Those of you who may have read my ‘Early Days’ stuff on this website will have come across my visit to Matala in 1966. Or you may have heard the stories from the days when this tiny bay became the hippie capital of Crete. Why it happened I don’t know, but the bay was truly beautiful. It has lovely fine sand and the cliff on the right as you look out westwards towards the sunset has a large number of roman burial places, effectively caves where you could stay if you had a sleeping bag.
When I went there it was truly amazing. To have been through many cretan villages seeing only cretans, I washed up in this lovely place to see dozens of hippies just lying in the sun and enjoying themselves. Their colorful clothes a stark contrast to the cretans. There were one or two stone houses and a kind of cave church, but it did not seem that any locals lived there at all.
There was a temporary taverna stroke bar that one of the cretans had set up on the beach and with some beers and some wine and a souvlaki barbecue he did very well. I remember that he also had an old Philips record player there that worked on batteries and he played LPs over and over. That was the Mermaid Cafe as everyone called it.
Today there are hotels and rent-rooms establishments as well as tavernas and in the summer it is chaos. In the winter though, almost nobody lives in Matala. There are no cars and it is almost like it used to be, but no hippies, of course. Oh, and you are not allowed to sleep in the caves anymore.
I never met anyone famous when I was there, but one of the people that spent some time in Matala was Joni Mitchell and she wrote her famous song Carey all about the place, the beach, and it always brings it all back to me.
Thanks Ray .. enjoyed this. I saw Matala in the 80’s and there were still plenty of ‘travellers’ around there then.
I was in Matala in the winter of 1969. I’m a Canadian author, working on a book that includes a section on Matala back then. I’m a little fuzzy on the details…anybody who was there around that time, I’d love to hear from you. Did the Delfini have the Philips record player, or the Mermaid?
Pedantically,
Marni
Hi,
Thanks for this page. I am collecting bits of information about Matala in the sixties and seventies.
Have a look and feel free to comment or add anything.
http://www.elzosmid.nl/matala
hi
Crispin here from Stroud in England. Jennie and i met on New Year’s Eve going into 67. We hitched to Crete
via Venice in April and met a couple from L.A Greg and Judy. it was they who told us about Matala, while we were staying in the Youth Hotel.
We had £50 each, the maximum you were allowed to take with you in those days, and planned to pick grapes or whatever and be away for 6 months!
Greg was a song-writer friend of Jackson Browne and he had witten songs for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I remember other names, Zac Srtakey (American) and we became close friends with Lizzie and Adam also from L.A. Adam was wild and ended up jumping out of a bedroom window in Bombay sadly. Jackson Browne later wrote a song for him Song For Adam.
We were personally at the gentler, more flowery end of hippiedom (Donovan,etc) as opposed to the more out and out hippies then. We hitched down through old Yugoslavia and arrived in Athens virtually on the first day of a curfew, and military junta overthrow. I’d washed up in a restaurant in London to save money and met a Greek guy who’d given me his address in Athens.Even though he was now in the Army , we somehow ended up staying with his lovely Greek family for about a week until boats from Piraeus resumed.
Matala was a wonderful life changing experience. We found ourselves a sweet cave. I don’t remember cooking but we had an old parafin lamp , and rush matting on the
floor.At night we’d sit aound with guitars singing and drinking wine.
We heard about B-Ins and Love Ins , acid, the West coast music for the first time. The little café used to make cheap tomate-salades (onions and tomatoes.) with astragalia (nuts) cheap and potent Retsina..and there was an old
record player..with records left by freaks and travellers.
(Richie Havens, Blues Project, Donovan, etc)
We lived in a cave from April fro about 3 months ,
at Easter when all the villagers came down. We’d walk to Pidsidia (sic) and hitch to Mires for fresh-made amazing Yoghurt. There was a little white shack, a bit like one of the
German guys pics. We didn’t have cameras so no pics sadly. We all talked about “where to next”..giving blood in Thessaloniki (as already documented on this site)..was a favourite..although I was quite queazy when i did it…400 drachmas sounds about right.. but it might have been less.We then hitched up to Istanbul, via Xanthi and scary coastal roads with sleepy and lecherous lorry drivers on dodgy mountain bends and all met up again in the stoned haze of the Gulhane where we managed to get a cheap room. The Pudding Shop was the place to meet. So many memoires. We went back in 85 but it had changed so much. i hated the big plastic fronted bits on the restaurants.It felt a bit sad.
all for now X love C+J.(still togther with kids and grand-kids)