Walking into the Suda Bay War Cemetery, one would be confronted by rows and rows of bone white headstones marking the graves of close to 1600 servicemen from both World Wars. The burial remains from four sites across Greece, Chania, Heraklion, Rethymnon and Galata, were transported shortly after the end of the war where a memorial grounds was marked out. It remains a tribute to the thousands of lives lost in the fall of Crete, during the summer of 1941.

Within a stone paved hexagon border at the center of the memorial stands a simple cross in white with a strip of black marble running through the centre. At the break of dawn, an ethereal glow often shrouds the park as the first rays of dawn form a warm halo silhouetting the memorial. One would almost feel as though the boundaries between heaven and earth may have blurred momentarily. As you walk back out through the iron wrought gates of the cemetery, it would be hard to forget how these servicemen continue to remind us of the blunders of our past.