Crete by Barry Unsworth Page B

maps, however up-to-date these may appear to be. What looks blessedly empty on the map turns out to be in full spate of building. There is a point, not easily measurable but nonetheless real, when the influx of visitors and the changes of structure needed to accommodate them passes from sustainable to destructive. And it is a point of no return. The anthropologist Sonia Greger, writing in 1993, already sounded a warning note:
    Tourism along the north-east coastal strip of Crete has, I would say, reached crisis stage with respect to the near break-down of traditional values, hospitality and sense of community…. One cause of crisis in tourist development is escalating competition between locals, as they throw out their traditional means of support and subsistence.
    The larger, more expensive hotels overlooking the bay also cause damage to local communities, in this case by virtually depriving them of their own land. Extensive areas of the promontory, including large stretches of the shoreline, are closed off. By Greek law everyone has the right of access to the shore, regarded as common land. This is an excellent principle, but it is not applied in practice. The hotels have imposing gates and entrance driveways, and security guards to keep an eye on who comes and goes. Unless you are a guest or very good at bluffing, you are unlikely to get through. This means that a local inhabitant who once swam from these beaches, or kept a small boat for fishing, or walked on the cliffs and enjoyed the splendid views across the bay, and who was accustomed to regard these things as his birthright, has been—as the result of a stroke of the pen in some remote office—entirely dispossessed.
    Such vast hotels are in any case founded on a wrong concept of what a hotel should be. “Megalux” is the effect aimed at. The “mega” is present in the hundreds of detached bungalows, in the acres of gardens, the vast, marble-appointed reception areas. But the “lux” part is lacking. The capital outlay has been enormous, the need to recoup very urgent. Package tours are the quick way to do this. For these hotels the ideal visitor is not a private person but a unit, a number, part of a package. A spirit of suspicion prevails. The guest must furnish himself with a card that has his category on it; without this he is lost, unable to reply satisfactorily to the hotel staff who are constantly asking him who and what he is. In one hotel with a five-star deluxe rating, one of the most expensive on the island, outside a breakfast room with seating for a thousand people, so large that one can hardly see across it, there is a notice in various languages requesting the guests not to walk away with the knives and spoons. The women who work as cleaners are routinely searched at the gatehouse before being allowed to leave.
    At the entrance to the dining room an impeccably dinner-jacketed headwaiter, having glanced at our card, murmured that in our case meals were extra. We found out that—just as in the case of people who want to avoid being mugged on the street—you must look as if you know where you are going. As we wandered bemused among clumps of tamarisk and orange groves and volleyball pitches and Olympic-size pools and palatial conference rooms, a security guard in the dress of a Cretan bandit, festooned with weapons, emerged from the shrubbery and asked to see the card proving we were bona fide guests.
    Lying just a few miles south of Iraklion, the magnet that draws so many people to this region of Crete is Knossos, indisputably one of the greatest prehistoric sites in the world. This is where the Labyrinth, which has exercised the Western imagination for millennia, is said to have been, though its real nature is still disputed. Some maintain that it derives from the Minoan habit of agglutinative building, adding rooms to already existing rooms till their houses and palaces came to resemble mazes—in that case,