Talking Location With author Iain Gale – CRETE

29th October 2022

TalkingLocationWith.. Iain Gale – Crete

Crete has a way of drawing you in. From the moment I first set foot there while researching an earlier novel in 2011, I was utterly captivated. Today the island is a paradise for holidaymakers and the coastal towns are thronged with tourists. But 80 years ago, this was a very different place. Just move away from the resorts and up into the interior and you will find the real Crete. A place rich in tradition, culture, character, myth and history.

The landscape is extraordinary, ranging from the familiar beaches to lush farmland with the soaring Lasithi mountains, which culminate in Mount Ida, the legendary birthplace of Zeus.

The distinctive smells and sounds of Crete hit you the moment you step ashore, in particular the sweet, pungent scent of wild thyme, which tells you instantly that you can only be in one place.

The people too are a race apart. To reach the very heart of Crete you need to venture up into the hills and encounter the locals. The further inland you go the more welcoming they become. Sit down at a table in a proper local taverna and dine on goat’s cheese, fresh bread, olives and lemons, washed down with the local white wine or the ubiquitous raki – the very life blood of the Cretan Resistance partisans, the andartes – and within a few minutes you will find yourself slipping back in time. To the 1940s or beyond. All you need is a little imagination.

My own first taste of this reality was at a little bar in the hilltop village of Galatas, site of a famous encounter in 1941 between New Zealand troops and the German invaders, which featured in my earlier novel.

SBS: Special Boat Squadron  is set a year later, with Crete now under German and Italian occupation. It was inspired by Operation Albumen, the series of daring commando raids against Crete’s enemy-held airfields which were vital for control of the Mediterranean.

The action ranges across the most rugged and difficult terrain that Crete has to offer, reflecting the need for the British raiders to stay off the beaten track and operate in absolute secrecy.

From the hidden landing cove of Cape Kochinoxos on the southern coast, the action moves inland, across increasingly breathtaking scenery. The dusty roads here are lined with olive groves and fragrant lemon trees, producing huge, thick-skinned fruits, which can rival those of Italy’s Campania. Unexpected rushes of colour are provided by the rich flora of the island, in particular by the bright pink oleander bushes, while towering ilex trees frame the distant, snow-capped mountains.

Walking the roads, it is hard not to be aware of the babbling streams coursing down the hillsides, although as soon as night begins to fall, all else is drowned out by the unmistakeable chirruping of the cicadas and the occasional croaking of frogs.

Much of the action in the book is set in the network of hidden caves set in the hills above the village of Kastamonitsa, which was famed for its role in the Cretan resistance to German occupation during the Second World War. While the heroism of the andartes themselves is undoubted, that of the Cretan people as a whole was equally prominent and should also never be forgotten. Cretan men and women showed no hesitation in taking any opportunity to harass their occupiers, whether by assassination, destruction or other means, and Nazi reprisals were swift, merciless and truly ghastly in their ferocity.

Of course, for many of the classically educated Brits who came ashore with the commandos, Crete was a place of ancient history and mythology, and relics of the ancient world and past civilizations are dotted across the island. My central character in particular is constantly haunted by Greek myths and their parallels to his own situation.

Apart from classical ruins, the hillsides of the interior are also dotted with many small Orthodox chapels. One of these, the church of Agios Nikolaos, features prominently in the book, as the British commandos choose to make it their HQ for the attack on Heraklion. In fact, my chapel is a hybrid of existing buildings and the location that I picked for it, close to Heraklion, is home to a now-ruined chapel. To get a feeling of the building which I had in my mind and which features in the book I would strongly recommend a trip to a little chapel which now stands in the grounds of the Minos Palace Hotel on Crete’s east coast. You can get a key from reception.

Built by monks in the eighth  or ninth century AD, it has an extraordinary atmosphere and with its almost fort-like layout would have seemed the perfect spot for the raiders’ base. It is a modest, single-storey building with a bell above the door, and the apse contains remains of early medieval frescoes much like those described in the book.

Having moved steadily north through the island towards their target of Heraklion airfield, after the raid the SBS men are forced to retrace their steps, in a desperate race to reach the south coast and the means of seaborne escape to Egypt. And just as the Cretan landscape plays an integral part in their journey to the target, so now its unforgiving terrain becomes an important factor in their fate.

Hopefully the book will take you there in their footsteps. But if you really want to get a feeling of what it might have been like to have been one of the heroes of the original SBS, the notorious pirates of the Aegean, you could do no better than lose yourself in the beauty, culture and timeless mystery of Crete.

Iain Gale

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