MY daughters thought she looked like the witch out of Hansel and Gretel garbed in a black dress, with just two front teeth and what can only be described as the sort of beard a 14-year-old might grow.
We made poor jokes about her fattening them up for the oven but this old Greek lady turned out to be quite sweet really, offering us a sparkling marble-floored suite in the building adjacent to her house for about $250 a night. I say the building adjacent to her house, yet it wasn't a complete building, the ground floor remained a shell without walls on one side. But the first floor resembled a new three-star hotel which in the Paleohora, on the southern coast of Crete, is hard to find.
When the old lady and her family will complete the building is not clear. If she follows the examples of thousands of her countrymen and women it will be years ahead and few will care.
The countryside of Crete, indeed of many of the Greek islands is littered with half-finished buildings, even those which appear complete have the ubiquitous steel reinforcement rods sticking skywards out of their flat roofs, a sign that they are well, not quite finished yet Mr Taxman.
Completing your building means you have to pay an additional roof tax and nobody in their right mind in the Greece of today wants to do that.
Couple that with bank loan rates of around 30 per cent in many cases and few can afford a mortgage. The net result is that if you build a house you construct as much as you can afford at any one time and then leave it until you have the cash to carry on.
Greek tourist development is threatening to despoil the beautiful islands of the Aegean and seems to have taken in few of the lessons of the earlier Spanish boom. The country is the third most popular foreign destination for Britons attracting 1.82 million a year, but it is in danger of losing much of its attraction. In the village of Stavros, where the ultimately type-cast Anthony Quinn played Zorba the Greek in the film of so many years ago, a free for all has developed with people from the nearby town of Hania erecting holiday homes on land they have in effect stolen from the church.
