Fiddle Me This

Winter is in full force here, which means it's really, really wet, and, here in the village, cold. Although we have had blessedly welcome spells of sun - with breathtaking views of the completely snow-covered Psiloritis and his rivals to the west - for the most part the weather has been wet. Paint-peeling, mold-inducing, goat-stinking wet. The humidity here is astounding; if we don't air out the place vigorously whenever it's not raining, evil-looking black mold grows on the ceilings, the walls drip, and in general it starts to feel like a medieval castle. Which makes me wonder what the hell people did all the thousands of years before central heating and industrial-strength mold spray. I suppose they had the fire going all the time and they just took the pneumonia as it came. It's impressive how much colder and windier it is here than on the coast; the really mountainous villages must already be getting regular snowfalls by now. We've also had some misadventures (amusing in hindsight) with our inexpertly installed front door, which had the charming characteristic of letting in huge amounts of rainwater. One night as we were sitting at the kitchen table with our friend Kostis drinking tea, the wind suddenly picked up, the heavens opened, releasing a truly unbelievable barrage of hail, and within five minutes our entire living room was an inch deep in freezing cold water. We rolled up the rug, stashed the instruments on higher ground, and bailed for hours. The next day the neighborhood kids made hail-people.

I'm gradually getting more involved in the musical life of Rethymno. I'm playing violin with the chorus of the Rethymno Asia Minor Society, which is comprised of descendants of Greek refugees from the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey who were resettled in Rethymno in 1922 during the population exchange which resulted from the Greek state's disastrous empire-building gluttony in the wake of World War I. The refugees brought their decidedly eastern culture with them, including a wealth of instrumental and vocal music that had a profound and fateful impact on Greek popular music and still resonates powerfully today all over the Greek diaspora. The choir sings these old songs, which they learned from their grandparents' generation (most of the members are roughly 40-60 years old). This has given me a new perspective on this repertoire (collectively referred to as "Mikrasiatika" - Asia Minor music - in Greek), hearing the songs sung by living people with a real context for them. I've heard and played many of them countless times, and adore them for their matchless beauty; but always felt an experiential distance between myself and this music, its creators, and the people who made them mean what they mean, especially when compared to the Greek music that has a tangible context for me - for example, the traditional music of Kalymnos or Crete. But spending time with these people who grew up hearing their grandparents and parents sing them, who listened to refugee musicians playing the ud, santouri, and other "Turkish" instruments at family celebrations, and who have an entire universe of memories and emotions tied up with the contours of their melodies and the feel of their words in the mouth, has made me feel a little closer to them. I realize that these peoples' experience of this particular music is not unlike my experience of the Irish and Greek island music that I love so much - it boils down to an immigrant experience. Though their immigrant ancestors traveled a shorter geographic distance than mine, and though the linguistic and cultural barriers that they encountered upon their arrival in their new home weren't quite as daunting, there's a common feeling of reaching for something at once familiar and foreign, part of one's self and part of a past that's gone for good.

We rehearse in an old Turkish mosque, known as the Neratzi, which was originally a Venetian church and whose towering minaret looks like it would collapse in a second if they removed the scaffolding supports. It also serves as the city's central odeion or music school and is one of the most atmospheric live music venues I've visited recently. In this setting, something happened at one of my first rehearsals with the choir which served to crystallize for me everything I just wrote about in the preceding paragraph. One of the singers brought with him an old Cretan Turk (in other words, more than likely an ethnic Greek whose family had converted to Islam) who had been born in Rethymno in 1913 and was deported along with his family in 1922 to be resettled somewhere on the Turkish coast as per the population exchange. At the age of 97, having lived nearly all his life as a forced immigrant, he decided to make one last trip, a first return to his birthplace. The director of the choir turned to us and called up a classic song of the 1920s that was a big hit in the Cretan Turkish community, as an homage to this old man who had come so far - so much farther than the flight from Izmir - to find some small measure of comfort in the waning moments of his life under the sun that shone on his childhood, to feel under his feet the island that was mother to his ancestors for God knows how many centuries. Though he was nearly deaf, his ears pricked up with the first notes of the instrumental introduction, and he was clearly transported by the song. Tears flowing, he thanked us in pure Rethymnian Greek and told us how much it meant to him to be back home.

I've also started a regular gig playing Brazilian music in a local bar, which is an experience as strange as it sounds.

In November I was hired to teach traditional violin at the Μουσικό Γυμνάσιο/Λύκειο Ρεθύμνου - the Music Middle and High School of Rethymno, one of the two such institutions on the island (the other is in the capital, Herakleio). From what I hear, this is a fairly common phenomenon in Greece, at least in larger cities, some of which have several. It's not quite an arts or music magnet school - it's public; anyone can go as long as they apply in time and it doesn't fill up - and the amount of time the kids spend taking music lessons and rehearsing in various ensembles is immense compared to what I had at my arts magnet public school when I was 12. Well over half the faculty are music teachers, either adjunct (like me) or full-time, and the kids have an impressive range of instruments and styles to choose from, ranging from orchestral standards like cello, piano, and oboe to bouzouki, laouto, lyra, and guitar, as well as classical and traditional instrumental and vocal ensembles.
This being the epicenter of the Cretan lyra tradition, there's no shortage of aspiring young players tearing it up in between (and during) classes, and they have some of the best representatives of the local traditions as teachers at the school, including the lyra virtuoso and askobandoura (Cretan bagpipe) player Alexandros Papadakis. One of the most common sights I witness upon entering the grounds of the school is a kid with an oversized lyra on his knee, ripping away with the bow at an alarming speed, flanked by two or three of his classmates pounding on laouta while a line of girls dance a graceful malevizioti as a crowd of onlookers sing mantinades and take pictures with their cellphones.

The environment at the school is fairly chaotic, as you can imagine; not just because of the noise, but more due to the astoundingly disorganized nature of the enterprise. When the school approached me about the job, I decided to be up front about things and inquire at the scondary education office whether I was allowed to be a government employee (which all teachers here are) even though I'm not a citizen and am here on a student visa. "But you're Greek, right?" They asked. Well, kind of. "So it's ok. No problem." A month or so later they called to inform me that I couldn't be hired, after all, but the headmaster made a phone call ("Ela re Giorgo, where else are we going to find somebody in Rethymno who plays traditional violin?") and an exception was made. This atmosphere or informality extends to paying the teachers, as well; we get paid not twice a month, like most Greek employees, but (and I quote) "whenever the Ministry of Education puts money in the bank account".

The New Year started with a bang - literally. Several of them, in fact, as our landlord fired off a few rounds with his shotgun outside our window while we were cooking dinner with my in-laws. They came from Brazil to experience "real" Greek and Cretan culture, and were not disappointed; aside from my father-in-law's five trips to the Parthenon while staying in Athens ("a coisa mais linda que eu ja vi na minha vida" - "the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life") and two to Knossos, the exacavation of the grand Minoan palace outside of the Cretan capitol Herakleio, they ate wild rabbit, drank raki with stivania-clad, moustachioed villagers, listened to old-fashioned Chaniot violin music in traditional kafeneia, endured the harrowingly precipitous drive to the south coast of Rethymno province to see the sun set over the Libyan Sea, and made friends with an extraordinarily hirsute local tavern keeper who they nicknamed "o lobesomem" - "wolfman". So naturally we spent New Year's Eve cooking Indian food with the apothecary of spices Ana brought back from Bombay and played bossa nova until 4 am. We even had an intercontinental jam session with my brother via Skype (my father-in-law lays down a pretty nice samba groove on the spoons). Ana recorded a few videos of the occasion, but I don't think we're quite ready to take the world by storm, so I won't post them. As she said when e-mailing the incriminating films to our collaborators, "Just remember Jobim's line, 'people who sing out of tune have a heart, too'".

I recently took my first final exams at the University, which one the whole wasn't too different from what I'm used to, except for the first day, when my test was cancelled because of a bomb threat. We were directed by a nervous secretary to "evacuate the auditorium and move to the hallway", presumably because if a bomb went off in the room and we were all crammed into the adjacent corridor we would be completely safe and nothing would fall on our heads. When it became evident that there would be neither an explosion nor an exam, I went home. My initials efforts to learn about the make-up were met with confusion, the characteristic Greek shrug-frown-raised eyebrows-protruding lower lip-palms heavenward, and the speculation that it might be rescheduled for September. September? Yep, confirmed a classmate, that happened to me twice. Fortunately they managed to squeeze it in during the exam period, but it got me to thinking. The professor didn't even bother to show up for the exam the first time. Maybe he didn't want to travel down from Athens, and made the bomb threat himself. Actually, now that I think about it, he didn't come for the make-up either.


On February 2, the feast day of Iemanja (the Brazilian sea goddess), the elements saw fit to smile upon us, so we went down to the sea, offered some flowers, and Ana danced for her.

But the most wonderful thing that's happened recently is that I've found a musical mentor in the person of Manolis Manioudakis. Once or twice a week, I make the hour-long trip west to Chania where Manolis runs a kafeneio, which also serves as the headquarters of "Charchalis", the Traditional Musicians' Association of Chania. Named after the most important local violinist of the early twentieth century, the association sponsors cultural events, concerts, and the occasional recording, but its primary missions are to serve as a gathering place for all lovers of the region's traditional music, and most importantly, to pass on these musical traditions to young people. This last objective is furthered to a great degree by Manolis, who gives lessons on violin, laouto, and lyra to anyone who's interested, completely free of charge. On any given afternoon, the visitor to the kafeneio will see two or three aspiring violinists, ranging in age from seven to their late teens (and older on occasion), spread out among the kafeneio's tables and chairs, diligently sawing away at a new syrto, while their fathers or grandfathers
drink coffee and raki, read the newspaper, and engage in animated discussions with the regulars, who stop every now and again to comment on the young students' progress and offer unsolicited advice ("Now, I don't play the fiddle myself, but I know for a fact that you should be ending that phrase with a down bow").


In between making coffee, pouring generous cups of raki and wine and dishing out plates of mezedes like Sfakian herb pies and home-cured olives, Manolis sits close by each student in turn, listens attentively, and, with the patience of Mother Theresa, shows them where to put their fingers and, over time, how to mold the wild melodies into a musical conversation.

The kafeneio is something of a museum and musical panoply at the same time, every available wall space covered with framed photographs of the great Chaniot violinists, laouto, and lyra players of the past - each one numbered for easy identification - and a floor-to-ceiling cabinet bristling with instruments in various states of readiness, tuning, and (dis)repair.
I have seen many the random passerby spontaneously enter, groceries or paintbrush in hand, gaping at the musical pantheon on display and asking excited questions, to which Manolis responds with warmth, humor, and an infectious love for the music and everyone who makes it (or, as he often says, "anyone who tries").

Manolis himself is the last great violinist of his generation, the last representative of an old way of playing the fiddle and interpreting the dance music of western Crete. Seventy-five years old, he grew up in an era of tremendous poverty and hardships - he was a young man during World War II, the German occupation, and the Greek civil war - and his natural inclination towards music led him to "steal" as much as he could from the great musicians he heard at weddings and feasts. (Including his father, who was a noted violinist and gave him encouragement and support from the beginning: from the time that his father came home early one day and "caught" him surreptitiously playing the violin, he declined all musical job offers and insisted that Manolis be hired instead.) The very first time I heard him play I knew that I wanted to learn from him - he has a beautiful, sensuous touch, a sneaky, unpredictable way of turning the tunes inside out without ever losing track of the fundamental rhythmic cycles that govern Cretan dance music, and a powerful lift and drive to his playing despite the inconveniences of age. I like to get there not long after he opens, when there are just a few regulars and we can sit for hours picking apart the intricacies of bowing, phrasing, and the history of the music. He has great stories (like the time he went to play for a wedding in an isolated village and the locals wouldn't let him leave - they kept him there for almost a month, playing every day at baptisms and parties until his frantic, uninformed parents mobilized the police) and valuable insights into where this music comes from and how much of its power and magic lies in the details that many young players ignore in favor of faster, more aggressive, and louder ways of playing. Most of all, his gentle, warm, good-humored nature lends a welcoming aura to the place that makes it feel like home. It's probably a good thing that we don't live in Chania, or I'd spend every day there. Like this guy.


On that note, I'm getting up early tomorrow to go pay Mr. Manousakis a visit, so I bid you a happy Carnival (just barely belated, if you're in Brazil, New Orleans, or Venice, and slightly in advance, if you're here in Greece). Personally, I'm looking forward to those magical forty days: Lent is the best time to be vegan in Greece. Not that Crete is tough on my kind; quite the contrary. But still, it's handy not having to explain one's self all the time.

Next installment: Rethymnian carnival customs, the second Rome, and who knows what else...

Giant mushrooms, bagpipes, and gun-totin' drug runners

(Originally written in November 2007)

Contrary to what you may think, Greece does indeed have seasons (the first heavy snows are already falling at the Bulgarian border), and Crete, though it's pretty far south and really not too far from Africa, has so far surprised us with an autumn that, well, feels like autumn. Something in between the barely perceptible Floridian autumns of my childhood and the classic Eastern US fall. It obviously lacks the blazingly glorious oranges and deep reds of Vermont and Massachusetts, but the temperature has dropped considerably, especially up here in the village (where it's usually 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than on the coast), and the beach days are getting fewer and farther between. The precipitation and humidity have also surprised us - it's rained almost daily for the past month, turning the brown and scrubby fields and mountainsides of August and September into an explosion of green clover and purple heath (it actually looks a lot like Ireland, aside from the olive trees), and giving us some really amazing rainbows. You ain't seen a rainbow until you've seen it arching over the Cretan Sea from the western White Mountains of Hania towards Mt. Psiloritis in the east. The aforementioned Lefka Ori are starting to make good on the promise of their name - on clear days we can see the snow on the highest peaks.

(Despite all this talk of fall, it's still warm enough down on the coast to go swimming.)

The change of seasons has also naturally meant a change in what fruits are offered by the kilo every time you visit someone's house. It's now nearing the end of prime pomegranate season (I have about twenty of them in my refrigerator) and the lotus fruit is currently king. This is the lotus of Homeric literature, which Odysseus' crew ate and forgot who they were and where they were supposed to be going for an inexcusably long period of time, not the Asiatic aquatic plant of the same name. The lotus fruit grows on a tree and when it's ripe looks kind of like a huge rotting tomato; yet it's tasty and reeeeeeeeeeeally sweet. Too sweet for me, in fact, which is why we also have twenty of them in our refrigerator. Oddly, they are identical (though bigger) to one of Ana's favorite fruits in Brazil (known as caqui), so she's happy about it, anyway. And with the rain (which has been an almost daily occurrence since mid-October) has sprouted another Cretan culinary delight, the wild, fleshy pleurotus mushroom, known in these here parts as "omanitis". Our landlord goes out hunting for them on dark, untrodden mountainsides each time it rains and brings back gigantic, phantasmagoric specimens that he proudly displays to all passersby. They are incredibly sumptuous when fried in (surprise!) olive oil, and the texture reminds me of duck. I don't know why, since I haven't eaten meat in probably twelve years or so and am not sure if I ever ate duck before then, but it just does.

One of the things that has most impressed me during my stay here so far is the strength and vitality of Cretan traditional music and culture in general. Naturally, being interested in such things, I seek it out at every opportunity, but it's remarkably easy to find compared to every other place in Greece I've ever been to. It seems that almost everybody is always listening to Cretan music in their car, you hear it on the radio or CD player in almost every shop from the hairdresser to the auto parts store... There are countless radio stations that play mostly traditional music, and several that play 100% Cretan music 24 hours a day. A lot of it is of questionable artistic and aesthetic value, but considering that it's non-stop and there are over 500 recordings of Cretan music released per year (by and for a population of less than half a million people!), you can't be too critical. My favorite thing about Radio Megalonisos (as it's called here in Rethymno; it has affiliate stations in Heraklion, Hania, Agios Nikolaos and... Sydney, Australia) is its status as a forum for the thriving folk poetry tradition of the island. Every morning the deejay reads off four words (for example, "wine", "longing", "lips", and "knife") and people call, text, or email in traditional couplets (mantinadhes) that they've made featuring the terms of the day. It's astounding how fast the response is. I remember listening in the car one day as the first such announcement of the day was made; before I had gone three hundred meters the first response was received and read on the air. These are rhyming couplets in fifteen-syllable lines, not free verse! The Mantinadha Challenge of the Day aside, people send in their favorite couplets via phone, email, or SMS - someone recently gave me a book of mantinadhes compiled exclusively from mobile phone inboxes - and the deejays frequently read messages from the musicians whose cuts they are playing, dedicating the next song to a friend, co-worker, or sometimes to dame Crete herself.

We've been frequenting the Lake of Kourna these days - the only natural lake on the island and an important sacred site to the ancient Minoans. Despite its population of aggressive geese and a few patches of alarmingly efficient quicksand, it's a truly magical place. According to local legend it was formed as a divine boon to a damsel in distress, drowning her assailant and turning her into a neraid who, so the old folks say, sings her mournful song at dusk.

The first weekend of October my noisemaking partner Periklis and I (after a visit to the island of Karpathos, where he's a schoolteacher, for a traditional wedding) made our way to the island of Paros to participate in the seventh annual Pan-Cycladic Festival of Traditional Wind Instruments. It was, and is, essentially a four day long tsambouna party, where just about everybody in the world who actively plays the instrument (the traditional Greek island bagpipe, a device of primitive construction made of a goatskin bag, a wooden or horn pipe, and two canes with fingerholes burnt into them) converges on an agreed-upon island and plays nonstop, mostly all at the same time.
There was tsambouna music everywhere, all the time, twenty-four hours a day, played by over a hundred musicians (including some laouto, lyra, violin, and drums) - on the way there on the boat, on the dock, in the streets, in the hotels, in the taverns where we ate, in the buses that took us from one village to another (much to the annoyance of the less than good-humored drivers, who vainly tried to compete using the radio), and, like I said, more often than not all at once. It was MAGICAL. To see eighty year old grandpas who until they came to the event for the first time probably thought they were the only person left in the entire world who still played the tsambouna playing along with twentysomething Athenian hipsters who made their instrument out of PVC pipe and a plastic bag, and to see the assembled crowds (who were in large part local people with no particular connection to the festival) loving every second of it, dancing, singing, and in general getting their groove on, was to see that, contrary to what we may think because of where we live and what we're told, a huge chunk of the world - most of it, in fact - still knows how to relate to one another, can still have a good time without plugging things into wall sockets, and the best kind of entertainment is the kind that invites everyone to participate regardless of who they are or what they're "good" at.

My experience at the University so far has been everything that I imagined about European schools and more. There's radical leftist graffiti everywhere, as well as rallies and protests on a regular basis (always featuring shouting and the threat of violence, occasionally featuring fisticuffs, and always resulting in conflicting classes being cancelled so that everyone can attend). The student body is fairly typical, split between grungy bohemian types and your run-of-the-mill clubgoing Eurotrash. My professors are entertaining. They usually arrive about half an hour late, smoke in class (as do all the students), some of them yell and curse, and some of them are sneering and condescending. A precious minority are actually decent teachers, although I get the impression that very few of them them feel any kind of investment in the University, since about half the faculty lives and mainly works in Athens and is flown or boated in once a week for their classes. This I cannot understand. Is the prospect of living in the "provinces", where you can breathe non-carcinogenic air but can't find a Starbucks, so frightening to Athenian intellectuals, or does Greece actually have a dearth of employable university types rather than the usual surplus? (I can't imagine that it's the latter, since everyone I know here with a higher degree is engaged in a constant struggle to find a decent job.)

Another surprising revelation about the Greek educational system is the frequency. length, and widespread nature of student sit-ins. I'm not just talking about those that happen at the university level, although they are impressive (last year a whole semester got chucked out the window); I was just talking to a middle-school kid who said his class' student government had called a general strike to protest the condition of the school building, which apparently is literally falling apart and infested with rats and other vermin. They hadn't had classes for two weeks and were still negotiating with the school administration and local government. People, we're talking about THIRTEEN YEAR OLD KIDS here!!! When I was thirteen and we voted for student government officers, the hot topics were the stale danishes in the cafeteria and whether we could wear hats in the halls between classes.

A few days ago we celebrated the 141st anniversary of the Holocaust of Arkadi, a local monastic center about 30 kilometers east of Rethymno. On said day in 1866, several hundred villagers took refuge from menacing Turkish soldiers in the monastery (which they also happened to be using as an ammunition storehouse to supply the rebels conducting guerilla warfare on the Turks from their mountain hideouts). When the Turkish troops had surrounded the monastery and began forcing their way inside, the villagers decided to ignite the gunpowder rather than be subject to the horrors that certainly awaited them at the hands of their captors. Needless to say, there were no survivors on either side. I just wonder what they do for the annual reenactment.

Other late breaking Rethymnian happenings: I'm not sure if this has made the news to much of a degree outside of Greece, but it seems that the government has finally made an effort to do something about the most lawless village in all the badlands of Crete, Zoniana (it's commonly referred to here as "The Wild West"). The villagers of the mountainous region between the cities of Rethymno and Herakleio are renowned for their cavalier stance toward modern, urban social conventions and laws imposed upon them by outsiders in general; they're particularly well-known for their love of guns (as I mentioned in my previous message) and cattle-rustling ("How many head of sheep do you have?" "Two hundred of our own and another three hundred.") But a few decades ago in Zoniana, an extremely isolated village in a historically economically depressed area, the local shepherds began experimenting with a new cash crop: hashish. They quickly saw how easy it was to grow and sell, and had no problem preventing prying eyes from paying too much attention, given the firepower at their disposal. They've shot down police helicopters, ambushed approaching SWAT teams, you name it. But this Wednesday, after a police convoy driving towards the village was attacked by machine-gun fire and several officers were severely injured, the government finally had enough of being humiliated and sent in a small army of three hundred special forces officers to besiege the village. To date they've only arrested 25 people (a slow start in an area where 90% of the inhabitants are involved in one way or another in drug trafficking), but have made some entertaining discoveries: aside from the endless fields of thriving cannabis and coca plants and the drug laboratories in stables and outbuildings, they've found several stolen ATM machines, stolen cars, trucks, and motorcycles, mind-boggling quantities of weapons (some of which are far more advanced than anything the Greek police force has access to), and the bank statements of shepherds who recently made deposits in the MILLIONS (we're talking euros here, people, not drachmas!).

The mountain-dwelling Cretans are so badass, in fact, that the flatlanders can't stand it and have started applying decals to their cars and trucks that look like bulletholes. (I swear.)

Along these lines (in the cultural weirdness department), I've seen a few noteworthy English language t-shirts lately. Not quite as good as the Japanese variety, but still pretty bizarre. My two favorites: 1. (worn by a fellow student at the U.) "Banana's (sic) are my Business" and 2. (spotted on a muscly guy parking his motorcycle) "Gay Men's Department".

On that note, I bid you Γειά χαρά (health and joy). The sun is out and we're going to the beach.

ΚΑΡΩΣ ΗΡΘΑΤΕ ΟΡΕ ΣΥΜΠΕΘΕΡΟΙ!

(Originally written in September 2007)

Χαιρετισμούς σ'όλους!
Greetings to one and all!

Some of you may remember that the last time I lived in
Greece, in 2002, I sent out periodic e-mails
chronicling my experiences and rambles here. Well, for
the benefit of the curious, the worried, and the
fellow travelers among ye, I intend to do the same
this go round, this time in blog format. Very periodically,
especially once school starts.

Which brings me to the first item of business. Some of
you (those with whom I haven't been in touch for some
time) are probably confused to some degree, so I'll
explain a bit: Ana (my wife - more confused? OK, it's
been too long, you should write more often) and I
moved to Crete a few weeks ago for yours truly to
complete my degree in Ancient and Modern Greek
Philology - basically comparative literature and translation
studies - at the University of Crete in Rethymno.
My degree is officially going to be from my "home"
institution, Hellenic College in Boston, but since HC
is officially recognized by the Greek government and
thus the EU, I was able to arrange a year of study
here with a minimum of hassle and red tape (by Greek
standards anyway).

So, we arrived in Athens on August 8 with four pieces
of excess luggage, or rather without, since Air France
forgot to put one or two on the plane from Washington.
C'est la vie... After a few days in the Greek capitol
waiting for my laouto to arrive, visiting with
friends, and being reminded why overcrowding,
pollution, ubiquitous concrete, and the Attic climate
are a very bad combination, we boarded the good ship
"Knossos Palace" and set sail from Piraeus, the
ancient Periclean port of Athens, for the Cretan
provincial capitol of Heraklion, seven hours or so
across the Aegean. (That's not too bad a trip; I once
journeyed from Piraeus to the island of Rhodes on the
dreaded Romilda [otherwise known as Vromilda, from the
Greek word for filth] universally considered the worst
boat in Europe. It took 28 hours and I was covered
from head to toe in soot by the time we got there.)

For those of you who've never been on an inter-island
Greek ferry, they're fairly huge, sturdy affairs
equipped with a number of cabins and a hold large
enough to accommodate what seems like hundreds of
cars, trucks, and motorcycles. There are basically
three divisions of ferry travelers, anthropologically
speaking: the tourists (usually Northern Europeans)
who sunbathe on the top deck; the gypsies and
wise-to-the-game backpackers who make a beeline for
whatever available floor space they can find inside
the ship and spread out their sleeping bags and
blankets (a regular feature of Greek ferry travel is
stepping over the sprawled-out limbs of snoring
passengers); and the Greeks themselves, who tend to
congregate in an asphyxiating knot around the ship's
bar, smoking and drinking frappes. On overnight
ferries, I personally try to find a spot underneath
one of the staircases, where one can spend a
relatively quiet and tranquil evening, punctuated only
by the curses of those with the same idea when they
arrive to find you already there. I must also add that
one of the highlights of ferry travel is that the
self-service restaurant on board has surprisingly good
and relatively reasonably priced food, and the line
always moves really fast, no matter how long it looks.

We arrived in Heraklion - named, of course, for the
archetypal hero Herakles/Hercules - with its massive
Venetian walls (it took the Turks a 21-year siege and
hundreds of thousands of casualties to
finally take it in 1669) and drove south to the
village of Gergeri, on the south-east flank of the
great Mt. Psiloritis, where the second annual "Piping
Shepherds" traditional Greek bagpipe festival was
taking place. Last year some friends from Kalymnos and
I participated in the first annual festival, which
takes place in the municipal forest outside of the
village, and this year we returned to find that it had
grown to a two-day event which proved to be
well-attended, exciting, and very loud. One of my
favorite moments was late in the evening/early in the
morning after the first night's performances, with all
the musicians and dancers seated around long tables
piled high with food, wine, and Cretan raki (a fiery
spirit distilled from grape skins); my friend Periklis
and I began playing Kalymnian party songs, and before
long three generations of Cretan, Thracian,
Macedonian, and Pontic Greeks (plus at least one
American and a Brazilian too) were all singing,
dancing, playing, and beating on tables, plates,
glasses, and each other in a Dionysian frenzy.

After two days in Gergeri we drove down to the
southern coast, the shore of which is washed by the
Libyan Sea, and then west and back up north to our new
home in the village of Somatas, a few kilometers south
of the prefectural capitol of Rethymno. Rethymno is in
many ways the ideal place to be based on Crete - it's
more or less at the geographic and cultural midpoint
of the island, is a relatively small city of about
30,000 full-time inhabitants (this number swells by
many times during August, making it fairly
suffocating), and is home to the liberal and fine arts
campus of the University of Crete, as well as the
international Center for Mediterranean Studies. This
makes for a very cultured and cosmopolitan
environment, without losing much of the charm and
mystery of previous centuries - especially very late
at night or early in the morning when the light is
just so and the streets are empty. The old Venetian
town at the center of the city is still surrounded by
its thick walls and decorated by 16th century
fountains and stone mansions (not to mention dominated
by the astoundingly large and astoundingly
well-preserved castle or Fortezza); the Exotic Aroma
of the Orient wafts everywhere from the countless
mosques, minarets, and wooden Turkish balconies left
by the previous Ottoman residents; and one need not
look very hard to see black-shirted old men with
imposing mustaches, huge leather boots, and,
frequently, a well-worn sidearm or knife making their
daily rounds among the kafeneia or glaring fiercely at
the scantily-clad Swedes and Germans who are the
latest addition to the long list of their island's
invaders.

The natural beauty around the city of Rethymno is
extraordinary; the beaches on the north coast,
particularly to the west of the town, are sandy,
clean, and stretch for miles (kilometers, sorry), and
almost immediately to the south the mountains begin to
rise, culminating in the aforementioned Psiloritis,
which at nearly 2500 meters is the
highest peak on Crete. This part of the island also
seems to be the greenest, though it is still fairly
rugged and dry. The stretch of beach to the east of
the city is sadly overdeveloped in the worst kind of
way, with innumerable and identical package resorts
(to paraphrase a wry guidebook I read yesterday,
Mother Nature worked slowly and patiently for millions
of years to endow this stretch of coast with all of
her gentle and breathtaking charms, while the modern
Cretan Homo Turisticus has in twenty years managed to
screw it to hell). But just a few kilometers west and
almost immediately to the south the wild, rugged, and
gorgeous nature of the place takes over. There are
innumerable caves, coves, and gorges, and olive groves
stretching as far as the eye can see. From the balcony
of our new digs we can see a broad sampling of what
Crete's northern coast has to offer: the plain below
us is full of olives and figs, the mountains rise up
behind us, rocky, full of oregano, thyme, and jasmine,
and dotted with the occasional stand of cypress or
pine, and in front, in a cleft between two hills, a
blue strip of the Aegean.

The village we live in, Somatas, is home to about 100
people and is located off the main road that leads
from the city of Rethymno to Spili (for you Greek folk
music enthusiasts, Spili is the birthplace of the lyra
player and composer Thanasis Skordalos). About five
kilometers from Rethymno, two or three from Gallos,
where the University is located, and a similar
distance from the next village to the south, Armeni,
it doesn't have any stores or services of any kind
except for a small livestock doctor's office (which
hasn't been open once the whole time we've been here)
and taverna run by a family of lyra and laouto
players. The latter is located right next to our
house, which, depending on your point of view and
taste, could be great or not so great. When they
party, Cretans don't stop 'til they done got enough,
which is usually around lunchtime the next day.
Luckily we like Cretan music.

Until now we've only met a few people here, but they
are enough to populate a bizarre novel along the lines
of something Gabriel Garcia Marquez or, better yet,
Mark Helprin would write. A brief sampling: our
landlord Nikos, a large, blustery fellow with a huge
bristly mustache whose normal speaking voice is in
most people's shouting register; his Norwegian wife
Anna who follows him around discreetly repairing
whatever damage he happens to cause; Nikos' mother
Pisti (Faith), a sweet old woman who at sunrise every
morning goes out to gather wild greens and who upon
our arrival presented us with several kilos of figs
and grapes and announced that she would be our
grandmother while we're here, since ours are across
the ocean; her jaybird, whose name I don't remember
but who we hear all day whistling and pronouncing the
few words of Greek he knows (the most bizarre one,
which also happens to be his favorite, is "koukla"
("doll"), which he intones in a chillingly low
Hitchcockian voice); the endearing milkman Pantelis,
who is a few oars short of a galley, so to speak, has
a speech impediment that makes it extremely difficult
to understand anything he says (that on top of his
incredibly heavy Cretan accent), and who brings fresh
sheep's milk for Ana every other day; the two Indian
guys who live across the street and work at the local
brick factory during the day but listen to
earsplitting Bollywood soundtracks by night; and of
course our friend Kostis, a local Vipassana meditator
and house painter and the whole reason we first
visited Somatas.

Cretans in general are a curious race of people who
place their personal, familial, and collective honor
above all else - it's not uncommon here to hear about
vendettas that have been passed down through
generations, with dozens of victims on either side -
and whose favorite pastimes (at least in the mountain
villages) include livestock theft and shooting/blowing
up anything they can get away with. I saw a sign
recently outside a village store advertising "Guns,
Ammunition, and School Supplies". Guns are so beloved
here that just about every Cretan male over the age of
14 has at least one, and some people spend
unbelievable amounts of money to illegally procure
everything from vintage pistols to Kalashnikof assault
rifles and even hand grenades. This obsession probably
stems from the fact that for centuries the Cretans
have constantly been in a state of armed uprising
against oppressive foreign overlords (Arabs, Ventians,
Turks, Nazis), and it's become such an integral part
of the culture that they haven't seen fit to let it
go. Aside from hunting and settling their differences,
guns are mostly used nowadays as a means of
expression, to convey the exuberance felt in good
company on a happy occasion. The success of weddings
here is judged by how many rounds are fired off during
the reception (a really good one tends to have about
2,000). I, for one, am so far content with wearing a
mustache to express my manliness. But who knows, we
just got here...

I'm sure you've all heard about the tragic fires that
engulfed the Peloponnese and other parts of mainland
Greece recently. While I haven't visited any of the
heavily devastated areas, I can say (from what I've
seen on the news on what friends living in Kalamata
and other affected areas have told me) that it is a
national disaster on a scale that Greece hasn't seen
in quite some time. I've heard countless horrific and
heartbreaking stories, as well as a few bizarre ones,
like the guy who fended off the fire around his house
by spending twenty hours spraying the perimeter with
his basement full of homemade wine; and the gypsies
from northern Greece who rushed down south, pretended
they were local residents who had lost their houses,
and collected thousands of euros in state-funded
reparations from several different banks on the same
street before they were caught. At any rate, many of
Greece's most beautiful and most viable forested areas
- not to mention several villages and nearly a hundred
people - are now ash, and the rage people feel at the
perpetrators of some of the fires (several were
definitely intentionally set) and the government
(which responded in a relatively lackadaisical manner)
is intense. The fires have predictably played a major
role in the hype and mudslinging that has preceded
this weekend's general elections, because of which
everything, including schools, shuts down from Friday
to Monday. (Everything, that is, except for
coffeehouses, where everyone will run immediately
after casting their vote in order to yell at each
other about who's going to win.)

On a happier note, I played at a wedding here in the
village the other night. The band's guitarist fell ill
at the last minute and I happened to be washing dishes
in my underwear when came the summons (luckily I live
next door to the tavern). Lyra, two laouta, and
guitar, which seems like a funny addition to the
traditional Rethymniot trio but if you pretend it's a
laouto it makes some degree of sense. Anyway, we
played from 10 to 6 the next morning without a break
and it felt a bit like my baptism into the cultural
life of Somatas. I won't relate to you the various
comical scenes that occurred due to my
veganism...