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Greece and Crete
Alexandria: The City that Changed the Word by Islam Issa: A Review
Islam Issa: Alexandria: The City that Changed the World. Sceptre Books, 2023 Islam Issa, the author of this expansive history of Alexandria, spent his childhood in his native city. His Alexandrian descent through the male line was unequalled. His father’s “ancestry test revealed a staggering 97.5 percent near to the…
Cem: The Twenty-day Sultan
To be a sultan, even for less than a month, is an achievement. Cem, the twenty-day sultan paid for it for the rest of his life. Here is his story. Cem’s birth and childhood Born the third son of Fatih Sultan Mehmet (the conqueror of Constantinople), Cem could style himself…
Recommended places to stay and eat on Crete
As a brief introduction here are six hotels and one restaurant that are recommended in the new Blue Guide Crete. Note that, as with all Blue Guides Recommended establishments, all have been visited by the author or our editors and contributors, indeed in the case of the below we have stayed…
Artwork of the Month: July. The Phaistos Disc
On 3rd July 1908, the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier, working in the so-called ‘House 101’, northeast of the palace of Phaistos, found an object with symbols on both sides, next to a Linear A tablet. The object became known as the Phaistos Disc—and it remains as intriguing and mysterious now,…
The real Patrick Leigh Fermor?
Walking seems to be back in fashion. Pilgrim routes, secret pathways, ancient trackways: it is as if we are rediscovering the traditional pace of life. One catalyst for the interest has been Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, in 1934, when he…
The Trouble with Snake Goddesses
Over 100 years after the excavations at Knossos, Crete, it is hard for the modern observer to appreciate the excitement engendered by Evans’s finds. Here was a whole new civilization with artistic achievements rivalling Egypt’s. Evans himself fostered expectation by dwelling on the modernity of the style and by embarking…
Edward Lear and Crete
The well-known nonsense poet and artist Edward Lear paid a short visit to Crete in 1864. He was coming from Corfu, where he had lived for nine years; when the British government returned the Ionian islands to the Greek state, the British community dispersed. At that point in his life…
Comments on Blue Guide Greece the Aegean Islands
The result of five years of fresh research by author Nigel McGilchrist, and detailed editing by Michael Metcalfe and Heinrich Hall, this is the first full Blue Guide treatment of all the Greek Aegean islands in a single volume. (And Nigel McGilchrist has published the full manuscript that he wrote for this…
Familiar face
Displayed on its own in a glass case in one of the later rooms of the excellent Archaeological Museum in Aghios Nikolaos, Crete, is an arresting clay head. It was found near Siteia, where it had been left at a shrine as a votive deposit. The young man’s lips are…
