Aptera, one of the most fascinating archaeological sites in western Crete, has been inhabited since Minoan times (the first reference to the city Aptera as A-pa-ta-wa can be found on Linear B tablets from Knossos dating from the 14th to the 13th century BC), but it was only a significant city around the 8th century BC.
Aptera’s location above the bay of Souda was also tactically important: being close to its two seaports, Minoa (today’s Marathi) and Kasteli (near Kalyves), it was able to control the flow of ships, and it grew to be a major commercial station in Crete and one of the island’s biggest towns.
Aptera was completely wrecked in the great earthquake of 365 AD, and it was only sparsely populated after that, although a monastery dedicated to St. John the Theologian survived among the rubble.
A section of the archaeological site is gated off, and you must pay a nominal entrance charge to get access to it (in 2018, it is 2 Euro) (from 8.00 to 15.00, closed Mondays).
Impressive Roman cisterns, remnants of Roman bath houses, a freshly discovered theater, and the monastery of Agios Ioannis Theologos, where there is a good display of the Aptera site, can all be found on the site.
The fenced space is actually a small portion of a much larger complex that spans the whole hill. Surrounded by massive fortification walls (with a total circumference of 3.5km), the majority of the site has yet to be excavated, but much work has been done on the western gate (the first thing you see when driving up towards Aptera), and there is an interesting Hellenistic villa excavated in a field near the site’s entrance.
A massive Ottoman fort to the north of the hill overlooks the entire city of Souda .
