It was rarely necessary to know much Greek. One sentence in our limited vocabulary usually brought a quick response in English. One woman, in the village of Vorizia, who did not speak English repeated several phrases in a harsh, unrecognizable tongue. Maryl eventually identified it as “Greco-German,” but we never did figure out even with hand gestures just what she was trying to tell us about driving our car to a nearby 14th century Venetian-influenced church. Taking a left fork just beyond the town limits, as directed by the Blue Guide, we drove the required 2 km. along a dirt road, but found nothing. Tired of dodging rocks and ruts, I parked and we walked a little farther. But all we found was a tree-shaded pen with two giant hogs and two dozen piglets. Returning to the fork in the road, we determined that we had turned just a little early. Negotiating the right track to the church involved crossing a mud puddle of indeterminate depth, which I did by getting up momentum, crossing my fingers, and splashing through. We did find Ayios Phanourios, but the church was locked. At the beginning of the adventure a young boy in town had led us to the woman, promising a key (τo κλειδι). But he also said something about a knife (τo μαχαιρι). After much deliberation, later, I concluded that the Bishop did it, with Miss Scarlet, in the conservatory using a candlestick.

To return to the topic of language, I had concentrated on the vocabu­lary of food during my pre-vacation drills. But I usually did not need to request or identify an item of food in Greek. Most of the menus translated items into English (with varying degrees of accuracy and humor). One menu was in Dutch. Usually the waiter made things easy by inviting you to go to the kitchen to inspect the food. There were two occasions when it would have helped to know a little more Greek. At one of our three breakfasts (not a customary meal in Greece) Maryl asked for an egg and two toasts, forgetting that “toast” to the Greek mind means a sandwich—in this case pressed ham and process cheese. Not an appetizing break­fast. And we never learned to convey a request for two plates to share one course. For a snack one afternoon, Maryl pointed to some appetizer-sized fish and asked for two plates; we were served two plates heaped with 15 or 20 little pan-fried fish. Not delectable, but edible. The bones were soft enough to chew. Chowing down a plate of fried fish enhanced my apprecia­tion of the life of a Cretan villager. Or perhaps of the life of a pussycat at the Chaniá harbor.