Sticky Reputations

During our stay on the island of Crete we have noticed how friendly and keen to engage the locals are. Are they just sucking-up to tourists? Cynicism notwithstanding, a genuinely warm welcome is hard to fake and easy to detect. They often ask where we are from and, invariably, our answer – “Manchester” – elicits a positive response that can serve well as a conversation-opener. For some it is about football, for others the music scene, but for the dentist whose services I was obliged to engage, it was about the city’s scientific heritage and the fact that he had trained there. The point is that we are from a place that people know something about: it has an international reputation that, fortunately, sticks to its itinerant denizens – for which I am grateful. If I were to hail from, say, Hemel Hempstead I doubt the conversation would get past the “Where is that?” stage.

Having left Chania, where we had been staying for ten days, we arrived at Ayios Nikolaos, where we were ushered into our apartment by Sacha, an unkempt, laid-back (I would say stoned) man of about forty. His manner – which included a tendency to swear casually – led me to enquire whether he was Greek. “No. I’m a bloody Serb,” he said, explaining that the adjective was conferred on Serbians in 1994 by a CNN reporter and that it had stuck – much to his obvious resentment. Sacha went on to remind us that the next day, January 6^th, would be Christmas again because “the effing Greeks” use both the Gregorian and Julian calendars, “FFS!”.

We had heard that the 6^th would be celebrated by a traditional cross-diving ceremony at the harbour so, rather than attend a church service, we went down to watch it. It started with half a dozen bushy-bearded old men in fancy clerical kaftans chanting and singing on the quay. Meanwhile, in two small boats below them, a dozen clean-shaven young men in swimming shorts were poised for a contest. At a given moment the priest with the most elaborate hat threw a small wooden cross into the water and the young men dived in to retrieve it. After a lot of splashy tussling, the victor climbed out clutching his prize, presented it to the priest and was rewarded by being allowed to kiss it before it was thrown in again.

I didn’t take the trouble to learn the significance of the ceremony, but it was more fun than any church service I have attended, though the absence of female participation rankled somewhat. Sceptical though I am about organised religion, it is a significant factor in social cohesion. However, I prefer the entirely secular – like the performance of folk-dancing I had seen previously, where boys and girls, dressed in mid-18^th century costume, danced together in what was obviously a display of marriageability – a very temporal raison d’être that has little to do with an imagined life hereafter.

Traditions, whether fostered by religious or secular practices, define communities, and a Greek tradition that I particularly like is generosity to strangers. In Chania, our landlady gave us jars of honey and bags of produce from her smallholding; the lady in the fish shop (where they grill your purchase over charcoal, if you wish) gave us a portion of fava beans with our takeaway lunch; the lady in the bakery gave us extra sesame breadsticks; and Lena in the coffee bar (a Stone Roses fan) pressed on us some of her biscuits made with olive oil and red wine. All of which has left me nonplussed the by fact that Virgil’s comment “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” still comes to mind, 2000 years after he wrote it. Reputations can be very sticky, but these guys are working hard to shake this one off.