Day 9: Sunday fun day

Trip

Greece+Cyprus 2025

Location

Crete 🇬🇷

Date

September 21, 2025

We’re at the second Sunday of our vacation. The first one was spent pacing ourselves while heading to Hydra (see Day 2). When in transit, reduced business hours affect you less. Today, we’re spending the day in the city and are confronted with restaurants being closed or offering reduced service. Our first pick for breakfast was closed, we’ll have to try it again tomorrow. That’s really when it dawned on us that Sunday might not be business as usual. We thought of checking the opening hours for the museum and historical sites we were planning to check, but not restaurants 🤦. A little Googling later we found a second spot that looked promising and was open. 📍Black Honey, right by the sea, seemed like a good spot and had a few patrons in. When came time to order we learned that they didn't have food service today other than a couple of limited items (leftovers from yesterday?). Needing some time to research further, we grabbed coffee there. We used that time to find our next potential breakfast spot and double check tomorrow’s itinerary – now that we’re reminded that things can close, we might as well double-check we’ll be able to make it. Good news! Looks like we’ll be able to fit it all.

📍Frankly was very busy. Karine managed to get us seated quickly and ordered breakfast (shakshuka for me, eggs benedict for Karine). We were not in a big hurry as, while Heraklion is a gastronomic destination, it's not overflowing with places to visit. We’re not overly chagrined to be leaving tomorrow.

The first of two places, we wanted to visit was the 📍Koules Fortress (also called Rocca al Mare or Castello a Mare), a fortress built by the Venetians in the early 16th century to protect the port. To paraphrase Anthony Bourdain in No Reservations (season 4, episode 4) “being invaded by the Venetians had the benefits of coming with long lasting architecture and great food”. I don’t know how the people that were invaded felt about it but I’m not entirely sure they were excited by either. Anyway, we can agree on the food and the fortress, while heavily restored, still stands impressively. Visiting the inside of the structure isn’t breathtaking. It contains a plethora of information panels about the Ottoman siege and invasion of Heraklion. While informative, it gives the feeling that nothing happened between 1646 and 1898 other than misery. While the fact that many periods of unrest occurred leads me to believe that the Ottoman could have managed Crete close to how Belgium treated their Africans holdings, the total lack of details feels like there are parts of history missing.

From the Venetian and Ottoman, we jumped back in time by visiting the 📍Heraklion Archaeological Museum covering, chronologically I might add, a period of over 5,500 years. It starts with from the Neolithic period (around 5000 BC) and goes all the way to Roman times. It focuses on the Minoan civilization, a Bronze Age culture centered on the island of Crete – I know, a museum in Crete focused on a civilization that was centered on the island is innovative. The Minoan flourished between 3000 BCE and 1100 BCE and are celebrated for their cities and palaces; they represented one of the earliest high civilizations in Europe. Might I also add that they worshipped a GODDESS?

The museum itself was easy to navigate. Every room is numbered; you start at one and end when there are no higher-numbered rooms to find. Most of the content is, as most archeology you find in museum, either from temples or cemeteries.

Having visited roughly 7500 years of history in two hours or so, we needed some time to recover. We went day drinking! What else is there to do on a Sunday, on vacation? There was the obligatory searching for the good open place. We elected to go back to where we went yesterday and try their next door neighbour: 📍Old Cafe. A small menu of bites and 500ml of wine remains cheaper than the same amount of sparkling water. We grabbed some cheese and some Dakos and called it lunch.

The rest of the day was dedicated to taking it easy our Airbnb’s balcony. The sun was warm, our brains were full, it was a perfect time to disconnect.

Dinner was at 📍Merastri. Yesterday might have been all about fish, tonight it was all about grilled meat. Ordering was simple enough, a couple of starters, some grilled vegetables and 1kg of grilled meat. Everything was exactly as advertised and delicious.

We’re heading out on the road tomorrow. We’ll be making our way three hours east. A stopping point that will allow us to do our first gorge of the trip the day after. After all, Crete is famous for its UNESCO-level gorges.