free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
tremendous beyond description (yet safe at the same time, or tourists
might be frightened. But this paradox applies to much tourist publicity.).
Let me show restraint then. The xyloskata, plunging down off the
Omalos into the gorge, is indeed impressive. Standing on the top you
can see the inland end of the gorge to the right – a long smooth scree.
The gorge winds down towards the sea seven and a half miles away to
your left. Mt Gingilos rises opposite, sheer and massive, blocking the
view to southwards. Its rock faces, the Rotten Cliffs, are dotted with
cliff-hanging trees, scree and gullies where the snow dings all the year
through. The xyloskala - not really wooden steps, but a zigzag path
worn into the cliffside - descends a sheer 2500 feet to the gorge. This is
impressive; especially since the gorge is a pocket of strange weather
conditions. To come off a sun-bathed Omalos and enter this gloomy
cleft, to see vapours rising from the depths – this is what has made
travellers compare the descent to a descent into Hades.
Once down the wooden steps you have a seven- or eight-mile walk
to the sea. The path winds beside the stream, which (in summer) disappears
underground half-way down, reappearing again below
Samaria. Samaria, the remotest village in Crete, is the only settlement
in the gorge. In the winter it is cut off by the flooding stream. Like
many of the Cretan villages it looks depopulated with its crumbling
ruined houses - and soon will be, for the government’s schemes for the
Samaria National Park entail removing the villagers to other sites and
leaving Samaria to the ibex. Not far below Samaria, the true gorge
begins; the mountain walls close in, and for the last few miles you walk
between sheer rock faces a thousand feet high – at one point (the Iron
Gates) only about ten feet apart.
Julie, who did a lot of research into the gorge later in the summer,
says that the people are quite content, indeed pleased, at the prospect
of being moved. They have possibly been led to expect better compen-
sation than they will in fact get; however, what they do get in the way of
land could hardly be worse than what they have now. I remember the
refrain of Georgia Katsamerakis, the housewife with whom we stayed
on the way back through the gorge, and who had made a little necessary
money by selling some of her magnificent woven stuffs and embroideries
to foreigners. ‘I have two daughters. A dowry costs money, a
lot of money. There is no work here. Life is difficult here. I have two
daughters, you sec.’ Happily she sold only those pieces which were
comparatively easy to replace. The fair-haired Samarians were the
handsomest people I saw in Crete; the children, though they looked
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