Mermaid Cafe in Matala 1969 |
Mermaid Cafe
Dana Kennedy [Islands Magazine]
September 2006
It's been 35 years since Joni Mitchell sang "Come on down to the Mermaid Cafe and I
will/buy you a bottle of wine/and we'll laugh and toast to nothing/and smash our empty
glasses down" in her timeless song "Carey."
The Mermaid Cafe was the epicenter of a
colony of hippies who lived in the sandstone caves lining the beach near the town of
Matala, on the southern coast of Crete in the late 1960s.
Mitchell spent a few months
there.
The cafe closed in 1980, but man-about-town Dimitris Houstoulakis says he fields
questions daily from travelers seeking the famous gathering place - a place as mythical
as Matala's ancient caves where Mitchell also hung out.
"People come here and they can
feel how it was," says Houstoulakis, who owns the popular Dimitris Villa Hotel.
The Mermaid cafe may be gone - the taverna Delfini is now in that building - but, like
the song says, the wind is still "in from Africa." Today, capture the hippie vibe at the
nearby tavernas of Nikos in the village of Pitsidia, or at Vafis in Sivas.
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