Koriandri, There is a map that hangs above my desk, frayed at the edges and stained with the ghost of a coffee cup ring. It is a map of Crete, but it is not the map you would find in a rental car kiosk. It is topographical, a frantic scribble of brown contour lines clawing at the blue embrace of the sea. And in the heart of this parchment, in the high, roadless interior between the Psiloritis mountains and the Libyan Sea, I once drew a small, tentative ‘X’ in faint pencil. Next to it, a single word: Koriandri.
I found the name not in a guidebook, but in the footnote of a forgotten academic paper on Minoan footpaths. The reference was fleeting, describing it as a “seasonal settlement of shepherds, known for its preservation of the old ways and its unique, isolated dialect.” There were no photographs. No tourist reviews. No listed attractions. Just a name, a whisper on the wind, a geographical secret.
This was a decade ago, in the twilight of a different era of travel. I was a different person then—a collector of places. I traveled with a checklist, a camera perpetually in hand, my worth measured in passport stamps and a tally of “must-see” sights conquered. I had done the Santorini sunset, elbowing through a throng of selfie sticks. I had endured the chaotic charm of Chania’s harbour, a spectacle performed for an audience of thousands. I was full of places, but I was empty of something essential. I was suffering from a profound, modern malady: I was touristed out.
Koriandri became my antidote. It was not a destination; it was a quest. This is the story of that quest, and how a village that barely existed on paper taught me everything I needed to know about why we wander.
The Journey is the Destination: A Pilgrimage on Foot
The modern world has a contract with us: in exchange for convenience, it asks for our wonder. You can fly into Heraklion, rent a climate-controlled car, and be sipping a cocktail on Elafonisi beach in a few hours. The land between is reduced to a blur, an obstacle to be minimized. I had signed this contract too many times.
For Koriandri, I broke it.
There is no road that leads to Koriandri. There is a track, which becomes a path, which becomes a goat trail. My journey began in the village of Anogia, the last outpost of reliable Wi-Fi and espresso machines. From there, I hired a man named Yiannis, who was less a guide and more a force of nature compressed into a wiry, septuagenarian frame. His face was a roadmap of its own, etched by sun and sirocco.
“You want to go to Koriandri?” he grunted, looking me up and down with an appraiser’s eye. “Why? There is nothing there.”
“That’s the point,” I replied, feeling both foolish and defiant.
He shrugged, a gesture that seemed to contain whole philosophies. “Ela,” he said. “Come.”
We set off at dawn. The first hour was a gentle climb through silvery olive groves, the air thick with the scent of thyme and sage crushed under our boots. Then, the landscape began to change. The trees thinned, the earth turned to a reddish, rocky scree, and the path began to coil upwards in earnest, following the spine of the mountains. This was not a hike; it was a conversation with the earth, one where the earth did most of the talking.
Yiannis moved with a preternatural grace, his footsteps silent, his breathing even. I, on the other hand, was a symphony of grunts and scrapes, my city-softened body protesting with every step. My backpack, filled with “essentials,” felt like an anchor. With each mile, the noise in my head began to quiet. The anxiety about my inbox, the mental list of chores, the endless replay of conversations—it all began to be scoured away by the simple, brutal physics of ascent.
We walked for hours. The only sounds were the crunch of our boots, the distant bleat of a goat, and the wind singing its old song through the gorges. We drank from a natural spring, the water so cold and pure it felt like a new kind of thought. We ate a lunch of Yiannis’s wife’s bread, hard cheese, and bitter olives, sitting on a sun-warmed rock overlooking a valley so vast and silent it felt like the dawn of creation.
This was the first lesson of Koriandri: The path is not the price of admission; it is the sacred text. The journey itself, the slow, deliberate, and difficult act of moving through a landscape, is where the transformation begins. By the time we crested the final ridge and saw the cluster of stone roofs nestled in the high fold of the mountain, I was not the same person who had set out from Anogia. I had been simplified, stripped back to my most essential components: a body that was tired, and a mind that was, for the first time in years, truly quiet.
The Architecture of Time: A Village Built of Stone and Silence
Koriandri did not announce itself. It simply emerged from the landscape, as if the mountain had grown it. The village was a collection of perhaps two dozen mitata—the ancient, stone-vaulted shepherd huts unique to this part of Crete. They were not built on the land; they were built of the land, from the grey limestone that surrounded them. There were no power lines, no paved streets, no signs pointing to a taverna or a museum.
The silence was the first thing that truly struck me. It wasn’t an empty silence, but a thick, textured one, woven from the sounds that belonged: the whisper of the wind, the buzz of a bee, the distant chime of a goat’s bell. It was a silence you could listen to.
An old woman, her face a beautiful, wrinkled testament to a lifetime in this high air, emerged from one of the huts. She was dressed in head-to-toe black, a common sight in rural Greece, but here it felt different, less a symbol of mourning and more a uniform of dignity and endurance. She looked at Yiannis, then at me, and nodded slowly. No smile, no frown. A simple acknowledgment of presence.
Yiannis spoke to her in the local dialect, a version of Greek that was thicker, more guttural, laced with words that had long since vanished from the lexicon of the coast. I understood nothing, and everything. He was explaining me, this strange pilgrim who had walked a day to see their “nothing.”
She gestured for us to follow her. Her name was Eleni, and she, along with a handful of other elderly residents, were the guardians of Koriandri. In the summer, a few more families would return, following the old transhumance patterns, but now, in the late spring, it was just them.
She led me to one of the mitata. The interior was cool and dark, a single room that served as kitchen, bedroom, and life. The air smelled of woodsmoke, dried herbs, and age. There was a simple hearth, a wooden table worn smooth by generations of elbows, and a bed in the corner. A single, small window framed a perfect picture of the sky. This was the second lesson of Koriandri: A life can be rich in proportion to what it has willingly let go.
There was no clutter here because there was no capacity for it. Every object had a clear, unequivocal purpose. There was no space for the superfluous. This radical simplicity was not a poverty, but a profound elegance. It forced a focus on the essential—warmth, food, shelter, community. My own life, with its endless streams of consumer goods, digital distractions, and psychic noise, suddenly seemed like a chaotic and frantic attempt to fill a void that didn’t need to be filled, but rather, needed to be acknowledged and respected.
The Unwritten Menu: A Feast of Presence
That evening, we ate with Eleni and two of her neighbours, a brother and sister in their eighties named Manolis and Maria. The meal was an act of creation from nothing. Eleni produced a stew of wild greens (horta) she had foraged that morning, cooked with a few potatoes and enriched with a glorious glug of local olive oil. There was more of the dense, sourdough bread, and a ceramic jug of wine that Manolis had made from his tiny, terraced vineyard further down the slope.
The wine was rough, potent, and tasted of the earth and the sun. We ate from chipped clay bowls, sitting on wooden stools outside Eleni’s mitata as the sky turned from blue to violet to a deep, star-flecked black. The conversation was sparse, translated in fragments by Yiannis, but it was punctuated by long, comfortable silences. We were not there to talk; we were there to be together.
Manolis, after his second cup of wine, began to sing. It was a rizitika, a traditional Cretan folk song from the mountains, a capella. His voice was old and cracked, but it carried a power that silenced the night itself. It was a song of love and loss, of resistance and the land. I didn’t understand the words, but I felt them in my bones. It was a sound that had been born in these mountains, and it belonged to them. It was not a performance for a tourist audience; it was an offering to the night, a thread in the cultural DNA of this place.
This was the third lesson of Koriandri: The most authentic experiences are not sold; they are shared. They exist on the other side of transaction. The meal was not from a menu; it was from Eleni’s knowledge of the land. The wine was not from a bottle with a label; it was from Manolis’s labour. The song was not scheduled; it was summoned by the moment. This was the deep travel I had been starving for—not observing a culture from behind a lens, but being allowed, for a fleeting moment, to sit within its rhythm.
The Weight of a Word: The Language of Place
The name, Koriandri, had haunted me. On my second day, I asked Eleni what it meant. She smiled a rare, gap-toothed smile and led me to the edge of the village, to a small, rocky clearing where the ground was covered in a low, feathery green plant. She bent down, picked a sprig, and crushed it between her fingers, holding it under my nose.
The scent was unmistakable, yet different. It was coriander, but wilder, more pungent, with a citrusy depth the supermarket variety had long since lost. “Koriandri,” she said.
The village was named for the wild coriander that grew in abundance there. In that moment, the abstraction of the name on my map collapsed into a sensory, living reality. The place and its name were one. This is a truth we have largely lost. We live in a world of generic names—‘The Royal Hotel,’ ‘The Central Park.’ But in places like Koriandri, the names are still descriptive, born from the intimate, long-term marriage between a people and their environment.
Yiannis explained that the local dialect was full of such words. They had specific terms for the different types of wind that came down from the peaks, names for every rock formation and spring. Their language was a highly detailed map of their home, a tool for navigating and understanding their world in a way that my Google Maps could never comprehend.
This was the fourth lesson: To know a place’s true name is to understand its soul. Our modern, efficient travel skims over the surface of names, using them as waypoints. But to stop and learn the story behind a name—to smell the koriandri that gave a village its identity—is to plunge beneath the surface and connect with the very essence of a place.
The Letting Go: The Gift of “Nothing”
When it was time to leave, a strange melancholy settled over me. Eleni pressed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle into my hand. It contained a handful of wild oregano and a sprig of the koriandri. Manolis shook my hand, his grip still iron-strong. There were no bills, no exchange of money for services rendered. I had brought some supplies from Anogia—coffee, sugar, tobacco—which Yiannis told me was the appropriate custom, a gesture of thanks, not a payment.
The walk back was different. My body was sore, but my spirit was light. The ‘X’ on my map was now filled with faces, scents, sounds, and silence. I had gone in search of a place and found a state of mind.
I never went back. Part of me is afraid to. I hear that a rough road has been bulldozed part of the way there now. That a few of the mitata have been bought by Germans and Dutch and turned into holiday homes with satellite dishes. The world, in its relentless march, is finally finding Koriandri.
But the Koriandri I carry with me is safe. It exists not as a geographical location, but as a touchstone, a personal north star for what travel can and should be. It taught me that the goal of travel is not to acquire things—souvenirs, photos, stories to boast about. The goal is to shed things: preconceptions, hurry, the compulsive need for comfort and content.
Koriandri, the place of “nothing,” gave me everything:
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It reacquainted me with my own body, not as an ornament, but as a vehicle for experiencing the world.
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It taught me that silence is not an absence, but a presence to be cultivated.
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It showed me that human connection transcends language when it is built on shared, simple humanity.
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It convinced me that the most precious resources in our frantic, burning world are slowness, space, and silence.
The map still hangs above my desk. The pencil ‘X’ is still faintly visible. I no longer see it as a destination to be checked off. I see it as a question, a quiet challenge from my past self to my present self: Are you listening? Are you still willing to walk the path? Are you brave enough to seek out the “nothing” that holds everything?
For any traveller feeling jaded, lost in the echo chamber of Top 10 lists and influencer itineraries, I offer you this: Find your own Koriandri. It might not be a village in the mountains of Crete. It might be a forgotten stretch of coastline, a small town in the plains, or a forest with no trail markers. Go there slowly. Go there respectfully. Leave your expectations behind. And be prepared to learn that what you thought was nothing was, in fact, the very thing you’d been searching for all along.