Return to Mochlos, Crete

By Linda Lappin

View from a tavern in Crete.

Over 30 years ago, on a bright day in June, a bus deposited me near a precipice along the old road from Heraklion to Sitia in eastern Crete.

A wooden arrow pointed the way to my destination. A gravel track descended, snaking through glinting olive groves and salt-glazed vineyards couched low upon the ground. The entire landscape was finely powdered with chalky dust from a nearby gypsum quarry eating a hole in the mountainside. Wearing an ankle-length granny dress and red hiking boots, carrying a second-hand suitcase that weighed a ton, I started down.

I was on my way to visit a friend from college who had decided to marry a fisherman and make a new life in a village where the winter population numbered twenty souls. I met no houses along the way, though a few heaps of stones indicated that some ancient dwellings had once stood there. Tethered to stunted carob trees were goats nibbling thorns.

An old house in Mochlos, Crete. Photo by Linda Lappin.

The sea was still hidden on this side of the mountain, though from the bus I had glimpsed jewel-like flashes of turquoise and aquamarine. Yet I was not quite prepared for the vista that opened to my eyes as I stumbled around a curve and beheld the Gulf of Mirabello in all its majesty.

To the left extended a promontory where at the base were sprawled the pink and white bungalows of Ayos Nikolaus; to the right an imposing wall of magenta cliffs shielded the eastern tip of Crete. Below lay a handful of cube houses tossed at the water’s edge, clustered around a little church shaped like a loaf of bread. Just offshore was a tiny island, bald, barren, and perfectly round, where another tiny white church was built just above the shoreline. That island was the site of the Minoan palace of Mochlos, then under excavation. I did not yet know that the modest little fishing village that took its name from the island would prove itself to be one of those secret spots you never tell anyone about, for fear of spoiling  your personal paradise. To know about Mochlos, you had to know someone who had been there. At that time, it was not in the guidebooks. I was even made to promise never to name the place if I wrote about it — a promise I have kept until today.

A church near Mochlos, in Crete. Photo by Linda Lappin.

That first morning I crossed paths with an old woman in black plucking snails from sage bushes and a farmer sidesaddle on a depressed-looking donkey, transporting fodder. They both hailed me with the ritual greeting given in these parts “Yah” to which I replied with a polite “Yassas — or “your health.” I don’t remember how long it took me to reach the village, or how I found my friend. I probably went to sit in the kafeneo and waited while someone went to fetch her. That first night, I slept in a room illuminated by kerosene lanterns, packed with mildewing books, giant sponges, and diving suits. I remember opening the door in the dead of night, and gazing at a thick swirl of stars above the invisible sea.

Next morning, I went down to the kafeneo — coffee house, tavern, restaurant, hub of civic life, and took my place among the regulars, quickly noting the types: women crocheting lace, fishermen drinking raki, watching the weather, and waiting for night when they would take out their boats, tourists with thick novels, and even a writer, with a portable Olivetti, hammering the keys, and looking very much the writer as he sipped his retsina. Old men, playing with worry-beads, drank tiny cups of sweet coffee sludge (or so it appeared) very, very slowly. All these people seemed to have succumbed to a form of indolence partly, I reasoned, because of the topography of the place. There was no through road. Once you had wound your way down that steep track, only an emergency could make you go up again. Mochlos felt like a last outpost at the world’s end. The only escape was by sea.

Kafeneon Moclos. Photo by Linda Lappin.

There was nothing to do there, except be, if you do not count swimming or fishing. No shops, bookstores, discos. No newspapers, TV, or telephone. I helped my friend wash sheets by hand and harvest chickpeas. I learned to crochet lace, play backgammon and how to milk a goat. I swam to the island and explored the excavations irritating the guard who would stare at me through binoculars from the kafeneo, afraid, perhaps, that I might pocket a shard or two and hide them in the bra of my swimsuit. I went on boat trips and picnics and learned a bit of Greek. I gathered wild herbs and lit beeswax candles in solitary chapels on mountain peaks.

The Return

For over 20 years, I returned again and again to spend my summer vacations there, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, then with the man I would later marry. Then for no special reason, in the nineties my husband and I spent our holidays elsewhere, and for fifteen long years, we did not return. But one morning we woke up knowing that we had to go back to taste again that unique atmosphere — basic, rough, and rustic. But was it still that way?

British writer Vernon Lee once claimed that when we leave a place behind, we shed a little part of ourselves which merges with the spirit of that place. Upon returning, we take it up again. I think that’s why summers in Mochlos always seemed endless, as if their duration defied the logic of time. I experienced time differently there: days were not stretched horizontally across a calendar, but vertically, through the years. But after such a long hiatus, would I be able to connect with that resonance?

Friends had moved elsewhere. The old roads had been paved and a major hotel built a few miles away. The whole of Crete had been subjected to devastating development. Still, we booked our ferry tickets, arranged to rent rooms, packed our car and set off for our 3-day journey from Rome. Disembarking at dawn, we sped along the new National Road threaded high on the cliffs of Crete, gale winds whipping the eucalyptus trees. We found the turn-off still marked with a faded sign, and the gypsum quarry, depleted now, soon to cease operation.

View from a Greek ferry.

Rounding the curve, we saw it: the blue sweep of the gulf of Mirabello, still as magnificent today as it was from memory. Down in the village, we found more people, more houses, and more cars. Fewer hippies and more children, but no discos, shops, travel agencies, banks, or drug stores — only a minimarket stocked with essentials. Mustached men were sitting in the kafeneos tinkering with worry-beads, but instead of coffee in tiny cups, they were sipping frappe through straws. Set right inside the door of one house was a washing machine, a status symbol here. From next door came the blue flicker of a plasma screen running Windows. On the front step of a house where I stayed 25 years ago was a row of starfish drying in the sun. Inside, a woman was talking on Skype. 

To our great dismay, as we walked westward, we saw that the coves outlying the village had been bulldozed out to make a harbor. Bungalows and a tennis court had been built on the parched hillside above the artificial harbor. The secluded beaches where lovers went at sunset, where German nudists used to camp — are gone. It is no small irony that the harbor has been built for pleasure craft, after fishing as a way of life in this area was phased out by the European Union decades ago.

That evening, after a swim, my husband and I dine at our favorite tavern, where the teenager, Spyro, who once waited tables after school, is now gray-haired and most efficiently in charge. As we sit watching the island, late swimmers return, climbing up from the beach below. At the neighboring tables, a group of friends drinks glasses of raki; a woman, alone, is crocheting; another reads email on a laptop; two boys are playing chess. I sense that the village atmosphere, although changed, is still satisfying to these people in some deep and necessary way. Some people travel to see new places, others, perhaps myself included, to experience themselves differently. What is it about these simple things: a swim in clean water, a hearty meal, a good book, or astonishing scenery that makes life in this place so irresistible?

Today the road leading west to the new harbor dies at the foot of a promontory.

One day it will probably be extended to connect the harbor straight up to the national road leading back to Ayos Nikolaus. Till then, Mochlos will remain an outpost attracting artsy types, extremists, misfits and dreamers — among whose ranks I like to count myself. 

Later, back in our room, the island and the stars above it seem to float in through the front windows, filling the entire space. It has taken over 30 years for the ruined palace over there to be brought to light, for its treasures to be yielded up. In those years I too have been discovering myself, layer after layer going down to the foundation, to see what has been buried, what has crystallized over time. We desire, once wrote Barry Lopez, to become “the companion of a place.” There are some special places in this world where you may also become the companion of your deeper self. Despite an absence of 15 years, Mochlos is still that to me.

Linda Lappin divides her time between Rome and a village in Tuscia. She is the author of three novels: The Etruscan, Katherine's Wish, and the forthcoming Signatures in Stone, a mystery novel set in the Monster Park of Bomarzo and also of "Spirits of Place" a creative writing textbook for travel/memoir writers.