Focus on: Heraklion Airport

We see Heraklion Airport in a few of the episodes, but the longest sequences are in the first episode, where we see Haldane’s aircraft land, him alighting from it and walking through the terminal.

That particular building, designed by architects N.Dessylas, D. Kontargyris, A. Lambakis and P. Loukakis, was a completely new construction, completed in 1972 at a cost of 55 million Drachmas and took 40 months to build. It was one of the first to be designed and built solely by Greek engineering firms.

The airport buildings are shown in detail in both the 1972 BBC TV series The Lotus Eaters (when it would have just opened), and in 1977 with Who Pays the Ferryman?

At the beginning of episode 1, we see the aircraft that Haldane is travelling in landing and he subsequently alights from it. From the airstairs, we see a panning shot of the airside side of the terminal building (apologies for its crudeness – I’ve also added the ground-level shot of the marshaller as that has a section of terminal in it).

I found an excellent website called Doma, which is all about Greek architecture. The page describing the airport has some lovely photos of it when it was first built.

The Doma website also points to another website, Architecture Periodicals, which is an archive of old architecture magazines. One of the magazines, called Architecture in Greece (Vol. 3, 1969 edition, page 210) has a section describing the airport, its design, considerations and construction. It also contains plan views of the airport that shows the layout in greater detail. Of particular interest is the following diagram which shows the flow of people for departures and arrivals. The top of the photo being airside, the bottom leading to the main entrance. The arrows show the direction of flow of people.

Bear in mind, the diagram above shows a different staircase layout airside. The right hand long ramp was not built, and instead a third staircase was built, with the three staircases being more equally spaced. See the first black and white photo of the new airport above.

In episode 1, we see the flow of people from the aircraft walking to the ingress point which is the closes set of stairs to the control tower. This leads directly to the arrivals area shown in the diagram above.

The grey shaded area, shown by the number 3, is where passport control and baggage reclaim were located. So when we see Haldane after he’s collected his luggage, he is at one of the egress points for arrivals in the lounge area, just below the grey area.

The design of the airport also considered further expansion, however back in the 1970s the projections for future passenger traffic would’ve been far too low, as the sharp rise in tourism to the country from the 1980s onwards showed that the airport would soon be at and vastly exceed capacity.

The airport was remodelled between 2001-2004 where the terminal building was extended on both sides and the whole building re-clad to what we see today. The work was done by Ekter SA, a Greek contractor. Their website has photos of the construction work – link here. From the below photo, you can see the whole lower area from the main terminal building to the control tower was demolished and the current building extended at the same height to the control tower.

Heraklion Airport operated for many years around 60% over its designed capacity during the busy summer months. As the options to further expand the airport were limited, a decision was made to relocate the main airport to the former airbase at Kastelli.

In February 2020, construction began on a new airport building at Kastelli and the new airport is due to open in 2027. The original completion date was supposed to be 2025, however due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work was delayed. The new airport finally marks the end of Heraklion Airport and the demise of one of the locations used in Who Pays the Ferryman?