MY BIG FAT CRETE WEDDING | August 28th 2008

Philip Watson

In Crete, guns and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, so a wedding is a striking mixture of ancient and modern. Philip Watson joins the party ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

We were sitting with my wife's cousins in front of their village house, and tears were already being shed. All should have been well: Antoni and Sofia were getting married in two weeks' time, the engagement had been a happy one, and both families had declared themselves pleased with the match; even the collection of the dowry had been satisfactory. But Sofia was crying, and the source of her unhappiness was a subject close to every Cretan man's heart: guns.

"There it is again!" said Manolis, the head of the family. Sure enough, the toc-toc of small-arms fire echoed across from the dusty gold and green hillside opposite.

"I don't want guns at my wedding," Sofia wailed, "we're not Palestinian militia!"

Ever since the first gun arrived on the island, shots fired in the air have outdone the traditional sound of church bells to herald important social occasions. Weddings, births, celebrations of all kinds continue to be marked by a volley of gunfire, or balothies. The Cretan man powerfully asserts his right to defend himself against thieves, imposters, invaders or, more traditionally, the next-door village. The last time Cretan men were advised to give up their weapons was by their own government, shortly before the German invasion of 1941, and that generation swore never to perform such rash acts of peace again.

Today Crete has the highest ratio of guns per head in the European Union--even going by the official figures. The population of Greece is 11.5m, and there are 1m licences for rifles alone; but according to some estimates there are a further 1.5m unlicensed guns. Sometimes it feels as if most of those are in Crete.

Sofia's brothers, Dimitri and Costas, handsome young men in their mid-20s, are proud of their guns, just like any other man in the district. If you mention them, they laugh and wink at each other. They keep their weapons buried in one of the family's tomato fields, Manolis said, although the expression on his face told me he didn't approve.

"You've heard about the tank, haven't you?" Dimitri asked me. His brother smiled. Somewhere on the island, the story goes, is a German Tiger tank from the second world war, kept out of sight and in full working order. True or not, the story illuminates a Cretan characteristic: independence of spirit, and pride in outwitting interfering lawmakers and invading foreigners alike.

Gun licences are granted mostly for hunting, and some insist that the gun laws are tight. Others mention their neighbours' latest purchases: Kalashnikovs, Glocks and Uzis--quick-firing automatic weapons that would finely mince game animals before they reached the pot. The chatter of machinegun fire is a regular sound in the hills and valleys of western Crete, and whenever two or three men are gathered together, you can be sure that guns will be discussed, compared or fired into the air.

* * * * *

The inevitable question is: don't people get hurt or killed by falling bullets? Ten deaths and three dozen injuries from shooting accidents have been recorded by the police on Crete alone in the last ten years. Giorgos Voulgarakis, the public order minister at the time, invited Mikis Theodorakis, a veteran composer and respected opponent of the 1967-74 military dictatorship, to lead an anti-gun campaign. "We Cretans used firearms during hard times in the past to protect our country and our island," Voulgarakis said. "Now, sadly, we effectively turn them against each other." Today, Dimitri, Costas and their friends count on a local policeman to tip them off about the frequent "random" searches for illegal weapons. I asked Dimitri whether anyone was worried about getting caught.

"Of course," he said, "but the police need to file their reports. We'd just have to pay the fines, then life would go on."

From the other side of the terrace, Manolis clicked his worry beads irritably. "You're forgetting," he said. "What about Zoniana last year?" In the nearby village of Zoniana, a miniature drugs empire is reported to have established itself, with cannabis orchards concealed in the olive groves. In November 2007 a police raiding party was ambushed by at least 20 men armed with Kalashnikovs, injuring three officers, one seriously. The police are deeply concerned about the effect of the drugs trade on Crete, fearing that the island may become a key staging post between Africa and Europe; there are also signs that local production is on the increase. Manolis gestured towards the fields, to make his point clear: "Now they will come and look for drugs, and they will find your guns."

Dimitri and Costas replied together: "But they won't find any drugs! We are honest people following our Cretan traditions. The police know the difference."

A week before the wedding, my wife attended Sofia's dowry party. In the old days, the groom's family would arrive at the house of the bride's family; they would walk around and touch any object or item of furniture that they wanted for the new couple, and the bride's family was bound to add these to her dowry. Sofia said, laughing, "My grandmother had to hide some family treasures that her parents didn't want to give away"--an old chest had to be hauled out to a barn and covered with some sacks until the groom's family had gone. Today, so there can be no mistake, Sofia's family had simply filled a room with the necessary furniture bought from a popular store in town, some still in its plastic packaging: a white leather sofa, a nest of tables, a high-definition tv, boxed. Whereas the dowry used to be put onto a donkey cart and taken to the couple's home, here everything was loaded onto a couple of 4x4s, and driven off with long blasts on the horn.

The next big party was held in the middle of the week before the actual wedding. All the neighbours brought what they could. The local women from the village sat around the broad concrete terrace, peeling, deseeding and chopping vegetables with sharp little knives, and talking all the while. Tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes filled plastic buckets in front of them. Walnuts and almonds were cracked skilfully from their shells and tossed into china bowls. Sofia's grandmother sat watching them through her black-rimmed glasses, hands knotted over her stick, complaining that there wouldn't be enough to go round.

The men set up trestle tables and wrestled with stacks of plastic chairs. Sofia's mother laid out crisp white tablecloths, and other women brought more from their own trousseaux. Towards mid-afternoon a pair of strong-looking teenage boys erected a horizontal pole on a pair of supports, like a sort of goalpost. Soon after, the first goat arrived. It was wrapped loosely in a plastic sheet, cradled in the arms of Sofia's brother Dimitri, and it left a thin trail behind him of tiny drops of blood. Dimitri soon had the skinned carcass suspended by its hind feet from the pole. Costas brought another, and hung it with graceful ease next to the first. Manolis smiled and pronounced the old saying "meat is needed for a wedding" and the men agreed solemnly. Within an hour or so five more had arrived, and children skipped up to have their pictures taken with the seven suspended beasts.

Is that a good number, I asked Manolis? He shrugged and waved his hand, as though to say, "don't worry about it, we can manage with or without these goats." But he thanked the farmers who had brought a goat loudly, clapping them on the shoulder and urging them to help themselves to cheese and honey.

By midnight, about a hundred people had arrived. The women picked politely at cheese pies, raw nuts and tomato and cucumber salads, and the men admired huge trays of roast meat and potatoes. The goats, however, remained hanging, centre-stage, but ignored by everyone except the children.

"What about the goats?" I asked Manolis. "Aren't you going to cook them?"

"No, no," he said patiently, "they are gifts. Look--we have plenty of food here."

Old ladies rearranged cheese pies into new heaps on plates, and Sofia's grandmother harried the seated guests: "Eat! Eat up, Christo! You're losing weight, Andreas! It's good food!"

* * * * *

The lyra players--a pair of middle-aged men with nimble fingers and high-wailing voices--began to strike up irresistible rhythms on their three-stringed instruments. They sang some traditional mandinádhes and voices in the crowd yelled their approval. It was not long before the men arranged themselves for a dance. There is no folk dance more graceful than the syrto, the "dragging" dance style that begins slowly and calmly, with a line of men joined hand to hand, led by one senior member at the head. Attitude is all: the face serious but relaxed, the body expressing firmness but at the same time a deep gentleness, an almost mystical calm, respite before the frenzy that follows. The music quickens; the feet skip to the faster beat, while the body above the waist appears to remain still. A dancer's grace and skill lies in the way he conveys pain, sadness, joy, kefi--the untranslatable word that captures the innate ability to hit adversity on the chin in the most noble and honourable way.

One by one the men in the line whirled around amid the shouts and clapping of the onlookers; and as the music reached its peak, Dimitri came forward with the smoothest of dance steps, a pistol raised in his hand as if from nowhere, and fired it high into the air, twirling swiftly and easily back to his place in the line, the gun now vanished, so that his hands were both suddenly free to take the hands of his fellow dancers. The movement was so fluent, so much a part of the dance, that I wondered for a moment whether a gun had been fired at all. Perhaps I had been mistaken. The noise might have been a sort of perfect percussion to accompany the music.

The dance ended and another began, for the women this time. Sofia called to my wife to join in, and one of the men asked her: "Your husband, can he drink?" She claimed I could.

"I am Likourgos," he said, slapping me on the back and introducing himself as a friend of the family. He tapped the back of the chair next to his and signalled for me to sit. A man of about 50, Likourgos had dark, curly hair, tanned skin and the traditional mountain dweller's build: thick-set, with square-fingered hands, a dark shadow of beard and expressive deep-set eyes. Like all the men of the village over 40, he wore a dense moustache. As an Englishman married to a Cretan, I am considered an acceptable foreigner. The Cretans pay heed to the spirit of philoxenia, literally "love of strangers"--the traveller or guest is honoured with special care. (During the war, my mother-in-law once told me, her family looked after a German soldier who had become separated from his platoon. They gave him food and drink, while only a few kilometres away in a neighbouring village, his comrades perpetrated terrible acts of war.)

Likourgos filled my glass and yelled a toast, fixing me with a friendly stare. I knew that this glass was not for sipping, so I yelled the correct response and drank it all, refilling the glass from the bottle and passing it, brimming, back to him. Cretans do not drink to get drunk; nor do they drink to cheer themselves up, since they would see that as mere character deficiency. Being cheerful, moreover, is not really in the Cretan character, not in that slightly superficial English sense. No: Cretans drink together, glass after glass, to be men together.

The same seems to be true with firing guns. Just as Cretans are rarely drunk, so guns are rarely discharged in anger. And just as wine or raki may be consumed in killer quantities, bullets may be loosed off in heedless profusion. It is a short step to seeing shooting into the sky as no different from an exuberant toast.

The sky grew paler in the east: dawn. Dogs sniffed around the goat carcasses; grandmothers started to clear away the plates of cheese pies, nuts and honey, roast lamb and goat, potatoes, bread, olives; yet there was no sign of regret about what remained uneaten. In the old days--an endlessly repeated, almost Homeric phrase here, "the old days"--the villagers all brought food as gifts, valuable relief from the harsh routines of life in the hills. Today, however, there are few signs of want. Shiny pick-up trucks are parked beneath handsome new car ports annexed to sturdy concrete-framed houses; everyone buys new clothes for a wedding, all but the widows over a certain age, whose mandatory black weeds can never be forsaken for anyone. The traditions observed in times of hardship persist mainly at the table, now crowded with food. One of the dogs crept up unchallenged and started on the meat as the guests found their way to bed.

* * * * *

The ceremony itself took place the following Sunday. Branches of herbs were thrown on the ground, to raise a fine scent beneath the feet of the guests as they made their way to the church. It all went off beautifully. The church was lit more brightly than seemed proper, but it favoured the camera and video-users. Sofia wore a strikingly low-cut dress in pale pink, with silvery sequins shimmering on each breast. Antoni wore a dazzling white satin suit. I wondered if the priest had any objection to this show, but he was hardly to be outdone himself, with his dramatic gold-trimmed vestments shimmering in the light. As they processed around the altar, taking their symbolic first steps together, we threw rice over them, the priest shielding himself with the Bible.

The wedding feast was not to be held in the village, but at Falassarna, a beach resort some 40 kilometres away, to which we drove in a loud and jubilant convoy. "I don't understand what young people want these days," Sofia's grandmother complained to anyone who would listen.

We arrived at Falassarna to an arrangement of tables laid with gaudy pink tablecloths, each one flagged by a bright pink helium-filled, heart-shaped balloon. Feather boas in a coruscating shade of pink were festooned over a stage; from the loudspeakers came the hammering chink-chink of Greek pop music. Chocolate bonbons tied in pink tulle were arranged at every place. I made discreet faces at my wife, who pretended to ignore me. I could see nothing but pink.

Then, above the shrieks of the children and the shouts of the men, a loud series of bangs shattered the disco rhythms: there it was, the old, familiar, almost homely sound of gunfire. Likourgos led a volley with his Kalashnikov, Dimitri and Costas on either side of him politely waiting for their turn with their own treasured new pieces, alternating single shots with bursts of automatic fire.

I looked for Sofia's face to see her reaction, but I needn't have worried: she seemed hardly to have noticed.

Photo credit: Wolfgang Staudt/flickr

(Philip Watson is an editor at Thames & Hudson)