Having finally found a parking spot for the car, we started trudging up through the recently rebuilt St. George's Gate. While walking, we heard intense music — a pretty weird thing in the middle of a deserted tunnel with a staircase, which is exactly what St. George's Gate is.
Wherever there are Rambo's copyrights, those are his photos. The rest are mine or from Flickr.
Upon reaching the end, we discovered it was Native Americans messing around. (Well, or pseudo-Native Americans). I've seen these same wandering Indians many times before — in Riga, Palanga, and somewhere else. And now they've turned up in Crete. As it turned out, from a deserted parking lot near a steep slope, we had come up straight into the old town of Heraklion, located relatively close to the sea.
Here Tanya found a fountain in the guidebook, and we immersed ourselves in a search once again. I suspect that all the fountains on the island were built by the Turks, but what do we care. Here I demonstrated a topographical intellect quite uncharacteristic of me, and practically led us right to the fountain, but just to be safe, I asked some women chatting at an intersection and showed them the picture from the guidebook. One of the Cretan women waved her hand — and indeed, the fountain was right there, twenty meters away, at the end of the street, and we would have even seen it if the street hadn't been arc-shaped like a piece of the Hadron Collider.
Imagine our disappointment when we reached the spot. No, the fountain itself was fine, unlike the one in Chania, but it was turned off! Even though the Turks were totalitarian bastards, under them the fountain would definitely have been running, unlike under the relaxed Cretans. By the way, the fountain is called "Morosini," and it was built (surprise!) by the Venetians after all, in honor of the ruler at the time, in 1628. Built not just for the sake of it, but as the crown of an aqueduct bringing water from Mount Juktas, 15 km from the city. Rumor has it that Zeus rests inside the mountain, despite being immortal. Well, believers are no strangers to doublethink.
Near the fountain there is also St. Mark's church, which just happened to be hosting an art exhibition, we took a quick look. Tanya isn't a big fan of museums, so we went through them in abridged mode. Ten times abridged. Also near the fountain there's some Venetian structure with a tricky name, but since it looks like a regular old piece of crap with arches, I didn't even remember its name.
Then we slowly crawled toward the waterfront, where a view of yet another ancient fortification suddenly opened up to us. As we had already figured out, all the peoples who inhabited the island in different times were no fools when it came to warfare, so they built fortresses to their hearts' content.
This specific one was built by the restless Venetians and is called Koules. (Koules?). When the Ottoman Turks captured the city, they locked up all sorts of revolutionaries in there, added a minaret and a second floor. The Masonic Byzantine ephorate already known to us, though this time the 13th one, repaired and polished up the fortress in our days in order to conduct their secret rituals there, I mean, exhibitions and conferences. True, it's not very clear where they do it — down in the basement the casemates are something else, dark and gloomy, the only thing missing is mold. I didn't see anything on the second floor; apparently, they don't let tourists into the holy of holies.
In real life it looks even more fantastic. A hundred meters from a bustling city with tourists and transport — a psychedelic breakwater going out into the sea and amazingly colored water on both sides. I was so jealous of those kiddos. By the way, they got there on bikes.
I don't know what's in the picture above — that's Rambo wandering into a museum. Considering that there's a crazy number of pictures in this post, I consider myself exempt from meeting the character count quota. We weren't in Heraklion for long after Koules; by popular demand of the working masses, we got in the car and rolled off to the sea. Strangely enough, the sea was only found near the Oceanarium, but more on that in the next parts. Stay tuned.