In various scenes inside and outside the taverna where a relaxed drink, game of Tavli or a meal are being enjoyed, we hear a slow song featuring a bouzouki.

After 5 years of searching old Bouzouki songs, I’ve found the one. It’s called Fantasia by The Olympic Bouzouki Group. The music heard in the serial starts from around the 1:08 minute mark.

The song was part of the Album ‘Holiday in Greece‘, a medley of covered Greek songs by popular composers, and was released in 1969.

Heraklion Airport appears a few times throughout the series, and in this article we’ll take a brief look at those appearances.

In the first episode, the opening shot sets the scene: a Boeing 737 lands at a foreign airport, an Englishman alights and travels into a City that has been developed extensively since his last visit. This is our introduction to Alan Haldane and his return to Crete.

The airport is seen next at the end of episode 3, when Haldane takes Lorna Matthews to catch her flight home. This time, we see her depart in a Boeing 720 – a version of the popular Boeing 707. In this episode, her flight to Crete was paid for by Matheos who wanted to play a trick on Haldane by getting him to cheat on Annika and involve himself with Lorna, a woman he’d once had an affair with, instead.

The airport’s next appearance is in episode 4, when Anthony Viglis brings his Grandfather back to Crete to bury him in the village of Dafnai. In the first scenes, just like in episode 1, we see another Boeing 737 landing and Viglis alighting from the aircraft. Then we see the coffin being removed from the hold, and taken to a hangar within the airport boundary so that it can be checked, whereupon Viglis states that the formalities were completed in Athens. As of yet, I have not found which warehouse or hangar this was filmed in, and fear I may never get to do so as the airport will stop being used in a couple of years’ time.

Our brief look at the airport’s appearances concludes in episode 6. In this instance, Duncan Neve / Bernard Kingsley is taken home by Det. Chief Inspector Cooper of Leicester CID after Kingsley gives himself up after being on the run for many years. Haldane and the Major observe the departure from the terminal’s balcony.

Speaking to Andrew Morgan, he says that a small crew was allowed to be airside and film arrivals and departures from beside the runway. This crew consisted of a camera operator and sound man as well as the director. He asked pilots beforehand whereabouts down the runway the aircraft would touch down or lift off from, in order to set the camera in the best possible position. He also tells of when he asked one of the pilots to make an especially ‘spirited’ departure so that it looked good for the camera. The filming of all aircraft was done on the same day.

During the opening credits of every episode, we see the animated wreath wilting then flowering again. Then inside it appears a filmed sequence of a boat moored in the sea near the Elounda coastline. This sequence starts with the camera pointed at the sea bed, showing how clear the water is, then it pans up to the boat, showing the land in the distance.

This is the same filmed sequenced used in the end credits of episodes 1 and 7 – however, these end credits only show the boat, not the panning up from the water.

The location is outlined at the bottom of the episode 1 page.

For those that have seen the older album or book covers, you may have noticed a temple in the photo within the wreath.

The temple in the photo looks like it’s on an island and you may think it’s on Spinalonga, but it isn’t – it’s not even on Crete at all. This location is actually the Old Fortress in Corfu.

So another location mystery cleared up – this time with a Google Lens search.

George Willemse posted an interesting link on the Facebook group recently.

The apartment above the one where Haldane was supposed to be staying is available for holiday bookings. The residence itself is called “The Island”, and the link to it is here.

Checking the photos, it looks as though the property is contained on the entire floor, from street to balcony overlooking the sea. The photos in the slideshow below are from the booking.com link above. Use the arrows to scroll through them.

It is an extremely interesting place to stay and one surrounded by the most important Ferryman locations of all.

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?

All pages now have static Street Views, which can be clicked on to open the movable Street View in a separate browser tab.

I can confirm that the web page loading times have been greatly reduced. Let me know what you think.

Continuing the arduous task of switching the embedded Street Views to static Street Views, episodes 5 and 6 were completed today.

Please remember, that the static Street Views are also a link, so you can click on them and it’ll bring up the actual Street View page in a separate browser tab.

I performed another search for Miranda Cottage recently and noticed that the estate agent (Zoe Napier) that was involved in the sale of the property had it up for sale again.

The property has been updated by the previous buyers and now looks quite wonderful inside. Below are a few photos of some of the interior and exterior bits we see in the serial, that were taken from the Zoe Napier website. It’s a slideshow so you can manually scroll through the photos using the arrows.

Continuing the addition of static Street Views, the episode 4 page is now complete.

This has increased loading times and has also given me a chance to amend some of the content so that it’s a little more optimised and less ambiguous.