Anniversary in Crete: 8 Evenings Better Than a Restaurant

An anniversary in Crete almost always ends up as dinner. A good taverna, a bottle of something, the sea somewhere in the middle distance. It is never bad. It is also, if you have been together a while, more or less identical to the last four anniversaries.

The problem with dinner is not the food. It is that you have both done it before, so nothing about the evening will be remembered specifically. Here are eight that will be — roughly in order of how little they cost.

The eight

1. The kazanema. From early October to December, Cretan villages fire up the copper stills and distil tsikoudia from the leftovers of the September grape harvest. These are genuine community events, not performances for visitors: neighbours bring roast meat and home-cooked dishes, and there is usually music. You can often spot one from the road by the flame and the small crowd holding shot glasses. If your anniversary falls in autumn, this beats any restaurant on the island, and it costs nothing but the willingness to be the outsiders who said yes.

2. Sunset from the wrong side. Everyone watches the sun go down over the sea. Drive twenty minutes inland instead, find a village square with one taverna, and watch the light go up the mountains behind you. The White Mountains turn a colour at dusk that no coastal view offers.

3. Dinner at the second-best table. Book the taverna you love, but ask for the table nobody wants — the one in the kitchen doorway, or on the pavement. You will end up talking to the family who own it. That is the evening you will describe later, not the sea view.

4. Swim at night. In September the sea is still around 25–26°C and holds its heat well into October. An empty beach at ten at night, with the water warmer than the air, is genuinely one of the better things available on this island. Take a torch, know the beach in daylight first, and don't drink beforehand.

5. Drive to a monastery for the evening service. You need not be religious. The singing in a small Cretan monastery at dusk is extraordinary, it is free, and it lasts about forty minutes. Dress modestly and sit at the back.

6. Cook the thing you cooked when you met. Villa kitchens are usually better than people expect. Find the market in the morning, cook badly together in the afternoon, eat late on the terrace.

7. The stargazing night. Crete has genuinely dark skies once you are away from the coast road. We wrote a full guide to where the Milky Way is visible — the short version is that you need to be inland, away from the resorts, and to let your eyes adjust for twenty minutes without looking at a phone.

8. An open-air cinema on your own terrace. Which is us, and I will come to the honest part in a moment.

The one I would not book

Not the sunset boat trip. It is the most-recommended anniversary experience in Crete and it is the one I would skip.

The problem is arithmetic. A shared boat carries thirty to forty people, and an anniversary is a conversation between two of them. You will spend three hours being photographed as a couple by a stranger with a lanyard while somebody's speaker plays a playlist neither of you chose. Private charters solve it and cost several times the price of anything else on this list.

If you want to be on the water, hire a small boat yourselves for two hours in the morning, when it is quiet, and have the evening back.

And the honest part about us

Starlight for Two is €690. That is a real amount of money, and for a lot of anniversaries it is the wrong call.

Book it if the anniversary is a significant one, if you are staying somewhere with a terrace worth using, and if what you actually want is a whole evening at home together rather than a night out. It works because nobody has to drive, nobody is watching, and it lasts from sunset until you decide it is over — set up from around six, packed away by midnight.

Do not book it if you are in Crete for three nights, if your accommodation has no private outdoor space, or if the two of you would honestly rather be in the middle of a town watching people. There is no version of an outdoor cinema that beats a great night in Chania old town for a couple who want to be out. Our guide to Chania after dark is the better read in that case.

All we need on the night is a normal power socket — we bring a 20-metre extension cable, so the screen goes where the view is rather than where the plug happens to be. You choose the film, and a personalised title card with your names and the date is €25, which is the thing people photograph.

If it is the right year for it, tell us about your evening and I will come back to you personally. If it is not, item one on that list is free and better.