Stories from Heraklion - First day impressions & walk on art exhibition

The time has finally come to share with you my experience from my recent visit to the city of Heraklion. I would like to begin with you some general information before we are going to get to the main part of this post. Overall I stayed in Crete for 10 days and for the first 4 days I was staying at my friend's place in a small town after that, I moved to an Airbnb in the center of Heraklion. This is the second time that I visited Crete and Heraklion in general but this time I tried to visit more Archeological Museums, Art Galleries, etc than enjoy the nightlife of the island. Well, the last part didn't go so well because I found plenty of friends that live in Crete and we celebrate our reunion pretty intensely I must say, and with a lot of Raki aka tsipouro. So my first thought was to try and break this visit into two posts and try to cover as many things as I can and highlight the pretty impressive stuff that I saw there but if I can't fit everything in those two I could make a third one also. Anyway enough with that let's begin our journey on Heraklion now!

The first thing that I did on my first day in the town was to take a walk at the port and enjoy the view of the sea but also I wanted to see the famous castle that dominates the majority of the port area. So I will not try to become a historian and I will drop a link about the history behind this place but I will make a summary for my lazy friends who can settle for less. So this particular castle was made by the Venetians in the early 13th century and was called Rocca al Mare, I believe that it was used for some kind of prison during the time it was active/open but it have plenty of room for soldiers/supplies, etc. I would not get into many details if you want to know more about how everything worked check here.

Visiting an Art Exhibition

So I never would imagine that on my first day on an island I would go to an art exhibition but I enjoy getting out of the norm from time to time. So I would like to clarify that I didn't even know that there was such an event in the town but I thought to give it a try and I was surprised in a very positive way by the paintings I saw. I don't want to comment any further on the paintings now because I don't want to affect your opinion either in a positive or negative way, I would rather let you judge it on your own and after that, you can comment your opinion in the comment section.

Main Hall

As you would see from the photos the area was divided by walls, which also divide the themes between all the paintings. You can see from the last photo that each side has a different kind of painting because they are from different collections and were created on different dates.

Art

My personal favorite collection

Well, I would like to close this post with something that I found pretty bizarre and it was one of his collections that catch my interest. It had the title "UNSMILING BODY" or "Lazarakia". This collection was inspired by the Cretan tradition Lazarakia of the Saturday of Lazarus. On the Saturday of Lazarus at the "lazarakia" bread in the shape of small children is offered for prosperity and carols are sung for this day. Well, it's kinda creepy when you read the context and see the images below and it really arouses my interest. Also, Mr.Tzanis Dimitris wrote about this exhibition the following "I studied a lot about the descent of Odysseus into Hades, in the rhapsody Necya of the Odyssey, then, Theseus forgotten on the throne of oblivion, the capture of Cerberus by Heracles, and the unruly Orpheus and I finished with a Christian version. That of Lazarus, which we all know marks the return and the meaning of the Resurrection. These symbolic images, the mental complexes pushed to the depths of an area of ​​the unconscious that from childhood come to fill what we would call an intermediate space of the thematic approach, define a return from fantasy, to inner truth and its unsmiling side. All readings had a commonplace. If one were to return from the "other world" what conclusions will he bring to us?". There's a lot of food for thought here and I would like to hear your opinion about this particular collection.

Thank you for reading