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 As readers may recall from my letter to the editor last month, and if you've been following this "David and Goliath" saga, I agreed with the management of the sprawling CretAquarium complex to the positioning of a sign immediately under the sign for my smaller, local Aquaworld. Theirs would say 10km, while mine showed Aquaworld just around the corner. This, we believed, would clear up any confusion in the minds of visitors.
However, just hours after the new CretAquarium sign went up, by some bizarre coincidence, an official of the prefecture happened to be passing by and decided that two signs pointing to the “same thing” in different places contravened some law or another. Of course, it was the Aquaworld sign the Hersonissos community police were ordered to remove – not the most recently added sign!
From the other side, the same lamp-post just 50m from Aquaworld now only informs visitors of the location of CretAquarium! What do I do now? It must be said that the police were very careful when they removed my signs and I got them back more or less intact.
There has been a lot of discussion over this chain of events within the locale of Aquaworld and many believe that the placement of the CretAquarium sign was a deliberate attempt to wipe Crete’s first aquarium off the map. These folks point out that the arrival and instantaneous decision of the prefecture official was too timely to have been a coincidence and that a telephone call must have been made!
 Mr. Danelakis, deputy mayor of Hersonissos, suggested to me that we simply put some distance between the signs and that we will then no longer be in contravention of the law. In the spirit of cooperation that we are seeking, I emailed Mr Pantazoglou of CretAquarium on the 29th September and asked him to move their new sign some distance away so that my signs could go back up. Also, since the local police tell me that “It is too hard” to get official permission for my signs, I have asked Mr. Pantazoglou to use his expertise to help me on this issue, since he is responsible for this aspect of CretAquarium’s marketing.
At the time of writing, I have received no reply to these suggestions, but I am sure that the goodwill expressed by the CretAquarium management will extend to these two small favours.
If you would like to read a blow-by-blow account, and vote on what you believe are CretAquarium’s intentions, visit the Aquaworld blog at http://aquaworld-crete.blogspot.com. I will, of course, keep readers informed of any further developments.
(Editor's note: We have placed several calls to Thalia Polychronaki at the CretAquarium to ask for its side of the story, as well as to conduct a general interview regarding the CretAquarium's first season of operations, but as of this date we have received no reply.
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