Martinengo Bastion
Kazantzakis' grave on the southern star.
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Heraklion's son and modern Greece's most famous pen: Zorba, and the Last Temptation that angered the Church into denying his rites โ so the city buried him on its highest bastion, a king without a church. To Greeks he is freedom's own equation โ his grave the town's truest shrine.
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Heraklion's walls are the legendary siege's shield: four and a half kilometres of Venice's mightiest Mediterranean fortification (16th century โ designed by Sanmicheli, first engineer of his age) with seven star bastions and moats โ the ramparts that held the Ottomans twenty-one years still ring the old town whole. Their crest is the city's upper promenade: Chania Gate to Martinengo Bastion, a sunset walk over the rooftops โ and on Martinengo its spiritual summit: the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis, modern Greece's greatest writer (Zorba), buried here outside the cemeteries by the Church's refusal, his stone marked by a wooden cross and the deathless line: "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." The Chania and St. George gates and their tunnels complete the round โ and Martinengo's noon scene: town, harbour, Koules and sea.
Kazantzakis' grave on the southern star.
Four kilometres over the town's roofs.
Martinengo Bastion, 71201 Heraklion