Free Crete by Barry Unsworth

and there is not much space between them and the shore. However that may be, the hard shoulder, which is narrow when there is one at all, and sometimes strewn with broken stones or the debris of ancient picnics, and which we are conditioned to think of as for emergency use only, is generally regarded by Cretans—who totally lack this conditioning—as an extra lane. Drivers wanting to overtake will sound their horns to make you get over, and they will quickly become angry if you fail to do so.
    Cretan driving habits have a quality all their own, which must be seen to be appreciated. It is not self-righteous or unmannerly or neurotically impatient. There is a sort of proud carelessness about it, lordly and dangerous. The quality is best summed up by the Greek word palikari, which has no real equivalent in English. The palikari is the hero, the freedom fighter, the patriot. He goes back centuries to the days of Turkish occupation, when he took to the mountains and became an outlaw and fought a guerilla war against the oppressor in which no quarter was shown on either side. You see him in innumerable old pictures, with tasseled cap and fearsome mustachios, breech-loading musket by his side and curving, double-bladed yataghan at his belt.
    Village education in Crete hasn’t changed so very much since those days. The palikari is a hero still, and a model of behavior, to schoolboy and adult alike. I remember once sitting outside a café in a quiet square when an open sports car of antique design came very fast around the corner and pulled up with extreme suddenness, narrowly missing a war memorial and an ancient woman in black. Out of it stepped a young man who strode into the café without a backward glance. “There goes a palikari,” one of the men at a nearby table said, and there was a note of unmistakable admiration in his voice.
    The last stretch of road, after it rejoins the coast at the base of the Drapanon peninsula, is spectacular, with the great expanse of the Almirou Bay on your left and the heights of Psiloritis rising before you. The cliffs descend in places very steeply, often to the verge of the road, and where the rock is split or heavily eroded, it shows a warm, reddish color that glows in the sun. On the outskirts of Rethymnon, as on the outskirts of all towns of any size in Crete, there are huge roadside posters advertising cigarettes—a rare sight these days, at least in Western Europe.
    Rethymnon is guarded by a Venetian fortress massive in its proportions—it is generally considered the largest the Venetians built anywhere, a response to the increasing frequency of Saracen pirate raids, one by Khair ed-Din Barbarossa in 1538, another by Dragut Rais in 1540, and two by Uluch Ali—an Italian renegade of notable savagery—in 1567 and 1571. The last of these was very destructive; large areas of the town were burned to the ground.
    The Venetians succeeded to a large extent in suppressing piracy, but despite the fort’s vast size and formidable defenses, Rethymnon fell to the Turks in 1646 after the briefest of sieges. The invaders did not obligingly expose their ships to the Venetian cannon, but attacked from the west and south, bombarding the garrison into submission. Seeing these towering battlements, so costly in men and money and materials, and in the end so unavailing, I was reminded of another empire and another wall, one built by forced labor on the orders of the Roman emperor Hadrian, running from coast to coast across the north of England, constructed to keep out the Picts. The Roman legionaries, used to a warmer climate, must have shivered in those bitter winds, looking always north toward the lands of the accustomed enemy. But the real threat, which no one had envisaged, and against which the wall was useless, came from the south, from the Saxon tribes that would come by sea….
    Here in Rethymnon, in the vast open space enclosed by the fortress walls, among