Heraklion is planning schools, social housing, green spaces and public facilities on three former military sites. But before every square meter is assigned a conventional purpose, perhaps someone should ask whether part of this land could become something visitors would actually come to Crete to experience.
The Municipality of Heraklion has moved another step closer to the urban development of the former Beteinaki, Theodosaki and Giakoumaki military camps, after the Municipal Council unanimously approved the revision of the area’s urban planning study, following a proposal by Deputy Mayor for Spatial Planning, Urban Planning and Municipal Property Nikos Gialitakis. The revised plan, developed within the framework of the Protocol of Understanding and Cooperation signed between the Municipality and the National Defense Fund, provides for the things cities quite reasonably need: school buildings, social housing, sports and cultural facilities, playgrounds, parking areas and green spaces.
There is also a rather satisfying little twist in the story, because the revision was not simply a matter of moving boxes around on a planning map. A geological study identified a deep fault in the area, prompting the Municipality to reconsider two building blocks originally designated for general residential use. Rather than treating the geological reality as an irritating obstacle between the planners and their rectangles, the revised study turns those two blocks into shared green spaces, increasing the amount of open land and aligning the development with the area’s physical characteristics and the requirements of planning and environmental legislation.
The result is also a change in the distribution of the property, with the National Defense Fund’s share reduced from 46.12 percent to 42.93 percent and the Municipality of Heraklion’s share increasing from 53.88 percent to 57.07 percent.
All perfectly sensible, and I do not quarrel whatsoever with schools, housing, playgrounds, culture, sport or trees. In fact, given the way cities tend to behave when confronted with an empty piece of land, the fact that some of it is becoming green space rather than yet another collection of buildings deserves a small round of applause.
But there is something about the phrase former military camps that keeps nagging at me.
Perhaps because I have a somewhat unusual relationship with the concept.
Perhaps because when I hear that a city has acquired former military land, I do not immediately see apartment blocks, parking spaces, and a playground with three brightly colored pieces of equipment, slowly being destroyed by the Cretan sun.
I see a survival school. And before anyone at the Municipality starts wondering whether I have finally lost whatever remained of my mind, hear me out.
What if Tourists Could Learn to Survive Beyond Crete?
Crete already has an almost absurd abundance of things for visitors to see. We have Knossos, museums, Byzantine churches, Venetian buildings, beaches, villages, mountains, gorges, caves, archaeological sites, and enough dramatic scenery to make a professional photographer question whether the island is showing off deliberately.
What we have considerably less of are places where visitors can learn something about the landscape by actually having to deal with it.
And that, to me, is where a former military camp becomes interesting.
Not as a military attraction, not as a weapons playground, and certainly not as some ridiculous tourist version of Rambo, but as a civilian school of survival and outdoor skills, using the former military infrastructure as the starting point and the Cretan landscape as the real classroom.
Because Crete is already perfectly equipped for the job.
We have mountains that can make an inexperienced hiker reconsider several of their life choices, gorges that look deceptively friendly until you have been walking through one for hours, caves, dry landscapes, exposed terrain, fierce summer heat, sudden mountain weather, strong winds, and a coastline that has a habit of reminding people that the Mediterranean is not actually a swimming pool.
We also have something even more valuable: centuries of people learning to live with all of this without the enormous technological advantage of opening an app and asking for the nearest supermarket.
A survival school could bring those two things together.
I Know a Little About Survival
I may have an ulterior motive here, because I know a little about survival. I have eaten snakes and frogs during training, learned enough about obtaining water to become considerably suspicious of the phrase there must be water somewhere, made several kinds of survival fires, and developed a particular fondness for the star fire. I have climbed, rappelled, trained endurance, become extremely skilled with knives, received Shotokan karate training through the military, and learned to shoot despite having absolutely no romantic feelings whatsoever about firearms.
I have also undergone training for the rather less picturesque possibility of being captured and subjected to enemy interrogation.
And then there was the wilderness exercise in which I had to survive alone for two weeks with nothing but my military survival kit.
The instructor was there, but he was not there to rescue me from every unpleasant little inconvenience that wilderness could devise. He was specifically prohibited from intervening unless I was in mortal danger. Otherwise, I had to figure things out myself, which is a wonderfully reassuring arrangement until you discover it’s becoming seriously inconvenient. You are about to die are apparently two very different categories in military survival training.
In survival mode, you stop seeing a patch of woodland as simply a pleasant place with trees and start wondering where the water is, where you could shelter, how the wind is moving, what could be used for fire, what direction you are facing, how much energy you have, and what you are going to do if the comfortable little plan you started with suddenly ceases to exist.
Which is why, when I look at Crete, I see a rather magnificent outdoor classroom waiting for someone to have the imagination to use it.
This Could be Something Tourists Would Remember
We spend an enormous amount of time in tourism talking about experiences, usually followed by photographs of somebody holding a cooking spoon in a whitewashed kitchen. At the same time, an instructor explains how to chop a tomato.
There is nothing wrong with cooking classes, but surely we can occasionally challenge visitors a little.
Imagine being able to spend half a day in Heraklion learning how to navigate with a map and compass, construct an emergency shelter, make a fire without reaching into your pocket for a lighter, understand how to find and conserve water, manage heat, tie useful knots, cook outdoors and deal with a basic emergency.
Imagine then taking those skills outside and putting them into practice.
That is an experience.
More importantly, it is an experience that actually belongs to Crete.
A visitor could leave the island knowing not only where Knossos was, but how to read a landscape, how to recognize the dangers of heat, how to think about water in a dry environment, and what to do if a hiking companion suddenly gets into trouble.
That is considerably more useful than another refrigerator magnet.
And it has the potential to become a proper tourism product rather than simply another municipal facility.
Make it Cretan, not generic.c
The important thing would be to resist the temptation to build a generic survival school and slap a picture of a Cretan goat on the brochure.
The whole point would be to make the experience specifically about surviving and understanding Crete.
There could be modern wilderness skills alongside traditional knowledge, environmental education alongside practical training, and perhaps even archaeology woven into the experience.
Because if we are going to tell visitors about the Minoans, perhaps we should occasionally let them think about the rather obvious question that follows: How did people actually live here?
How did they obtain and conserve water?
How did they make fire?
How did they prepare food?
How did they navigate?
How did they make use of plants?
How did they adapt themselves to an environment in which modern conveniences did not exist?
Suddenly archaeology becomes something physical rather than something viewed from behind a rope.
The visitor is not simply being told that ancient people survived in a particular landscape. For a few hours, they are being asked to consider what that actually means.
And the Military History Does Not Have to Disappear
There is another reason I think the idea fits these properties unusually well. The former camps have a history, and that history should not simply be scrubbed away because the land has acquired a new purpose.
Some of the existing structures, where appropriate, could potentially be incorporated into an interpretation space explaining the history of the camps and their military role. At the same time, the surrounding land takes on an entirely different civilian function.
A place once intended to prepare people for military life could become a place where civilians learn preparedness, resilience, navigation, emergency response, and outdoor skills.
The emphasis changes from military readiness to civilian resilience, a more interesting story than simply saying that an old military property was demolished and replaced with something shiny.
It Could Be Useful to Locals Too
The tourism opportunity is what makes me raise the idea in the first place, but the community benefits could be considerable.
The same school could eventually serve local children and teenagers, as well as hiking clubs, outdoor organizations, sports groups, environmental groups, and people interested in emergency preparedness.
Schools could bring students for practical outdoor education; hikers could learn how to prepare properly before heading into the mountains; young people could learn first aid, navigation, and environmental awareness. Local organizations could use the facilities for appropriate training.
In a world in which we have become extraordinarily good at outsourcing almost every practical task to technology, people could rediscover the deeply unfashionable ability to solve a problem without asking a machine what to do next. I am rather fond of that idea.
Heraklion Could Create Something People Travel For
The Municipality is already discussing how to turn a planning problem into an opportunity by converting land affected by the geological fault into additional green space.
Why not take that thinking one step further?
Why should former military land become only another collection of perfectly reasonable municipal functions when a small part of it could become something genuinely distinctive?
Heraklion does not need another attraction that visitors photograph once and then forget. It could use an experience that gives people a story, something they can tell their friends about when they get home.
Something that appeals to hikers, adventure travelers, families, curious tourists, young people, and anyone who has ever looked at a mountain and thought, I wonder what would happen if my phone stopped working up there.
And it could connect several things that Crete already possesses in abundance: landscape, history, archaeology, environmental knowledge, outdoor recreation and tourism.
The infrastructure is there: the only missing ingredient is imagination.
Don’t Give Tourists Another Thing to Look at
This is what I would like someone involved in the planning of these former camps to consider before the last piece of land is allocated and the final line is drawn on the map.
Don’t give tourists another thing to look at. Give them something to do.
Let them learn how to read a map, make a fire, find water, build shelter, tie a rope, recognize danger, and keep their heads when the landscape stops being postcard-pretty and starts behaving like the wild place it actually is.
Let them learn something about the people who lived on this island before bottled water came in six-packs and every hiking trail acquired a GPS track.
Let them discover that survival is not really about being the toughest person in the room. It is about observation, preparation, patience, improvisation, and knowing what to do next when the original plan has gone spectacularly to hell.
And perhaps that is exactly the kind of tourism Heraklion should be looking for: not another attraction manufactured for visitors, but an experience built around something the island already possesses.
Crete itself.
The mountains can provide the terrain, the climate can provide the challenge, the history can provide the story, and the former military camps can provide the place where people learn how to put it all together.
As for me, I already have the camouflage.