We find Vathipetro with its prominent placement facing the open horizon to the south. Under the shadow of Juctas, at “Piso Livadia”, this prominent position has long been, and still is, a passage for travellers to and from the south. The area features Miocene marls, which facilitate cultivation, and easily carved limestone, for the extraction of building materials. A Minoan country villa was found buried and intact right at that prominent position. “The area, fertile and well inundated, ‘complete with lush vineyards’, was called a Minoan Country Villa” (Marinatos, ΠΑΕ 1949, 100). The room with “the wine press was rebuilt with the actual ancient materials”... “its magnificence is disproportionate to its rural usage”. The enormous carved rocks and the floor slabs “grant uncommon grandiosity to the residence”, “great clay vessel... It was a basin for crushing grape stalks or grapes themselves” (Marinatos, ΠΑΕ 1951, 258-272). It is one of the most ancient grape presses in Crete.
In the current settlement of Vathipetro, there is a stone carved construction used in later years for water storage, evocative of a grape pressing tank. To the northwest of the settlement, there is a stone carved pressing vat and wine press, apparently used as a water tank in later years.
The route from the Vathipetro Country Villa towards the present settlement all the way to the medieval pressing tanks at “Paleochora”, Katalagari runs through a period of at least thirty centuries. “The largest, in Crete, remaining complex of grape presses at “Paleochora”, Katalagari, with five pressing tanks and ten collection basins, on top of the marl limestone layer, that is where this present wine production unit was carved. The floor of the pressing tanks had been “pounded” to give it a rough surface, so that the ‘lenovàtes’ –the grape pressers, woulnd’t slip. The walls of the vats had been constructed to that purpose. The collection basins have retained a beautiful hue on their floors, due to the oxides” (Stelios Manolioudis, 2018, Dionysus). Beautiful route, with lots of plants and a view of the wavy valleys northeast of the sea, all the way to the foothills of the Dikty range.
