subject yourself to a vigorous exfoliation, tiny stones flung at bare skin. One night the wind was so strong it ripped the thatch and howled through the rooms. The waves crashed all night.

But the clientele took it all in their stride and on our last evening Vicki and Stavros invited everyone to dinner — with Stavros’s brother and sister-in-law, his cousin Eleni and her husband, who had spent the afternoon picking snails from the fields for a saligaria as well as baking ghalaktoboureko, a rich cream and pastry creation, for dessert. There was a rabbit stifado, with lots of onion, tomato and cinnamon, lamb with artichoke, Greek salad, tzatziki, white wine from a farmers’ co-operative and conversation in French, Greek, English.

By the next morning the wind had died down, the water pocketed in the rocks and sunbathing was the order of the day. —