A Tale of Rethymno
In 1938, writer Pandelis Prevelakis published a nostalgic book about his childhood in Rethymno, a small city in Crete where the past still feels very close.
The embarrassing clatter of our suitcase wheels on cobblestones announced our arrival in Rethymno. It was mid-morning in February, and the old town was quiet. Our hotel was not yet ready, but since we were in Greece, we knew there would be a cafe nearby where we could plunk ourselves down. There wasn’t. We paused on a corner to determine our next steps.
A woman popped out of a darkened taverna. Did we need directions? At the mention of coffee, she beckoned us inside. The taverna lights came on, and it was magically open. She made us coffee and tea while her husband fired up the stove, and now we had a comfortable place to caffeinate ourselves over breakfast as we waited.
We have always been treated kindly in Greece. On the surface, this is not an interesting or surprising observation. To treat us otherwise would be foolish, since tourism has been a key part of the Greek economy for generations. But I do remember visiting other places where I was treated with barely-disguised disdain, even as my money was eagerly taken, so the hospitality I’ve encountered in Greece is not something I take for granted. And in my limited experience, Cretans, and in particular Rethymnians, were the most hospitable of all.
At the hotel, the owner, Giannis, checked us in himself. His family had lived in the compact four-story building when he was young; he had recently purchased and renovated it, with help from his parents who had moved to a farm in the country. The result was a modern but homey hotel. Our room was on the top floor, in Giannis’ former childhood bedroom. It was impeccably clean, with patterned curtains and vases of dried flowers on the nightstands.
A long balcony wrapped around two sides of our room, and I stepped outside to absorb the view. Rethymno is a low-rise town, with many buildings dating to the Venetian era, so our fourth floor perch was the Cretan equivalent of the Top of the Rock observation deck in Manhattan. To the northwest, beyond the rooftops of the old town I saw the outermost stone walls of the Fortezza, a fortress sprawling across a high rocky hill. To the east I saw the smooth blue horizon of the Aegean. To the south loomed the snow capped peaks of the White Mountains, where tourists more athletic than ourselves were probably skiing at that very moment.
But impossible to miss — right across the street, in fact — was the towering minaret of the Neradje Mosque. The minaret was centuries newer than the triple-domed stone building underneath it, a former Catholic monastery converted into a mosque by the Ottomans in 1657. Slender and stylish, the minaret was wrapped with two delicate iron balconies, a sign of its particular importance.
I was surprised to see the minaret still standing. Most mosques we encountered in Crete were abandoned and truncated lumps of their former selves, their minarets long collapsed, their domed roofs the only obvious sign of their past use. The turbulent history of Ottoman occupation, and the century of uprisings that led to Crete’s independence, did not leave Orthodox Greeks with much desire to maintain those buildings, nor any Muslim worshippers to fill them.
Neradje mosque has enjoyed a better fate than most. It was fully restored to public use, albeit as a music conservatory rather than a place of worship. It fronts the vast, smooth expanse of Mikrasiaton Square, a reference to Mikra Asia, the historical name for the Anatolian peninsula now comprising much of Turkey. That name, and a haunting memorial in the square, both honour a more turbulent and less hospitable time in the history of Rethymno: the Great Exchange of 1923.
Pandelis Prevelakis, a celebrated Cretan author and professor, was born in Rethymno in 1909. Of the many novels, plays, and historical essays he wrote during his lifetime, the best-loved might be The Tale of a Town, a small book about Rethymno, published in 1938. The English translation I was able to get my hands on was published in 1976. The book interweaves Cretan history with personal autobiography, but at its heart it is a sympathetic tale about the people of Rethymno, and their self-sufficiency and dignified character through countless historical hardships. Remarkably, a century after the events in his book happened, the atmosphere Prevelakis evoked still felt recognizable in the modern Rethymno we visited, at least in the quiet calm of the winter season.
At the time of the Great Exchange, the event now remembered in Mikrasiaton Square, Prevelakis was only 13 years old. His book begins in the time before the Exchange, when Rethymno consisted of two awkwardly intermingled populations: Christian Greeks, and Muslim Turks. The Ottoman rule of Crete that had begun in the mid-1600s had only recently ended, in 1898, following decades of violent uprisings by the Christian Greeks. But the Turkish population, having now lived there for many generations, remained.
When Prevelakis wrote his Tale, Rethymno had a population of 8,000, and most people were still living within the walls that surround what, today, is the old town. “The town advanced inland from the promontory with great caution, as if it was afraid of expanding too far,” he wrote. Residents had finally opened up the walls to let the town “spill out into the open fields” and “scramble up the hillsides”. Today, the population of Rethymno sits at just under 40,000 — small by most standards, but big enough to make it the third-largest town in Crete, behind only Chania and the capital Heraklion.
Prevelakis describes the Rethymno of his youth as a timeless place, where dignified residents continued traditions that stretched back centuries. As a port town, its very existence required a certain amount of openness to the outside world. Crete holds a central location in the south Aegean, and it is a natural stopping point for sailors traveling between Europe, North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and beyond. This brought wealth through trade, but also danger through piracy and invasion.
The Venetian empire was awarded control of Crete in 1211, after the Fourth Crusade, and it was they who built the Fortezza, the harbour breakwalls, and many of the historic buildings that still stand today. Ornate yet crumbling doorways and facades laden with Latin scriptures dot the old town, patiently awaiting complete collapse or expensive restoration.
But for Prevelakis, it was another invader, the Ottomans, that left the deepest impression. During the Cretan War, which began in 1645, the Venetian and Ottoman empires battled over the fate of Crete. The Venetians, worn down by years of war, tried to obtain military support from other European countries, but their potential allies were also depleted thanks to the Thirty Years War. And so Rethymno fell to the Ottomans in November of 1646. Crete remained under their control for more than 250 years.
Over the centuries, the wealthiest Turkish families took ownership of the rural Venetian estates surrounding Rethymno. On these lands the men farmed olives, fruit, and honey by day, then returned to the center of Rethymno every evening, riding their fine horses through the town gates to join their wives and children behind the safety of the city walls. Most of the time, their coexistence with their Christian neighbours was peaceful, though cautious.
“You could not tell a Muslim from a Christian except by his headgear,” wrote Prevelakis, “which was black in the case of Greeks (in ancient mourning for their slavery) and white in the case of those Turks who did not wear the fez.”
But in 1830, Crete found itself left out of the new Greek state created after the Greek War of Independence expelled the Ottomans from mainland Greece. Placed briefly under the rule of the Egyptian leader Muhammad Ali Pasha, and then back under direct rule of the Ottomans in 1840, Crete became increasingly restive. Christians staged numerous uprisings and revolts during the 1800s. The conflicts left countless dead, with massacres inflicted and suffered by both sides; waves of deadly plague cut down thousands more. In the end, the resistance succeeded. Crete became an independent state in 1898, and joined the Greek union in 1913.
Prevelakis was a small child at the tail end of these historic events, and he came of age during a transitional period. A substantial Turkish Muslim population still lived in Rethymno, and they still operated the farms outside the town. The mosques and Turkish cafes of Rethymno were still filled with worshippers and customers entertained by professional Turkish storytellers. The rebellions were in the past, and Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were living side-by-side without animosity. Prevelakis wrote:
“Still, in spite of all the bloodshed and stubborn resistance the Turks came to forget, down the generations, that they had come here as raiders to a foreign land; little by little they took it as their own and came to love it as their own. ‘My guts are Cretan too’, I have often heard the Turks of Crete say to Greeks.”
By Prevelakis’ time, in fact, the feeling was at least somewhat mutual. “And on the other side we youngsters, who had grown up after '99, when we had made peace with the Turk, felt no hatred for the Muslims,” he wrote.
Events 400 kilometers away changed everything. The city of Smyrna (now Izmir) on the western coast of Turkey had long been a prosperous international trading port. According to scholar A.J. Hobbins, Smyrna was a cosmopolitan place where communities of Christian Greeks, Turkish Muslims, Jews, and Armenians lived together amicably. But after the First World War, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and world powers began dividing up its former lands.
In September 1922, nationalist Turkish soldiers entered Smyrna, and within days, portions of the city were on fire. It burned for over a week, destroying the Greek and Armenian quarters. Detailed accounts of the fire and the accompanying violence remain highly politicized, but by September 22 tens of thousands were dead, and thousands more were trapped on a narrow quay between the water and the smoking city. Foreign ships in the harbour were unable or unwilling to rescue anyone, and it was days before Greek ships arrived to take some to safety.
At first, these foreign events did not impact the people of Rethymno. “At the sacking of Smyrna the hearts of the Turks rejoiced but they never showed it,” wrote Prevelakis, without explaining how he knew what others were thinking, if they did not express it. Some mosques were used to house a smattering of refugees that arrived from Smyrna, but otherwise, life in Rethymno continued as before. Prevelakis wrote:
“A year or two went by and we all thought we had turned that corner, when the fatal news came that Venizélos and Kemal had agreed to exchange the Turkish population of Crete for the refugees who had come in from Asia, so that the two races might both live at peace once and for all. Everyone was paralysed when they heard this, Muslims and Christians alike, and each asked the other whether they had heard the news and whether it was true.”
It was true. And it was the idea of the Greek Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos (a name modern travelers might recognize from the airport in Athens). On paper, his plan may have seemed like a sensible one: two populations were living in lands that were hostile to them, so why not have them trade places? But in practice, of course, for the very real individuals whose lives were to be torn apart, the proposal was devastating. Negotiations between Venizélos and Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were brokered by the League of Nations, which hoped to use this forced population exchange as a template for resolving future international conflicts.
“Although the League of Nations presumed that the identities of the people to be exchanged would be self-evident, assigning people affiliations as ‘Turks’ and ‘Greeks’ proved to be a challenge,” wrote history professor Sarah Shields in her 2013 essay The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. The lines between the two groups were not as clear as many imagined: the populations were heavily intermingled, and differed not only by religion, but by place of birth and language. There were countless regional differences across the vast lands of Turkey and Greece, and no standard “taxonomy” could be accurately applied to everyone. Despite this, the law passed, and the population exchange was mandatory for those determined to be living on the wrong side of a border.
Several months after the policy was formalized, steamships arrived in Rethymno to evacuate the Muslim Turkish population, and to drop off Greek Christians from Turkey. Prevelakis loosely estimated that only a tiny proportion — perhaps 200 of the 50,000 people of Turkish origin living in Crete — were happy to be relocated. “The rest were heartbroken at being torn from the land of their birth,” he wrote, describing lives abruptly interrupted: shopkeepers forced to walk away from businesses freshly stocked with inventory, olive and grape farmers who would never harvest crops they had carefully tended for years, and people who had just constructed brand new houses other people would soon call home.
Refugees on both ends of the exchange were told to simply walk away from their houses with only a few personal belongings, and then move into the freshly vacated homes waiting at the other end. The exchange was not so much a migration as a mass swapping of lives. Farmers, fishermen, shopkeepers: everyone was presumed to be interchangeable.
In Rethymno, the day of evacuation was orderly – until it wasn’t. The baggage was already waiting down by the port, where steam ships were anchored off shore, waiting for passengers. Then, Prevelakis explains, one man had a last-minute idea: he would bring the wooden shutters on his house with him, to use on his new house in Turkey. But when others saw the man removing his shutters, they decided to do the same. Soon hordes were tearing their houses apart for any pieces small enough to transport. The Christians began to panic amid rumours the wood was fuel to start fires. Violence was averted only when the army arrived to escort the evacuees to the ships.
“They went in with their clothes torn, their hands dripping blood,” wrote Prevelakis. “The women had lost their veils. They went by in single file between the double line of soldiers, like thieves caught stealing other folk’s belongings, looking askance, red-eyed, their teeth clenched with rage.”
For the most part, Prevelakis, himself a Christian Greek, described the Great Exchange with empathy, so it is jarring to read his somewhat glib summary of the outcome only a few pages later. “So the Turks went away and Rethemnos1 was left with the refugees from Asia,” he wrote. “These took over many of the employments of the Muslims, which flourished in their hands, and nobody was upset at the change.”
More likely, those who were most upset were no longer there to complain. Aytek Alpan, in a thoughtful essay about the ways traumatic events such as the Great Exchange are remembered, suggested nostalgia is a “selective perception of the past” that is influenced by nationalistic myth making on all sides.
In the wake of the Great Exchange, Prevelakis, still a teenager, explored what was left behind. “It was only after the Turks left that I poked about their mosques at will and lost my fear of them,” he wrote. “I went inside them and tried how the vaults echoed my voice. I clambered over the domes, I pondered for hours over the iron grills of the gates, which you might think designed especially to dizzy you with the swirling and twisting of their lines.”
After we settled into our hotel, we took advantage of the limited winter sun and wandered Rethymno. We headed first up Mavrokordatou Alexanrou, past a row of excellent restaurants, until we reached the intricate Rimondi Fountain, built by the Venetians in 1626. We admired the water still trickling from three small lion heads, then followed streets barely wider than alleyways until we reached the small Venetian port. There, we walked out along the scrabbly stone breakwall to the lighthouse built during that brief period of Egyptian rule in the 1830s.
From the port, we traced the waterfront westward, slowly climbing Emmanouil Kefalogianni, a wide modern avenue, until we reached the east entrance of the Fortezza. There we passed through the arched tunnel and the ticket office, empty except for a few wary cats who did not challenge us.
Most of the structures that once existed within the Fortezza’s walls are long gone, the last few destroyed by German occupiers during the Second World War. Today the fortress is a forlorn moonscape of loose stones punctuated by clusters of swaying bamboo. With its thick outer walls and clear views of the sea on three sides, I assumed the location must have been easy to defend from invaders. But, in fact, the Fortezza was poorly designed, and in 1646 it fell to the Ottomans after a siege of only 23 days.
We clambered over the remains of buildings and water cisterns, and ventured down into the dark underground vaults of a warehouse. We then circled the Ibrahim Han Mosque, small, squat and square, with its single domed roof and missing minaret. A few steps away we passed the Church of Saint Catherine, similar in size to the mosque, but more pristinely maintained. Its small arched belfry looked especially picture-perfect, and I was not surprised to learn it is younger than I am, added in 1985. Both the mosque and church are now popular wedding venues.
When I look back on history, I am often tempted to compress decades and centuries into convenient blocks separated by wars, invasions, and other tragedies. I find it easy to forget that between those transitions, generations of people lived their lives in worlds where very little changed, and they had assumed their children’s lives would echo their own.
To an Ancient Greek making a sacrifice at the sanctuary of Artemis on that Rethymno hilltop, the arrival of the Venetians a thousand years later would have been unthinkable. Those living during Venetian rule must have felt certain their sturdy walls would protect them forever, and likewise, the Ottomans enjoying their two and half centuries of dominance could not have foreseen the eventual collapse of their empire, and their expulsion to the land of their ancestors. The appearance in the sky in 1941 of thousands of German paratroopers would have been even more unthinkable. And none of those people could have imagined the arrival of hordes of international tourists armed with camera phones, eagerly exploring the remnants of Rethymno’s long history.
Today, change is relentless, and we can no longer measure it in centuries. When I visit a place like Rethymno, with its deep history, I am reassured by what survives — monumental buildings, stone walls, harbours, and street grids remain, as do the stories of the people who built them. But the overlapping layers of history, fuelled by rising and falling empires, are also an ominous reminder: the end of the world as we know it might be just around the corner.
References
Alpan, A. (2013). But the Memory Remains: History, Memory and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange. The Historical Review/La Revue Historique. 9. 199. 10.12681/hr.295.
Distance from Izmir to Rethymno. (n.d.). Retrieved February 7, 2025, from https://www.distancecalculator.net/from-izmir-to-rethymno
The Fortezza. (n.d.). Epaithros. Retrieved February 9, 2025, from https://www.epaithros.eu/en/monument/fortezza
History of Rethymno in Crete island. (n.d.). Greeka. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://www.greeka.com/crete/rethymno/history/
Nelsson, R., & Nelsson, R. (2022, November 30). The destruction of Smyrna – archive, 1922. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/30/the-destruction-of-smyrna-archive-1922
Neratzes Mosque (Τζαμί Νερατζές). (n.d.). Retrieved January 26, 2025, from https://www.rethymno.gr//city/tzamineratzes/tzami-neratzes.html
Pantelis Prevelakis. (2021, September 28). Crete Tourist Guide. Retrieved February 9, 2025, from https://web.archive.org/web/20210928175852/https://www.crete.gr/en/pages/ prevelakis.php
Prevelakis, P. (1976). The Tale of a Town. Doric Publications.
Rimondi Fountain in Rethymno, Greece. (n.d.). Greeka. Retrieved February 9, 2025, from https://www.greeka.com/crete/rethymno/sightseeing/rimondi-fountain/
Shields, S. (2013, June 2). The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. MERIP. Retrieved February 9, 2025, from https://merip.org/2013/06/the-greek-turkish-population-exchange/
Treaty Series Volume XXXII. (1925). League of Nations. Retrieved February 7, 2025, from https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/LON/Volume%2032/v32.pdf
The English spelling of Greek places is rarely consistent. I’ve used Rethymno throughout this essay, as do Wikipedia and Lonely Planet. But the translator in my edition of The Tale of a Town chose Rethemnos. Other less-common spellings include Rethimno, Réthymnon, and Rhíthymnos. The ancient city on the site was called Rithymna, the Venetians called it Retimo, and the Ottomans called it Resmo. The modern Greek spelling is Ρέθυμνο.