Free The Greek Islands by Lawrence Durrell

point. The northern massif of rock – and the heights of Mount Scopus which reach some sixteen hundred feet above the sea – have a moderating effect upon the rough north winds, which in winter blow down from the snow-clad Albanian steeps opposite Corfu.
    The patron saint of Zante is St Dionysios – anything Spiridion can do for Corfu, he can do better for Zante. He should be visited and candle-primed with respect – one should not play about with the spring weather in the Ionian. Both saints are, interms of Greek history, relatively young ones, though the Zante one had a long and acrimonious career, including stages spent in Aegina, and then a battle royal to obtain the episcopal nomination in Zante itself. He retired in a huff after having failed in this laudable enterprise and secluded himself in the uplands – a convent called Anafonitria, dying in 1622. His remains are buried in the atolls called the Strophades. In 1703, he was admitted officially to the register of fully fledged saints. Inevitably enough, his history is intermingled with accounts of Turkish piracy – the convent was pillaged by marauding Turkish pirates and, according to the tourist bulletin available in the island, they put ‘some monks to death and others to rapture’. In other words he has seen hard times and is a seasoned island saint, despite his relative youthfulness. It only remains to add that the ancestry of St Dionysios is Norman. By reputation he occupies himself to the exclusion of other preoccupations with the fishermen of the island, and every year he is presented with a pair of new shoes on his feast days.
    How to say farewell? It is as difficult a problem as ever Corfu presented; but one should not leave without two memorable excursions – one to the wide-sweeping bay of Laganas, and the other to the mysterious and poetical beach called Tsillivi. Years later, in the pages of a book, the traveller will find a grain of sand from this spot, and perhaps a pressed flower or leaf to remind him of something he has never really forgotten.

Crete
    To the Greeks Crete seems the most authentically Greek of all the islands because of the length of its history and its relative remoteness from the ancient centres of war and diplomacy. Crete, for example, played no part in the Persian or the Peloponnesian wars, during which the rest of the Greek dependencies were almost bled to death; with her crack fleet, she had time to take stock of things from the neutrality of her perch in the main deep of the Aegean.
    ‘The big island’ Crete is always called in the colloquial tongue; and big it is, spacious and full of the brooding presence of its four groups of mountains, which have more or less divided it into four countries with four chief towns. The mountains are high enough to be snow-tipped throughout the dour winter, and very often the traveller in the lowlands will have the feeling he is crossing a continent rather than an island. In almost any direction his eye turns, it is halted, not by a sea-line as in the smaller islands, but by a land sky-line, often massive and forbidding. It is sumptuously rocky, though the verdant and bounteous valleys that open everywhere offer no lack of water or shade or greenery; indeed Crete has quite a lot of high mountain pasture, unlike many islands of the same size.
    Once you round the broad butt of the Peloponnesus and enter the Aegean, you have turned a new page in the strange, variegated album of Greek landscapes – quite different from those of the romantic Ionian islands. The Aegean is pure, vertical, and dramatic. Crete is like a leviathan, pushed up bysuccessive geological explosions. It is also like the buckle in a slender belt of islands which shelter the inner Cyclades from the force of the deep sea, and which once formed an unbroken range of mountains joining the Peloponnesus to the south-west Turkish ranges. The valleys are the deep faults between eminences . After