A Day on the Quay at the Κύ#α Cafe Why does the Χανιά harbour area look more like Italy than the rest of Crete? From the fourteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries Χανιά’s Old Harbour was a major Venetian seaport, a commanding maritime height that dominated the eastern Mediterranean. The arc of Venice’s three major markets spanned Byzantine Constantinople to the Northeast, the Levant in the middle, and Egypt to the South. Those three geographies hide entire libraries of Chaniote history, from which one can nibble from the following canapé of vignettes. Constantinople was the largest trade terminus in the eastern Mediterranean. It was a forty-day caravan journey from the western terminus of the Silk Road, Samarkand—itself second only to Constantinople in the span of its economic tentacles. Samarkand’s trade history extends back as 685 ACE after China’s first Tang emperor Taizong (626–649) dealt with a long tradition of Tarim Basin banditry by exterminating the males and selling the women as chattel. Xi’an and Dunhuang in the East gazed westward across a dry flume of trade made of sand and pebbles, yet which channeled wealth’s flow no less readily than a flume of water. The first star chart in history was made in the mid-640s, not in bewonderment of our meaning amid all this immensity, but rather to get across the desert with cargoes intact. The Silk Road trade thrived through sclerotic and turbid times, bad governance and good, until the Mongol invasions clogged the desert with death eight centuries later. Even in prosperous times the Silk Road was no bed of roses. A diary note by an Islamic traveler named Abdul Zeyd al Hassan recorded, ‘During the Huang Chao rebellion near the end of Tang
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