It was all so different from the mule tracks, dusty riverbeds and gorges that this old veteran had once struggled along. ‘You have to see the Kriegsmuseum in the hills,’ he was told in the hotel. ‘Georgos makes everyone welcome and there’s nothing like it in the whole of Crete.’ As they turned down the narrow lane from the village of Kares, he wondered just what he was coming to. It was indeed a unique war museum, judging by the rusting machinery cluttering up the entrance of the old house. A man in a black shirt and jodhpurs introduced himself as Georgos Hatzidakis, owner of a motley collection of weaponry and armaments. He found himself in a small living space taken over with exhibits: posters and field equipment such as he hadn’t seen for sixty years, radio sets, medical instruments, binoculars, helmets of all nationalities, caps, guns; a collection that Georgos and his family had put together since 1941 when the Battle for Crete passed his door as a boy of ten. They had watched the British retreat, the German pursuit and the capture of the remnants as they stumbled back over the mountains as prisoners of war.
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