The Last Chestnut Farmers of Elos

The road to Elos climbs for twenty minutes from the coast, past terraced olive groves and abandoned stone walls, until the chestnut trees begin. In October, they cover the road with a carpet that crunches under tyres. In August, their canopy turns the light green and cool in a way that feels like a different country from the beaches forty minutes below.

Elos is a village of perhaps sixty permanent residents. That number swells to three hundred in summer when descendants return from Athens and Germany and Australia. It has one kafeneion, one small church with a bell that rings at 08:00, and the oldest chestnut forest in Crete. The trees were already a century old when the Venetians arrived.

The last families

Manolis Papadakis is 71. He has harvested chestnuts every October for fifty-three years. His father did it before him, and his grandfather before that. The family has roughly four hundred trees on the slope above the village, some with trunks too wide to put your arms around.

"We used to sell them as far as Heraklion," he says, sitting in the kafeneion with a coffee he has been nursing for an hour. "Now I sell them at the village festival and keep the rest."

The forest

The chestnut grove above the village is extraordinary, not because of any single tree but because of the cumulative effect of hundreds of them, their branches interlocking overhead, their roots lifting the stone path. Walking through it in October, when the ground is covered and the light filters through yellowing leaves, is one of the more quietly beautiful things you can do in western Crete.

Getting there

Elos is 55km west of Chania, about an hour by car. The village sits at 600 metres, so bring a layer in the evening even in summer. The Elos Chestnut Festival happens every October, when the harvest is in. The whole village turns out, there is local wine and raki, and old men play lyra until midnight.