|
Kaliviani - History
The roots of Kaliviani belong to the past. Like everywhere else on Crete, thick layers of new ground covering old civilizations. Here and there, a piece of old pottery comes up – back to sunlight again. Around the fields, old walls from hundreds of years ago are still functioning. More and more sectors became victims of the strong rainfalls in winter. Because fewer people still know how to build natural walls most of the broken walls cannot be reconstructed. Nowadays it is trendy to build (by mostly Albanians foreigners) nice nature walls around the homes – just a question of money. Maybe in old times it was the same..
When exactly the village had been build, I still do not know. Probably it has its name from the little huts – placed in the middle of wheat fields. To stay nearby the sea was dangerous because of pirate attacks. Therefore, the villager has built proper stone houses and they where all connected to each other! So women, children and the livestock could flee, invisible to the pirates, into the caves back in the mountains. That helped surviving. Still now you can have an impression of all that while walking through the narrow lanes of Kaliviani. Often strangers cannot see where one home ends and the next home begins. In the middle of Kaliviani, everything merges into one another and people live close together. Maybe that is why they respect each other even more, it is friendly and everyone pays attention without being intrusive – a quality I have noticed many times and I really like it. As small as Kaliviani looks, I never felt alone living here because there is always something happening around my home.
This page is already proof read by Dennes, thank you!
|
