Tabakaria — the tanneries of Chania

The place

Tabakaria is a street of tanneries on the rocks east of Chania. Most of them are empty, and a few of them are still working.

The buildings stand on the shore below Halepa, the quarter where consuls and merchants put their villas in the nineteenth century. The tanners were placed here for the same reason the villas were not. Lime, dung and softening hide carry a long way, and out on this point the smell went to sea rather than into town.

The name comes from tabak, hide, by way of Arabic and Turkish. A tanner was a tabakis. The same word left tanning quarters called Tabakika and Tabachana in Chios, Ioannina, Larissa and Amfissa.

The shoreline of Tabakaria from above, with the snow-covered Lefka Ori behind the city — Plate 01The tanneries occupy the last strip of rock before the water, with the Lefka Ori standing behind the city.

Why here

The site solved three practical problems at once

The port was a short cart ride away, so hides could be fetched and finished leather delivered inside a morning. The wells held brackish groundwater in quantity, which the early stages of the work consumed. And the sea in front was shallow and broken by flat rock, which was the most useful thing of all: hides could be soaked in it.

The first tanneries went up between 1830 and 1840, the decade Crete was governed from Egypt under Muhammad Ali. Before that, farmers from the villages of Apokoronas had been building sheds along this water and tanning on their own account. Halepa itself first appears in the records as a settlement in 1842, and was absorbed into Chania by 1920.

A small wooden fishing boat moored in shallow water off flat rocks, the town on the horizon — Plate 02Bundled hides were roped and left to soften in the shallows in front of the buildings.

The work

Every hide passed through the same long sequence

Hides arrived at the port of Chania in bales and came out along the coast on four-wheeled carts, one horse to each. The smaller workshops handled Cretan skins. The larger ones took ox, camel and horse hides shipped from west Africa, Nigeria in particular.

The bales were broken open by the water. Hides were tied with rope and left in the sea until they were soft enough to scrape, then moved into the lime pits, where the hair came away. The lime was quicklime and it was mixed with dog dung, which was collected around the squares and streets of Chania by children who were paid unusually well for an unpleasant errand.

Tanning proper happened afterwards, in freshwater vats charged with ground valonia acorn. The acorns came by lorry from Rethymno, where the oaks were beaten like olive trees and the crop, sold by the oka, could be worth more to a farmer than his oil. Pine and mastic bark were used in the same way.

What left the buildings was sole leather, vacchetta, waterproofs and fine chevreau, and most of the shoes in western Crete were made from it.

Inside an abandoned tannery: a rusted fleshing machine against a rubble stone wall, timber and debris across the floor — Plate 03This fleshing machine was left where it stopped, and much of the plant is still standing in the buildings.

The trade

Eighty tanneries once stood along this shore

At the height of the trade, in the 1950s, something like eighty tanneries operated along this shore. Some accounts put the number nearer ninety.

The labour came from Koum Kapi, the poor quarter immediately to the west, where most men worked casually at the port or did not work at all. A place in a tannery was a step up, and families took it for generations.

Powered machinery arrived around 1925 and again after the war. Work stopped under the German occupation and resumed once it ended. The decline came from about 1970, when small tanning was undercut everywhere at once, and modernising inside protected buildings proved impossible to justify. Owners closed the doors and left the machinery standing.

Today between two and six tanneries are still working, depending on who is counting, employing fewer than twenty people between them.

Archive photograph of the tannery district, stone buildings around a small cove with boats drawn up on the shore — Plate 04The district in its working years. Boats were kept here because tanning alone did not feed a family. The photograph is from an archive and its date is unrecorded.

The buildings

Each building faces the lane and the sea at once

The tanneries are long and narrow and set at right angles to the shore, so each one has a front on the lane and a front on the water. Goods came in from the road and waste went out to the sea. Two or three steps down at the seaward end survive on many of them.

Look up through an open door and you will find the beams studded with iron hooks. Hides hung from those to dry. The top floor was the drying loft, its openings slatted with timber so that air passed through without sun falling directly on the leather. Where the slats have gone, the empty frames still mark the rhythm.

Inside the better buildings there are marble staircases, which is the plainest surviving evidence of how much money the trade once made.

The row of tanneries seen from the water at dusk, waves breaking over the rocks in front of them — Plate 05Each building shows two ranks of openings from the water, the upper one used for drying.

The lane between tanneries, a small boat pulled up beside a wall, buildings on both sides — Plate 06A single lane serves the whole row on the landward side.

The shore

The shore here is rock rather than sand

The sea appears in narrow slots, one at the end of each gap in the row. The rock is low and pitted and holds pools. People swim off the ledges in the late afternoon. There is no beach.

The town and the mouth of the old harbour lie to the west. To the north, on a clear day, you can pick out the Akrotiri peninsula and the islands beyond it.

A narrow gap between two tannery walls opening onto blue sea, a sailing boat on the horizon — Plate 07The sea arrives in narrow slots between the buildings.

The rocky shore at dusk, water smoothed by a long exposure, the lights of the town along the coast — Plate 08The coast runs east from these ledges towards Agia Kyriaki.

Now

Tabakaria is neither a ruin nor a museum

Some buildings are open to the sky with fig trees growing out of the walls. Others have been restored as houses, offices and workshops. There is a taverna on the rock, cars in the lane, washing hung out, and a fair amount of scaffolding.

The complex is listed, which explains both halves of that. Restoration has to keep the original fabric and elevations, which is slow and expensive and leaves many buildings empty. It is also the reason the place still looks like itself.

A roofless tannery with a fig tree growing at its base, the sea visible through the empty window openings — Plate 09A fig has established itself in the wall of this roofless building, and the timbers are recent propping.

Restored stone buildings on the water with tables set out on the rocks and a small boat moored alongside — Plate 10These buildings have been restored and are in use, and the tables go out onto the rock in summer.

Visiting

Visiting asks nothing more than a walk

Where
Vivilaki Street, Halepa, Chania 731 33. About two kilometres east of the old harbour.
Getting there
Roughly half an hour on foot along the coast from Koum Kapi, or a short taxi ride. Parking in the lane is limited and awkward.
When
Late afternoon, when the light comes off the water onto the stone. Sunset from the rocks is why most people come.
Cost
Nothing. This is a public street, not a site.
Care
The buildings are privately owned and many are structurally unsafe. Look from the lane and the rocks rather than going inside.

People live and work here. The quiet is somebody's street.