The Pillars of Hercules

“You didn’t see it?” a German said to me at a cafe in town. He was incredulous, and he mocked my ignorance. I was not offended. Since I spent many days mocking other people’s ignorance, this was fine with me. “When this show was on television in Germany, the streets were empty. Everyone was at home watching it. Me, too. That’s why I came here.”

The port and the town and everything visible had been given over to tourists; there was not a shop nor any sign of human activity, nor any structure, that was not in some way related to the business of tourism. All the signs were repeated in four languages, German taking precedence.

Writing about tourists—whether it is a harangue or an epitaph—is just pissing against the wind. There is a certain fun to be had from snapping the odd picture, or cherishing the random observation. But I had vowed at the beginning of my trip to avoid tourists and, whenever possible, not to notice them. Haven’t we read all that elsewhere? I went ashore, bumped into the Greenwalds (Jack: “I’ve just been offered a genuine Greek icon for fifty dollars. Think I should buy it?”), walked around a little, and finding the crowds of milling tourists much too dense, I rented a motorcycle and left Ágios Nikólaos at sixty kilometers an hour. I rode east, down the coast, then southward over the mountains to the opposite side of Crete, to the town of Ierápetra. This place looked very much like Ágios Nikólaos, which I had fled from: curio shops, tavernas, postcard shops, unreliable-looking restaurants, Rooms for Rent! Bikes for Hire!

There were plenty of Zorba enterprises here, too. And bullying restaurateurs and their touts brayed at passersby at Ierápetra.

“Meester—you come! You eat here! Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Best food in Griss! Where you go? Not some other place—you eat here!”

Every five feet there was an insistent tout, hustling people off the pavement and seating them, before any competitor could snag them. There was probably a more unpleasant figure one could be assaulted by than an unshaven Greek howling commands at me in ungrammatical German, but if so I could not think of one at the moment. They were seriously browbeating the perambulating tourists—just the mood to whet your appetite; and when the people kept walking they were insulted and abused by the touts they had passed.

All that and a foul beach, but the muddiest beach at Ierápetra was called Waikiki, a misnomer that was merely a harmless desecration compared to the violence of calling a boardinghouse outside town The Ritz. Elsewhere in Ierápetra the eighteenth-century mosque in a quaint part of town had been wrecked and partly rebuilt. The minaret was still standing. The Arabic calligraphy remained. But the interior was defiled, having been turned into a tiny auditorium. Chairs had been set up, facing music stands, and the bass drum was propped against the wall.

Was this worse than the Turks in Istanbul revamping the Byzantine magnificence of Santa Sophia’s and making it a mosque, along with any number of Christian churches? Probably not. But there were still Christians functioning in Turkey and there were no Muslims in Greece. Apart from the tourists and some retirees, there were no foreigners in Greece. There were Arabs in Spain, Albanians and Africans in Italy, Moroccans in Sardinia, Algerians in France; but there were no immigrants of any kind in Greece. The Albanians that came had been sent back. Whether it was Greece’s feeble economy that kept everyone except Albanians (whose economy was abysmal) from wishing to settle there, or Greek intolerance, was something I did not know. Perhaps it was both—or neither, since the Greeks were themselves migrants, leaving in great numbers for America and Australia.

Was Crete the ancient homeland of the Jews? Tacitus thought so. His theory was inspired by the name of Crete’s highest mountain, in the central part of the island: “At the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the violence of Jupiter, they abandoned their habitation and gained a settlement at the extremity of Libya. In support of this tradition, the etymology of the name is adduced as a proof. Mt. Ida, well known to fame, stands on the isle of Crete: the inhabitants are called Ideans; and the word by a barbarous corruption was changed afterwards to that of Judeans.”

A Dutchman, Janwillem from Rotterdam, whom I met in Ierápetra, told me that he was here to look at buying a place for his retirement.

“I retire in a few years,” he said. “I would like to overwinter here, or in Benidorm.”

“What’s the attraction here?”

Janwillem countered with a question of his own. “You’ve been to Holland?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Very flat. Very expensive,” he said. “But here”—and he gestured—“is cheap! You can eat at one of those places with wobbly tables, very old and nice, dinner for two, with wine—twenty guilders!”

“So you’re moving here?”