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...