This week in Rethymno I saw a promotional notice for what I first saw written as Cretan Diet Week, with what I assumed to be an emphasis on the verb i.e. to diet. I switched off.

The next day I went for a cool walk in Rethymno’s shady municipal gardens and came across another poster for the Cretan Diet Festival, a celebration of a diet of which I wrote in another post, and I switched back on. The first notice had inadvertently hinted at a week of sacrifice and upended the message.

There’s more on the Cretan diet in my ‘A Modern Greek Tragedy’ rant but, briefly, in the 1970s the island’s population was widely recognised as one of, if not the healthiest in the world. Tragically, over the following forty years as more people adopted a western diet, the average weight of a Cretan increased by 20kg and obesity levels skyrocketed. By 2010, the healthiest people in the world, most having shunned the Cretan diet, became the most obese in Greece and Europe. It’s a sad story.

Among other things, the festival, the first of which was in 2012, is an attempt to reverse the Mediterranean diet’s fortunes, and presumably those of the producers, restaurant owners and growers etc. who participate.

But alongside all the foody stuff there are also cultural events featuring well-known Cretan musicians and dancers, as well as some from other parts of Greece. I went to one this evening, billed as an ‘Asia Minor feast with Maria Koti and her band’, and it was great.

Maria Koti

Maria Koti, pictured above, was born on Crete and used to listen to traditional mantinadas in the fields with her grandmother, who she describes as a peasant, which has a double-edged meaning in some cultures, but perhaps not here. Mantinadas are another example of Venetian influence, the word being derived from matinada, meaning ‘morning song’. They’re short, rhyming couplets.

Some of her father’s side of the family were immigrants from Asia Minor (Greeks rarely refer to Turkey), and the Dodecanese, so her music’s infused with traditional songs and melodies from there too.

It probably needs a balmy summer evening and waves lapping on a Cretan shore for the full, immersive experience but here’s a video of her from a few years ago. Imagine yourself in the film, Shirley Valentine, and it might sound better. Not everyone’s cup of tea but I enjoyed the concert.

The real thing in the atmosphere of a festival was much better. Rethymno’s municipal gardens were heaving, quite something for 10.00pm on a school night. There were children running around playing, teenage girls and boys with their grannies and grandpas, babies being passed around and doted on. Everyone was having a ball. It was a bit like a village fete or town show back in Blighty but without coats and English reserve. Glasses were raised although not emptied as purposefully or often as ours.

It was a bit less joyous walking home. I passed through sunset strip, an unedifying snapshot of Brits abroad, many slumped before plates of heart attack food from which their sun reddened bodies could clearly do with a break. Cheap pints and sunshine are great, and who wouldn’t want a break from the drudgery of nine to five, or the night shift, but it was such a stark and sorry contrast to the atmosphere just moments before.

Of course, I don’t know who they really are or how they feel but it made me think of Brexit and a piece by AA Gill, an arch lefty baiter who had a way with words:

“We all know what ‘getting our country back’ means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty”.

It’s unfairly presumptuous of me to think that the people I passed on sunset strip were the ones he described but I’d put money on it that quite a few were. I’m sure though that the people at the festival were having a lot more fun.

I took a few pictures