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Previous: 4: Iraklion
Old Rethymno is a charming small town at the foot of this Venetian fortress that was easily taken by the Ottoman Turks in 1645.
Here is the fortress gate with Rethymno in the background below.
This panorama, stitched from two photos taken from the fort, shows the old town in the foreground with modern Rethymno in the background. The ancient Venetian harbour is hidden by the houses but you can barely glimpse the lighthouse peeking over the red roof in the centre.
The old Venetian harbour is lined with restaurants for tourists...
...and with small boats waiting for them.
Here, a diesel powered sailing ship slowly chugs past the 16th century lighthouse at the mouth of the harbour with its load of enchanted tourists.
There are lots of tourists but the place is charming anyway. There were actually some local people in this small cafe on the corner of Arobatzouglou and Nikiforou streets!
Below left and right, Nikiforou Foka north and south of the cafe.
The corner grocery store near the youth hostel where I stayed had home-made ouzo that was pure dynamite! The Guora gate in the background was part of the Venetian defences of the town five centuries ago.
Tourists attract all kinds of people including this Roma street urchin dancing to her sister's drum beat.
The next day I moved on to Hania, another hour west by bus.
Hania, Crete's second city, was its capital from 1898 to 1971 when that honour passed to Iraklion.
The sky, cloudy in the morning, became menacingly dark and it was soon raining.
It was a cold and windy miserable day but I toured the sights to take photos anyway because I had to return to the Rethymno youth hostel where I had left my things. Here is a Panorama of the Hania harbour in the rain. You can click below to see the rest on the right.
The Mosque of the Janissaries facing the harbour is an unmistakable reminder of the Turkish occupation that lasted three and a half centuries.
And the proud Cathedral testifies that it is the Greek Orthodox Church that controls the peoples' minds today!
Because of the bad weather I found nobody to tell me if these ancient warehouses, bordering the Turkish quarter on the waterfront, were Venetian or Turkish.
I am sure that I would have enjoyed wandering through the maze of narrow streets in the Turkish quarter if the weather had been nice but I think that it was sheer heroism to take the pictures below in the freezing rain, just to give you an idea of what Hania is like!
It was heroic but I did not linger. I got back to Rethymno, spent a night there and the next day I hurried back to Iraklion to catch the fast ferry to the famous island of Santorini.
