Morning Mundanities on Odos Zampeliou Odos Zampeliou is one of the main routes that navigate the labyrinthine Topanas or Το!ανάς quarter. Today it is nicely paved with slates and cobbles of granite, but until just a few decades ago it was a rutway of dust or mire, depending on the season. Even now a few of the old palaces still have mud scrapers at the side of the door to clean off one’s boots. The Topanas was the wealthy merchant district in Χανιά’s Venetian heyday from the middle of the thirteenth century until the Turks overran the city in 1645. Odos Zampeliou marked the boundary that separated the pretentiously rich from the preposterously rich. The portal leading out of town just below my balcony dated from the 1400s and the most recent house on Odos Zampeliou was built well before the Turks. When the Turks took over they kept the merchants but threw out the politicians—a thought which would delight libertarians today save for the fact that the Turks replaced the old politicians with an inexperienced group of politically loyal toadies, and things didn’t go too well from that point on. Today a group of workers showed up at the unearthly hour of eight a.m. to make a show of progress on a seemingly endless cobblestone repair on the street below. 'Street' is not really the right word. 'Medievalard' is more apt, but the term probably won’t catch on the way ‘boulevard’ did from its French root boulet, meaning in this instance 'cannon ball’. When Baron Haussmann designed the long, clear avenues that so delight Parisian promeneurs today, he did so because France’s military foresaw the need to move large numbers of troops quickly through the streets, and to whiff a cannon load of grapeshot (smaller boules
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