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.
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