Books, Guides & Maps

Books, Guides and Maps

Recommended Books, Guides and Maps

Guides and Maps (linked to Amazon)

The Rough Guide to Crete (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

Crete Top 10 (Eyewitness Top Ten Travel Guides) by Robin Gauldie

Crete (Lonely Planet Regional Guides) by Victoria Kyriakopoulos

Living in Crete: A Guide to Living, Working, Retiring and Buying Property in Crete by Carol Palioudakis

Crete West: Rother Walking Guide by Gert Hirner, Jakob Murböck, and Gill Round

Western Crete (Landscapes) by Jonnie Godfrey and Elizabeth Karslake

AA Twinpack Crete (AA TwinPack Guides) (AA TwinPack Guides) by AA Publishing

Map of Western Crete (Maps of Greek Islands)

Recommended Plant Handbooks

This list is provided by Clive Daws and Stephen Waters Pure Crete's guides on the 'Crete in Bloom' tour. 

Some of the specialist titles can be ordered from: www.summerfieldbooks.com (Suppliers for the Botanical Society of the British Isles) or www.nhbs.com.

Prices (where indicated) are approximate).

Blamey, Marjorie and Grey-Wilson, Christopher (1993 onward)  Mediterranean Wild Flowers / Wild Flowers of the Mediterranean.
Harper Collins / A&C Black / Domino Books. Several hard- and soft-cover versions (contents apparently identical) published at £16 - £25. ISBN 0002199017 / 0713670150. Some are of interest to book collectors, which can inflate prices drastically for particular copies!
Colour paintings of over 1500 species from all around the Mediterranean, plus many line drawings of details used in identification. An excellent, book, particularly if you expect also to visit other Mediterranean locations.

Fielding, John and Turland, Nicholas (2005) Flowers of Crete. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
£55. ISBN 184246079X. Magnificently-produced book, full of valuable information on Crete, its plants and their ecology. Splendid photographs, which include most species of the island’s flora. Only drawback: large and heavy to carry, weighing 3.04 kg  (6 lb 11 oz).

Papiomitoglou, Vangelis (2006)  Wild Flowers of Crete. Mediterraneo Editions, Rethymno, Crete, Greece. £16.50. ISBN 9608227771.
Good photos and descriptions of over 500 species you are likely to meet on the island. Just about pocket size, probably the best of the compact Cretan flower books.

Orchids (Remember that nearly all orchid species are spring-flowering.)

Kretzschmar, Horst,  Kretzschmar, Gisela and Eccarius, Wolfgang (2004) 
Orchids  Crete & Dodecanese. Mediterraneo Editions, Rethymno, Crete, Greece. £22.50. ISBN 9608227429
Excellent photographs, identification details and distribution maps.

Other books, including older and more specialised works

Many of these, inevitably, are out of print but are worth considering if you can spot them secondhand at a favourable price.

Alibertis, Antonis (1998)  The Orchids of Crete and Karpathos. Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
A fully-illustrated guide, including hybrids and special forms, for the orchid specialist.

Alibertis, Chryssoula and Antonis (1989)  The Wild Orchids of Crete. Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
Earlier edition. Species cover similar to the 1998 version but many of the illustrations differ.

Clauser, Marina and Innocenti, Andrea (1999)  The Flora of Crete. Bonechi, Firenze, Italy.
Excellent photographs of many of the most characteristic species of Crete.

Huxley, Anthony and Taylor, William (1989)  Flowers of Greece and the Aegean. Hogarth Press, London.  Has helpful additional information, e.g. on herbal uses of plants, and their local Greek names.

Jahn, Ralf and Schönfelder, Peter (1995)  Exkursionsflora für Kreta. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart.
Keys and short descriptions for all the Cretan flora. The only compact and reasonably accessible book aiming for this level of cover. Illustrations are confined to photos of about 100 species, mostly endemics. Available only in German. Good, but not for the faint-hearted!

Polunin, Oleg (1980)  Flowers of Greece and the Balkans. Oxford University Press.
A thorough work, more authoritative than most of the ‘popular’ books.

Schönfelder, Ingrid and Peter (1990)  Wild Flowers of the Mediterranean. Collins, London.
Good for general use, with top-quality photographs, but less cover of the Cretan endemic species.

Sfikas, George (1987)  Wild Flowers of Crete. Efstathiadis, Athens, Greece.
Pocket-size, and deals specifically with Crete.

Sterry, Paul (2000)  Collins Complete Mediterranean Wildlife Photoguide. Harper Collins, London. A wide range of illustrations - but don’t be misled by the word ‘complete’ - there’s no way of getting photos of everything into one fieldguide.

Mediterranean Ecology

Grove, A.T. and Rackham, Oliver (2003)  The Nature of Mediterranean Europe  An Ecological History. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Rackham, O. and Moody, J.A. (1996)  The Making of the Cretan Landscape. Manchester University Press.

Checklists and Distribution Atlases

Barclay, Colville (1986)  Crete, Checklist of the Vascular Plants. Englera, 6. Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum, Berlin - Dahlem.

Turland, N.J., Chilton, L. and Press, J. (1993)  Flora of the Cretan Area. Annotated Checklist and Atlas. HMSO (Natural History Museum), London.

Chilton, L. and Turland, N.J. (1997)  Flora of Crete A Supplement. Marengo Publications, Retford, Nottinghamshire. Additions and updates to the 1993 book
Further online updates: http://www.marengowalks.com/fcs.html

Battle of Crete - Military History 

The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation by George Psychoundakis and Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Fall of Crete (Cassell Military Paperbacks) by Alan Clark

Crete: The Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor

The Golden Step: A Walk Through the Heart of Crete (Armchair Traveller) by Christopher Somerville

Falling for Icarus: A Journey Among the Cretans by Rory MacLean 

Lawrence Durrell 

'To the Greeks Crete seems the most authentically Greek of all the isalnds because of the lengh of its history and relative remotness from the ancient centres of war and diplomacy. Crete, for example, played no part in the Persian or the Peloponnesian wars.

'The big island' Crete is always called in the colloquial tongue, and big it is, spacious and full of the brooding presence of it's four groups of mountains.

The Cretans have seen everything - the collapse of the Minoan Empire, the rise of Venice, the slave markets of Turkey, Nazi parachutists and American hippies, nothing has been spared them.' Extract from Lawrence Durrell's The Greek Islands.

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