Latest news with #Heraklion
The Sun
4 days ago
- The Sun
Jet2's new flight route to connect the UK to Greece's biggest island
JET2 will fly from East Midlands Airport to the beautiful island of Crete next summer. The budget airline is launching its second route to the island, heading to the city of Chania. The flights will start in May next year, and tickets are already on sale. 4 Jet2 will run a new weekly Tuesday service to Chania from May 26, 2026 to October 27, 2026. Sun Travel found one-way tickets on from £94. The flight to the city is the tenth route from East Midlands Airport to Greece, and the second to the island of Crete. Jet2 already offers a route to Heraklion, the capital of the island on the northern coast of the island of Crete, Greece. Chania has plenty to offer with pretty harbours and it is very near to one of the world's best beaches. When one Sun writer visited the city last year, he discovered great food and some of the cheapest pints on the Med. Other discoveries included the Venetian port and cosy taverns. The area is a hub of activity, with food, drink and shopping by the bright blue waterfront. The island has an impressive array of museums too, ranging from archaeology and the Byzantine period to the National Football Museum. Outside of the city are lots of beautiful coastlines, including Kalathas Beach, Agios Onoufrios Beach and Nea Chora Beach. A 'Maldives style' water bungalow resort in Greece has gone viral for being a fraction of the price of the bucket list holiday 4 For anyone who wants to see a world-famous beach, take a day trip to Elafonisi Beach which is a 90-minute drive from Chania. The beach on the southwest coast is known for having pink sand and blue waters and has been declared the best beach in the world by Tripadvisor for 2025. This new flight marks the tenth Greek destination route from the East Midlands Airport base next summer. Corfu, Heraklion (Crete), Kefalonia, Kos, Preveza, Rhodes, Skiathos, Thessaloniki and Zante. For summer 2026, Jet2 will have 43 destinations departing from East Midlands Airport. Other new routes include flights heading to Agadir, Costa de Almeria, Pula, Preveza, Thessaloniki and Split. Here's more on Jet2 flights heading to 17 destinations from Luton Airport over summer 2025. And Jet2's new flights that are connecting the UK to two Spanish beach cities. 4
Forbes
07-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Why Star Trek Owes A Debt To Ancient Crete
The ruins of the ancient Minoan Palace at Knossos, Crete A stone's throw from Heraklion's ancient city walls, a modern-day McDonald's stands at the crossroads of a busy urban thoroughfare here on the Greek island of Crete. Four thousand years ago, however, Crete was also a crossroads dominated by a mysterious and largely still poorly understood Bronze Age culture that predated classical Greece. For those familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's hard not to compare Crete's ancient Minoans with the Ferengi, the fictional 24th century traders so savvy in dealing across space, time and civilizations. Not only were the Minoans adept at trade, but they were likely well ahead of their time when it came to celestial navigation. It's even arguable that their celestial prowess paved the way for the same sort of stellar navigation still in use at sea and now even in space. According to at least one researcher, the Minoans were using stellar navigation to trade with partners via all four cardinal points of the compass. I hypothesize that the Minoans employed a form of sidereal navigation similar to traditional Polynesian techniques—using star paths as directional guides across the sea, Alessandro Berio, an independent archeoastronomer, who holds a masters in cultural astronomy from the University of Wales in the U.K., told me via email. This is supported by archeoastronomical evidence of Minoan palatial alignments toward the rising or setting points of key stars, corresponding to trade routes to major Bronze Age port cities across the eastern Mediterranean, he says. In a new paper that Berio is preparing for journal submission, he argues that his most significant finding is the proposition that Arcturus—one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere—may have served as a primary navigational anchor in a Bronze Age sidereal system. That is, one that linked some of the most important cultural and political centers of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. I argue that the palace of Malia—one of Crete's major Minoan complexes—had a deliberate alignment with the rising of Arcturus, guiding seafarers along a star path toward Miletus, the principal Minoan outpost on Asia Minor's Anatolian coast, says Berio. Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the night sky is an aging red giant only 36.6 light years away. It's also the brightest star in the northern constellation of Bootes, a constellation known to be used for navigation by the ancient Greeks. Berio wonders whether Arcturus functioned as a celestial beacon across multiple cultural spheres—Minoan, Mycenaean, and Egyptian. In a 2022 paper published in the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Berio argued that the Minoans aligned their palaces with the stars Spica, Castor, Betelgeuse, Markab and even Sirius to navigate on imaginary lines to all points around the Mediterranean, including the Greek mainland, Asia Minor, Cyprus, the northeastern Nile delta, and even further west along North Africa. The Minoans were cosmopolitan people who traveled across the Mediterranean exporting olive oil, wine, cereals, textiles, and leather goods while importing precious materials like gold, silver, and ivory, Kostis Christakis, an archeologist and director of the Knossos Research Center of the British school at Athens, told me in his office on Crete. The Minoans knew how to trade and produced various goods for the Egyptian, Levantine, and Cypriot markets, Sue Sherratt, an archeologist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told me via email. In the Early and Middle Bronze Ages silver from further north in the Aegean destined for the east may have been channeled through Crete, she says. How did the Minoans use celestial navigation? Similar to traditional Polynesian and Micronesian navigators, the Minoans may have mapped the rising and setting of stars to specific angles on the horizon, says Berio. By following these 'star paths'—linear constellations rising at known azimuths—and combining this with seasonal knowledge of winds and currents, they could reliably sail to distant ports across the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean and expand their trade network, he says. Berio used OpenCPN, an open-source software, to plot likely Minoan navigation routes between two distant points. The correct altitude at which a star was visible on the horizon he determined by using Stellarium, a free software planetarium, as noted in his new paper. To mimic the naked eye observations of the Minoans, Berio limited the stars he plotted to only a magnitude of six. To achieve this kind of navigational accuracy, the Minoans would have needed to calculate course angles across hundreds of kilometers of open sea; we don't know how they did it, says Berio. The possibility exists that they developed some form of proto-coordinate system, perhaps using celestial zenith stars for latitude, and/or comparing simultaneous lunar and solar eclipses for longitude, he says. They likely first arrived on Crete from what is today southwest Anatolia in Asia Minor. Even though this civilization has been dubbed Minoan, in truth, no one knows what they called themselves, much less what they called the island of Crete. The myth of King Minos came later from Greek culture, but the Minoans were not Greek, says Christakis. A model of the ancient Minoan palace at Creek as it may have looked around 1800 B.C. pictured here ... More inside the Heraklion Archeological Museum. Yet the center of their society was clearly their palaces. Used over six centuries from roughly 2000 B.C. until 1450 B.C., the Minoan palaces were the main administrative, economic, religious and ideological centers of Crete, says Christakis. Standing atop the ruins of the palace at Knossos, I'm surrounded by semi-arid, wooded mountains that envelop this complicated maze. It's hard to imagine what it must have looked like in its full glory, but clearly this was a very sophisticated civilization that predated classical Greece by some five hundred years. On the muggy afternoon I was there, a real-life peacock perched on a much-degraded stone wall seemed to perfectly fit this place in time. My first thought was that great ancestors of this peafowl must have paraded their plumage when the palace itself was in all its splendor; delighting the residents with their haunting calls. A peacock on an ancient ledge at the Palace of Knossos, Crete At present, we simply know too little about the Minoans to determine whether they had a more philosophical and esoteric side, but like Star Trek's Ferengi, they were all about accumulating wealth. The upper echelons of their society, at least, seem to live in high style. As for their celestial prowess? The biggest enigma is whether we're seeing evidence of lost mathematical knowledge, or a navigational system so embodied in ritual, architecture, and oral memory that it never needed to be written down, says Berio. What puzzles me most is how the Minoans could have measured the angle of a sea route between two distant locations with such precision — especially without known instruments or a documented system of trigonometry, he says. The author inside part of the Palace at Knossos
The Sun
06-06-2025
- Business
- The Sun
The major new £422million airport set to transform European island with 18million passengers a year
GREECE'S biggest island is getting a huge new £422million airport. Heraklion, on the island of Crete, is currently preparing for a new airport in Kastelli which is scheduled to open in February 2027. 4 4 4 According to the New Heraklion International Airport, the new airport will serve 10million passengers each year, after opening. This number will then rise to 18million after some time. There will be 19 boarding gates, eight of which will be of combined use for Schengen and Non-Schengen flights. There will be space for 27 aircraft and also a terminal building with five levels of retail space and permanent exhibition areas. A masterplan map also shows an area shaded in purple that suggest future retail space. In addition, the airport is due to be one of the biggest in the country and when it opens it will replace the existing Nikos Kazantzakis International Airport in Heraklion. Nikos Kazantzakis International Airport opened back in 1937, however, it can only accommodate eight million passengers a year. Greece each year. The airport will be located a 25-minute drive away from Heraklion, which is the largest city on the island. In total, the airport is expected to cost €500million (£422million) to build and generate a total of 7,500 jobs in the area as well as a further 37,000 indirect jobs. The new £7billion mega terminal opening at Changi Airport In addition, the new airport is expected to give new life to Crete's tourism. According to Tornos News, the new airport will create a number of new roads and contain one runway which stretches 3,200 metres long with one parallel aircraft movement taxiway, A trial launch of of the airport will take place next summer, before a full opening in 2027. Currently, airlines including easyJet, Jet2 and British Airways fly to Crete. These are likely to move to the new airport when it opens. And there are a number of other new exciting airports opening around the world. A new £25billion mega airport is also opening in Europe to 'take on Heathrow and Dubai' with 65milllion passengers. Plus, one of the world's busiest airports reveals plans for new £7billion mega terminal with 50million more passengers.
Travel Daily News
04-06-2025
- Business
- Travel Daily News
Five Senses Consulting launches Cruise Vibe Coding
Five Senses Consulting launches Cruise Vibe Coding, a framework transforming cruise destination experiences by designing authentic emotional identities at every guest touchpoint. HERAKLION, GREECE – Five Senses Consulting & Development, a leading global consultancy in cruise tourism strategy, has announced the launch of a pioneering new tool: Cruise Vibe Coding – a framework designed to transform how cruise destinations communicate, engage, and inspire at every guest touchpoint. At a time when cruise passengers are increasingly informed and discerning, Cruise Vibe Coding offers a timely solution for ports and destinations seeking to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market. 'Cruise Vibe Coding is all about emotional continuity,' said Ioannis Bras, CEO of Five Senses Consulting. 'It's how we make a destination feel authentic – from digital content and terminal signage to the way an excursion is described. We're not just consulting anymore. We're designing vibes.' What Is Cruise Vibe Coding? Cruise Vibe Coding is the intentional design of an emotional identity across every aspect of the cruise guest experience, from pre-arrival research to on-site signage, storytelling, and the arrival environment. It helps destinations and ports create immersive, cohesive, and memorable impressions that convert visits into word-of-mouth, repeat tourism, and stronger partnerships with cruise lines. What It Delivers The tool is already being integrated into select client strategies and includes: Audits of digital and on-site communication tone Excursion narrative redevelopment Emotional alignment in signage and wayfinding Custom welcome and arrival experience design LinkedIn presence calibration for port authorities and tourism boards A Win-Win for Ports and Cruise Lines The new tool is designed to deliver value on both sides of the industry equation. Destinations benefit from deeper guest engagement, improved satisfaction metrics, and stronger identity. Cruise lines gain access to more emotionally engaging ports, improved excursion quality, and positive guest feedback. 'Cruise Vibe Coding doesn't replace AI – it goes beyond it,' added Bras. 'This is about feeling. And feeling is what brings people back.' Five Senses Consulting & Development is a boutique firm specializing in cruise destination development, strategic marketing, and guest experience innovation. With a presence in over 60 global destinations and 25+ years of expertise, the firm is recognized as a trusted partner to ports, tourism boards, and cruise lines alike.
Arab News
03-06-2025
- Climate
- Arab News
Magnitude 5.2 earthquake strikes off Crete — EMSC
SARAJEVO: A magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck in the sea off the Greek island of Crete on Tuesday but no damage or injuries have been reported, a Fire Service official said. Regional instrumental seismicity in Crete, Greece. The colored dots represent the #earthquakes that have struck the region [using @ISCseism catalog -1960 to 2020- and @EMSC data -from 2021 onwards]: — EMSC (@LastQuake) June 3, 2025 The quake was at depth of 17 km, 85 km away from the town of Heraklion, the European Mediterranean Seismological Center said.
