The name

When the Arabs took Crete in the ninth century they moved the capital here, built a mud-brick wall around the settlement and dug a deep ditch — khandaq — around that. They called the place Rabdh el Khandaq, the fortress of the ditch.

The Byzantines shortened it to Chandax. The Venetians turned it into Candia, and used the same name for the whole island. The city only became Heraklion again in the twentieth century.

The walls

Venice began fortifying the city in 1462 and never really stopped. The chief designer was Michele Sanmicheli, the most celebrated military engineer of the Republic, and the result is a triangle: the sea forms the base, and the Martinengo bastion is the apex at the southern point.

There are seven bastions in all — Sabbionara, Vitturi, Jesus, Martinengo, Bethlehem, Pantokrator and Agios Andreas — with a deep moat outside them and gun platforms cut into the earth. They are among the largest and best-preserved fortifications anywhere in the Mediterranean, and today the whole circuit is an open green space in the middle of the city, which people walk.

The siege

The Ottoman conquest of Crete began in 1645 at Chania. Rethymno fell the following year. In 1648 the army arrived in front of the walls of Candia.

The siege lasted twenty-one years — the longest in recorded history. The walls held throughout, and the defenders could still be supplied by sea. The city finally surrendered in September 1669, and it fell through betrayal rather than assault.

Kazantzakis

On the Martinengo bastion, at the highest point of the walls, is the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis, the Cretan novelist who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation. It is a plain wooden cross and a flat stone with an inscription of his own choosing, and the view runs over the whole city to the mountains.

The museum and the town

The Archaeological Museum covers five thousand years of Cretan history and holds the most important collection of Minoan art anywhere — the frescoes from Knossos, the snake goddesses, the bull's head rhyton, and the Phaistos Disc.

The Historical Museum of Crete takes up where it leaves off, from the Byzantine period to the Second World War, and holds two paintings by El Greco, who was born near Heraklion — the only two of his works on the island.

In the streets, the Morosini Fountain with its four lions is the centre of the city, the Koules fortress guards the Venetian harbour, and the Venetian shipyards stand along the waterfront in a row of stone arches.

Heraklion's own beaches are city beaches: convenient rather than beautiful, and busy in summer.

Amoudara, a few kilometres west, is the main one — a long sandy stretch, fully organised, with sunbeds, watersports and a line of bars and tavernas behind it. It is reached by city bus.

Karteros and Tobrouk, east of the city, are the other easy options.

Further out, Agia Pelagia sits in a sheltered bay about twenty-five kilometres northwest, enclosed by hills, and is calmer and clearer than anything closer in.

The better beaches of the regional unit — the south coast, Matala, Kommos — are an hour or more away and are day trips rather than an afternoon.

Heraklion eats Cretan food and it eats it well. Dakos, barley rusk with tomato, olive oil and soft cheese, is the standard, and lamb with stamnagathi, a bitter wild green, is the dish to look for.

The market street and the small lanes off it are where the produce is: cheeses, herbs, olive oil, honey. Around Lions Square the tavernas are aimed at visitors; the cooking improves a street or two away.

Raki arrives at the end of every meal, unordered and unbilled, and the local wine comes from vineyards a short drive inland, around Archanes.