Tourism as Ethnic Relations in Crete (Greece)
An Ethnographic Outline

Here you find some excerpts from an article written for KOLOR, Journal on Moving Communities (2002). In our Summer Schools the research about tourism as ethnic relations is one of the subjects. Following case concerns Crete, the largest Greek island. Comments are of course welcome. Feel free to quote from this text. If you do, we politely ask you to refer to our site. Thanks!

Traditional Cretan culture: the world of palikaria

In the first half of the 20th century more than 80% of the Cretans live in small, often isolated face to face communities (clusters) in the valleys and plateaus of the mighty Cretan mountains (highest peaks around 2,500m). These mountains (from west to east: Lefka Ori, Oros Idi or Psiloritis, Oros Dikti or the Lassithi mountains and the smaller Sitiaka Ori), gradually rising from the north coast and often ending abruptly in a steep south coast, have divided the island since ancient times in various geographical habitats. The Mediterranean patriarchal peasant culture dominates the slow but harsh village life. Each year identical agricultural activities come and go. Social life is organized around the extended family and politically developed in a hierarchic, many-sided system of patrons and clients. Social and technical innovations are rare. Tbc deeply entrenched sense of “honor” (timi) forms the aimed foundation of the cultural ideology, whereby men and women, guided by diverse strict cultural codes, live in separate worlds. This sense of “honor” implies in its negative manifestation the avoidance of “dishonor” and “shame” (dropi). Orthodox Christianity rules daily life and is in many ways through diverse patterns and rituals applied as a cultural system. Among the frequent religious festivals Easter is the most important with the triumph of the Resurrection of Christ and the reassuring knowledge “to have survived the winter”. Each village has its own patron saint, whereas the local priest (pappahs) occupies a powerful position, along with a few notables and landlords in charge of the well-being of the entire village. The laws of the Greek state (to kratos) are maybe known but seldom fully applied. “Cretan mountain villages take care of their own business in their own beloved environment (to ethnos).” The coffee-house (kafenion) is the little parliament where big and small matters are widely discussed by the gathered men each evening.

The Cretan villagers in general despise the slowly growing and in their eyes “Western and mixed” population (macripantalonades; “the long trousers wearers”) in the cities of Chania and Iraklio. These are located on the north coast. Only during the late Venetian hegemony of Crete from the 15th until the 17th century they formed multi-ethnic centres. They also feel superior to the poor fishermen living on the shores. Moreover, they develop the same negative feelings for the rough clans of shepherds of the higher regions. The only non-Cretan group on the island, a few thousand gypsies, is clearly seen as inferior. The Cretan mountain communities are extremely self-assured and conservative. They firmly claim to be “the real Cretans”. Within each village, one speaks of “good and honorable” and “bad and shameful” families. “The good ones" refer to “their true Cretan origin and lineage” (kalosiros, Cretan dialect). Those self-images are applied for the whole village. To the outside, the native village where most men spend their whole life, is described as “a good village” (kalo chorio), which is proudly “proven” by subjective interpretations of local history and various events in daily life. These stories underline the local superiority with a strong need for authenticity in terms of a collective approval (authentes), creating simultaneously a fervently cultural denial of any innovation. Clan and family feuds (ikoyeniaka, euphemistically called “family matters”) with the unwritten law of blood revenge (akhti) incite and reinforce this superior self-images, from the level of the own family to the whole native village.

In a broader perspective, all this leads to a large production of palikaria-images (from the Turkish loan word: palikar, “fighter”), creating culture patterns in which a young man is growing up to reach the ideal of “a true captain”, an undaunted man with a strong sense of honor in combination with the rigid aim to achieve real freedom for himself, his family, his village and “his Crete". He proves his status of being a man (a real Cretan with his own kapetania, “being a captain, a leader”) by different acts as the rite de passage of stealing a sheep from a nearby village (zoohklopi, a symbolic sexual performance). The historical context is formed by the long Cretan struggle against the Ottoman (Osmanli-)Turkish domination of the island (1669-1898/1913). This struggle, justified by Orthodox Christianity, is constantly revitalized by discussing the difficult political scene between Greece and Turkey and by telling endless stories of bravery acts of Cretan captains and fighters in their many, however seldom coordinated, uprisings against the Ottoman-Turkish hegemony. The fact that there are no more “Turks” (or their descendants) on the island (Treaty of Lausanne, 1923) is of great value because the Cretan villagers develop the taste of a full victory over the Islamic occupation. Several rituals of Orthodox Christianity give meaning to this patriarchal inspired cultural ideology of palikaria.

The slow integration of Greek national stereotypes in the traditional world of palikaria

Until the present day the majority of the Cretans has no interest in an independent Crete, although it is by far the largest Greek island (length: 260km; width: 12km to 56km). The Cretans (550.000; Greek population: 10.300.000) feel “Greek”, even more, they claim in general to be “the bravest Greeks”. Since independence (1830/1832) Greece has witnessed a substantial expansion of national territory. After a short period of some autonomy under the European Powers (1898) Crete is “united” (enosis) with Greece in 1913. The Cretan born, great Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos is the protagonist of this union, creating a far-reaching Venizelos-cult in Crete. In the palikaria, only by its union with Greece, Crete becomes a true nation-state. Not the Greek king but Venizelos and certainly the Patriarch of Constantinople represent the true symbols of Greekhood for many Cretans. The palikaria finds another strong matrix in the persistent local Cretan resistance against the nazi-occupation during World War II, when most Cretan young men were fighting in the Greek army around the borders of Albania. Indeed, many mantinades (popular sayings on rhyme surviving time by a strong oral tradition, often used in the typical Cretan lira songs) are stating in various manners: “Nazi's and Turks are devilish”.

From the 1950s onwards the strongly directed hierarchic Greek state, anticipating Greek regionalism, also strengthens its power in Crete. In daily praxis however, Athens is still far away. But in the towns of Chania and Iraklio (north coast) the national Greek stereotype of the Hellenic-Romeic opposition (Herzfeld, 1986: 215-233) gains ground. The Hellenic dimension refers to the glorious past of Ancient Greek culture while the Romeic points at “the sad break with that past”, the feeling to have failed as a people to give continuity to that glorious past. This ancestor obsession (progonoplexia) has many social outcomes as the heated choice between katharevousa (a cleaned up, artificial “Ancient Greek”) and dimotiki (the common language with local dialects and loan words from Italian and Turkish). This irrational “hunger for the past” leads in the numerous Greek military dictatorships -and certainly in Greek fascism- to plenty grotesque acts, often very frightening. It is in fact Europe that has created the Hellenic stereotype since the Renaissance and has spread it on a large scale since Romanticism. Ancient Greek culture is then considered as “the cradle of the European civilisation”. This viewpoint holds an influential argument in social Darwinism to support the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottoman-Turkish Empire (“Greeks, that is what we all are", P.B. Shelley, 1792-1822), despite the disappointment, even the resentment of many Philhellenes after their first meetings with Greek undisciplined guerrilla bands. Greek historiography itself produces later the myth-symbol to present the Armatoli and the Kleftes as freedom fighters. Yet in reality many of them were only ordinary bandit groups robbing everyone they met. Until today, European media often make uneasy amalgamations and associations between the Ancient and the modern Greeks, and this on various accounts. The Hellenic-Romeic opposition weighs heavily on the Greek mind. As the Greek poet Seferis masterly summarizes: “I woke up with this marble head in my hands. It exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it down”. A most clear literal illustration of the Hellenic-Romeic opposition is found in Nikos Kazantzakis' work Alexis Sorba (1952; “Zorba, The Greek”) by a Romeic- (138-139) and a Hellenic-inspired (140-141) letter written to the main character of the book. As many certainly Greek ethnographers stress, the Hellenic-Romeic opposition is a pitfall because as a result of it Greek informants respond in a way they think the informer wants them to do.

The Hellenic images integrate slowly in the palikaria of the Cretan villagers. A favourite mantinade runs: “Crete, fatherland of Minos, mother of Venizelos, without you there clangs no bell of freedom”. It is indeed the Minoan culture (2600-1400/1100 BC), simplified as “the cradle of Ancient Greek culture", that the Cretans apply to state that they are not only “the bravest" but also “the first Greeks". Greek and foreign archaeological projects, digging up “hard proof”, support this process. A village with a Minoan (or Ancient Greek) archaeological site gains more prestige despite the efforts of the orthodox clergy (certainly in the beginning) to counter “this pagan idleness". Fantastic images about the Minoan culture are rumored over the whole island. The poorly educated villagers refer to inherited Ancient Greek body features (“blond, great and strong, the hook-nose"), tell heroic tales about the Dorians as a (second) unit of brave ancestors and add even orthodox symbols. The result is an absurd mixture of sheer nonsense, popular rumors while some picked up historical facts. In the early 1960s the traveller David MacNeil Doren (1981) rapidly finds out that the villagers have no interest at all in historical realities concerning the Cretan ethnogenesis such as the depopulation under the Arab occupation (824-961) when Crete became a famous slave-market. During the the second Byzantine period (961-1204) as well during the Venetian occupation (1204-1669), many groups of immigrants come to Crete (e.g. Armenians under the rule of Byzantium). Most Cretan villages (metochia) find their birth during feudalism under the rule of Venice and are definitely not Minoan or Ancient Greek creations.

Thus, many Cretans of the mountain communities develop following patriarchal, ethnic self-images as Captain Pavlos Bikouvaris from the hamlet Amoudhari: “The world, that is Europe; Europe, that is Greece; Greece, that is Crete; Crete, that is Chania (city and region in West-Crete); Chania, that is Sfakia (even among the Cretans a famous "wild" mountain region); Sfakia, that is Askifou (village); Askifou, that is Amoudhari (hamlet of Askifou); Amoudhari, that is Captain Pavlos Bikouvaris” (quoted by many travellers as Enzinck, 1968: 89). The Cretans in their growing confrontation with Greek society are not only seen by the mainland Greeks as “dapper and fierce” but they also are feared and characterized as “lawless and primitive”, “a bunch of brutal outlaws, getting their knives out for the smallest triviality”. For many, Crete is “a Little Sicily”, and also this label feeds the Cretan traditional ethnic process “to be the bravest (and the first) Greeks”.

To the present: the coming of international mass tourism

In the 1960s the emigration “in small steps", from hamlets to larger villages and finally to Chania and Iraklio, starts to take off. The exodus goes further to Athens and from the Greek capital the migrants go often abroad. Studies estimate that about one out of six Cretans leaves their beloved island. The main cause constitutes the growing poverty, a process that starts with the enosis. The increasing dividing of the poor, limited farmland takes at last its toll. Furthermore, World War II exhausts Crete. The subsequent Greek Civil War (1946-1949) -in fact starting in 1942-1943 but in Crete far not so murderous as on the mainland- prevents foreign aid. “The Cretans have a potential need for almost everything”, concludes the large-scaled Rockefeller Foundation development report (1953). The dictatorship of the mad Greek colonels (1967-1974) intensified the Cretan emigration.

This process strengthens the palikaria of those who remain in the villages while in Chania and Iraklio -and some expanding communities on the north coast (Rethimno)- Hellenic images start to prosper, due to the nationalistic education in schools. In the cities the palikaria is amplified with what could be called “El Greco-images” (referring to K. Theotokopoulos (1541?-1614), the famous Cretan born painter flourishing in Spain). Those “intellectual” images allude to “the cultural highlights” of the Cretan Renaissance (1550-1650) during the Venetian period. The Cretan bourgeoisie “rediscovers” Erotokritos, the title and the hero of a 17th knight roman, written in the Cretan dialect by an exponent of the Venetian-Cretan nobility V. Kornaros. It is probably inspired by an Italian version of the Old-French 15th century novel Paris et Vienne by Pierre de la Cypède but rewritten for a Venetian-Cretan audience. For ages, a great part of the 10,000 verses survives in the Cretan oral tradition, applied as a strong symbol of resistance against the Ottoman-Turkish occupation. At present Erotokritos has become a relic “of the well-educated and civilised Cretans” with even life-performances in the city theatres. Some families even start to refer to their Byzantine origin, the continuation of the Roman Empire for thousand years, often stressing their Orthodox Christian being. In this whole process, some citizens start to develop negative feelings towards “the primitive mountain villagers” where the rapid descending population shows no interest in El Greco-images.

In particular due to the colonels, Greece enters into the market of international mass tourism. “Greece must become the Spain of the East Mediterranean.” In the 1960s it is common practice for extreme right governments to achieve economic successes on a short term by offering sumptuous privileges to foreign investors (see e.g. Latin America). Later, each Greek government promotes the coming of mass tourism. The famous Greek actress and Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri is very successful in such attempts using her Hellenic “art and culture” policy (“culture is our biggest industry”). In 1985, Athens is the first annual cultural capital city of Europe. Since the late 1980s the Ministry of Tourism and the Greek National Tourism Organisation (GNTO) have been vital in Greek politics and economy. In Crete, cultural tourism (Minoan and Ancient Greek archaeological sites) makes place for an imposing stream of international tourists of the sun-sea-sand type. Each year the Cretans count to their own surprise more tourist arrivals. Their amazement stops when they realise that tourism will never go away. In the late 1990s the cape of two million tourists a year is taken. In a few decades the island changes drastically from “a forgotten place in the south-east European corner” to a thriving international vacation destination where also Greek tourists are spending their holidays in an increasing way. Today Crete belongs, together with Athens and the islands of Corfu and Rhodes, to the top tourist resorts in Greece.

The integration of tourism: “politics and tourism”

Tourism has rapidly integrated in Greek society. Various aspects of tourism are daily discussed by the media. At the University of Crete, established in the 1970s, more and more students research different aspects of tourism. In Cretan kindergartens the toddlers make drawings of tourists. The Greek government plays a crucial role in this rapid evolution, generating often structural social changes. In the 1990s the policy of “a controlled quantity and improved quality” is launched, which results in huge investments in luxury marinas and heliports. A special police force is installed, then expelled and reinstalled, the so-called “Tourist Police”. The Hellenic images are not only “secured” through many restorations or reconstructions of the Ancient Greek heritage but also by the doubtful government measure that only special trained Greek persons may guide tourists in the official (open-air) museums. Their accounts are often coloured with a touch of nationalistic propaganda.

Tourism is in many ways used for political purposes by the Greek government. In 1996 Turkey announces that the south-west Cretan island of Gavdos in the Libyan Sea (55 inhabitants, a few square kilometres) lay in “the grey zone” of which the Greek possession has to be altered. Immediately Greece announces an investment of two million dollars “to improve” tourism on the small island (marina, heliport). While the investment still needs to be done, Turkey has remained silent in this matter. In the early 1990s Greece expects to organise the Olympic Games of 1996, a century after the first “reinstallation” of the games in Athens. When the Olympic Committee chooses the American city of Atlanta, the seat of the Coca-Cola Company, the tourists in Greece are by all means informed about “the scandal of the Coca-Cola games”. A Cretan politician even suggests to excluding Coca-Cola of the Greek and even tourist market through replacing it by its core competitor Pepsi. One of the most spectacular examples of “the use of tourism” in Greek politics is the conflict with the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Makedonia (Fyrom). When the Fyrom in 1990s claims this name (Makedonia) as a nation and even starts to use "Greek symbols", Greece felt threatened (the largest Greek province on the mainland is also called Macedonia). Even the heritage of Alexander the Great, one of the powerful Hellenic symbols is involved in the hectic debate between the two nations. The Greek anthropologist Ana Karakasidou, working on ethnic identification “of some Greek Macedonian border villages”, is incorrectly demonised as "anti-Greek" in some Greek media. The renowned Cambridge University Press (CUP) decides not to publish her work, fearing a boycott of their lucrative English courses in Greece and reprisals for their staff. Famous scientists working in Greece as M. Herzfeld left the CUP. In Greek eyes the European media start to ridicule the Greek anxiety about “the smal], harmless Fyrom”. Greece reacts by putting a special stamp on millions of tourist postcards which travel around the world with the text: “Macedonia, Greek and only Greek”. Banners with the same text are placed on the most crowded tourist beaches.

One must also emphasize the measures of local Cretan authorities to expand tourism. The pros and cons of diverse projects are analyzed profoundly by the Cretans. Will the investments bring prosperity to the region, the city, the own family or do they just offer a better way of life to the tourists? A good example of this debate is formed by the discussions of the improvements in traffic (air-land-sea). At present, Cretan politicians are very well aware that if they can link some project to expanding or improving tourism, Athens will at least lend a willing ear. On the other hand, because of the boom of tourism on the island, Cretan politicians are far more heard in Greece than in the near past, while some make brilliant political careers in Athens.

A tourist economy

In a few decades the Cretan peasant culture has turned into “a tourist economy” which brings more alterations than just expanded opening hours of shops, threatening the traditional siesta. A renewed, complex system of patrons and clientele in the business of tourism arises where the drive to make profit comes increasingly in conflict with the traditional ties of the extended family. The indirect employment in many tourist-linked economic sectors, ranging from building to public transport to banks and health centres, makes the Cretans aware of their new identity of a host culture. In the depopulated Cretan hinterland public and private initiatives are taken to create large-scaled cooperatives to extend the agricultural production and (from the viewpoint of the public sector) to stop further emigration. Such enterprises are also found in the fishery. The tourist market, however, puts a strain on the local economy to the extent that many "origin-made Cretan products" as feta-cheese must be imported from abroad.

The economy of tourism brings new people to Crete. There is the arrival of Greeks to work in tourist or in tourist-linked sectors. This process strengthens the Cretan integration in Greece with an increase of Cretan-Greek marriages. The largest and still growing foreign group is formed by mostly young European hosts and hostesses working for European tourist companies, completed with a variegated unit of diverse specialists as hotel managers, project developers, cooks, tourist animators and sport monitors. In the late 1990s Chinese families emerged, establishing an own network of Chinese food restaurants. One finds also a growing group of European youngsters trying to earn their stay of a few months (years) with some work in tourism. Cretan farmers hire them for the harvest. These young people start to replace the gypsies who were traditionally doing this work. The new economy of tourism generates a stream of active returning Cretan migrants, setting up diverse businesses in tourism with a capital earned abroad. Many have maintained family bonds in Crete such as the annual holidays of parents and children, so that their return is prepared, often a key for success. They develop a strong dynamism in the tourist market of supply and demand, due to their insights of the culture of the tourists' homelands. The returned migrants introduce a trend that is presently fully developed in Crete, namely transnationalism. I studied Cretan-German transnational families working in the sector of restaurants. Often the initiators are couples of mixed matriages, such as a Cretan man with a German spouse. In Crete as in Germany they are running taverni and one must stress the power of their cultural flexibility in combination with strong family ties. In Crete they go to meet the (German) tourists in a very dynamic way. Some of them are expanding their business to Eastern-Europe where they build up new networks with the descendants of Cretan and Greek communist refugees from the Greek Civil War. Their future in tourism in Crete looks prosperous as the whole process of transnationalism on the island is enlarging. Not only the group of foreigners working in Cretan tourism can easily be described as members of the process of transnationalism but also more senior tourists coming for a long stay to the island each year gradually becoming “inhabitants” of Crete. The various definitions of “the tourist” and “tourism” are indeed constantly under pressure by the social praxis, certainly if one considers that an expanding group of Albanians and Filipinos is coming to Crete as “tourists” (self-definitions) but in reality working illegally on the huge Greek black market in which the economy of tourism is dominating increasingly.

A global geographical and social polarisation

At present, for the majority of the Cretans living on the north coast (80%), it is common practice to share their island with international tourists. From March to October each year the tourists are filling up the countless hotels and pensions in greater numbers. The top season is situated between June and September. Many initiatives for developing large scale tourism in the mountains such as farm tourism, mountain climbing, even ski centers, have failed so far. Tourists' activities there remain limited to so-called “safaris” with shiny jeeps or popular one-day excursions including a visit to the famous monastery of Arkadi, a bus drive through the Lassithi plateau where 11,000 white-plastered windmills are maintained for the sake of tourism, the tourist crowded 18km descent of the San Maria Gorge including “a lazy option”. The whole process of mass tourism in Crete has generated a geographical polarization that can be summarized as follows:

- a growing population on the north coast with expanding cities (Iraklio and Chania) and communities, multi-ethnic, modern and dynamic, expanding tourist areas in an already large-scaled tourism; versus
- the depopulated mountain hinterland with ghost villages and a few slowly growing farming communities, ethnic-autochthonous during the 20th century, traditional, one-day tourist excursions and traveling backpack tourists, older population, conservative.

On the south coast a fast growing number of communities are already thriving for tourism. Undoubtedly, this area will assume the same outlook as the north coast within a few years. At the moment many mainland Greeks spend their holidays in the South of Crete in small coast villages which are also the favourite destination of Italian tourists with campers.

The global impact of tourism furthermore causes a social polarisation -as the Cretans themselves say- between “traditional” and “modern” families on the north (south) coast. The first group attempts to observe diverse traditions, often connected with cultural habits of Orthodox Christianity. This potentially evokes quarrels and even bitter conflicts between families and neighbors. It is in particular the new economy of tourism that evokes many changes in Cretan family patterns as the pioneering research of Maria Kousis points out (1984, 1989). My fieldwork in the 1990s confirms many of her findings such as the spectacular decrease of the size of the nuclear family or the decline of the traditional “unquestioned command” (koumando) of the senior patriarch.

The tourists as an ethnic category in Crete

Until now, some global aspects of the integration of tourism in Crete are discussed, offering diverse challenges and causing different changes, with special attention for the political and economic contexts. But there are more realms, embedded in those contexts, which also embody and determine the impact of tourism on Cretan society and culture. There is first the domain of the growing confrontations in terms of the physical presence of tourists. Secondly, one also needs to explore the real contacts and communication between Cretans and tourists. Supported by many participating observations and data collected during my field work in Crete, it is plausible to claim that the tourists must be seen as an ethnic category on the island and this as well from the Cretan as from the viewpoint of the tourists. This study is called “tourism as ethnic relations".

To understand the basic principles of tourism as ethnic relations, two work instruments are used. Tourism is defined as “a mass, temporary, recreational nomadism (nomadic way of life) in foreign parts; the tourist is by definition, the person who passes through a place with no expectation of permanence; the nomadism of the tourist is self-imposed, of deliberately limited duration, and sharply distinguished froni his normal sedentary existence” (van den Berghe, 1980: 375-376). Applied to the Cretan case, the island deals indeed with mass tourism whereby the tourist stays approximately one to three weeks filling this time clearly with other occupations than during “his normal, sedentary lifé”. As a second work instrument the broad concept of ethnicity by J. Leman (1998, 149) is adopted: “With ethnicity, we mean, (1) a “subjective, symbolic or emblematic use of any aspect of culture, in order to differentiate from other groups” (Brass, 1991: 19),(2) on the basis of “a feeling of continuity with the past, a feeling that is maintained as an essential part of one's self-definition” (De Vos, 1975: 17), (3) providing “reservoirs for renewing humane values. Ethnic memory is thus future, not past, oriented” (Fischer, 1986: 176), and (4) whereby it is not “the cultural stuff that it encloses” that fundamentally decides what is involved in the we-consciousness hut “the ethnic boundary that defines the group” (Barth, 1969: 15). Ethnic frontiers are social frontiers.”

Tourists come and go but their collective identity of "touristhood" remains in Crete. For the Cretans, all tourists look remarkably alike in appearance and attitude. With Leman's concept of ethnicity in mind, a first analysis of some vital topics of membership of touristhood in Crete can be made. To start with, there is the growing globalisation of tourist behaviour as it is more and more dominated by sea-sand-sun holidays and characterized by a family tourism in which hotels and pensions are the favourite residences. Moreover, the tourist industry intensifies the efforts to control the tourist mass activities, certainly in tourist “bulk destinations” of which Crete is a representative sample. To make optimal profits, tour operators lead the tourists in their sightseeing to only a dozen “top attractions”. Tourist excursions become indeed very predictable in Crete.

There are the specific tourist territories in terms of time bounded “tourist sanctuaries”, where the tourist feels comfortable (“at home as a tourist”) and where s/he is accompanied by fellow tourists: the beach during the day, the taverna or the hotel restaurant in the evening, the bar or the disco for the youngsters at night. The tourist outfit has no strict codes (and that is a code) but every Cretan -as most members of host cultures in confrontation with mass tourists do- recognises the tourists immediately by their leisurely clothing and the much worn tourist ornaments as video cameras or caps with texts as “I love Crete”. To be a tourist also means to carry out diverse typical acts as to hunt souvenirs, to get a tan at whatever cost, to photograph -in the eyes of the Cretans- “common things”, to write tourist postcards often scated on a terrace, to stroll in a casual way with “a tourist gaze” in the streets or to walk and to parade along the seafront before evening dinner. While enacting the latter, the tourists can meet some traditional families on their volta (walk) who in the Cretan tradition show their marriageable daughters.

The tourists in Crete mainly originate from Western-Europe. They represent some 75% of the total with the largest groups from Germany and Great-Britain. Thus, they share a series of cultural similarities in terms of background. The we-consciousness of tourists in Crete is sharpened by different acts as the rites de passage of arrival and departure, the stunning confrontation with the unfamiliar Greek language and alphabet or the shared frustration caused by the sometimes “unreliable conductors of public buses” which in most cases amounts to a problem of language. Today, English is “the tourist language” in Crete, followed by German. There is not only a Tourist Police but also a huge offer of tourist literature trying to guide the tourists in different fields. News from home countries is provided by many European papers and magazines.

Closing this first analysis, two growing tendencies wherein the tourists make themselves much visible as an ethnic category on the island need to be underlined. First the internal communication among tourists is taken more and more seriously by the tourists themselves. Mostly it is an informal exchange of diverse tourist information concerning topics like excellent restaurants, exciting discos, tips for excursions or warnings for falsified souvenirs as fake icons. But there is a tendency to make this informal communication less accidental by initiatives taken by tourists to organise more formal meetings in the hotel bar or just on the beach. The info that tourists obtain in this way, is for many of them sacred, even if their travel book or the tourist hostess says the opposite. It marks the growing solidarity among the tourists. A second trend is that tourists are increasingly becoming aware “of having an own history on the island” as a group. Some tourists create even myth-symbols in this history, for instance by stating that the depopulation of the Cretan hinterland is only caused by tourism “because every sensible Cretan came down his mountain to become rich in the tourist areas on the north coast”. Such images are rapidly passed by through the internal tourist communication channels and are in fact often a reaction to the Hellenic decor where tourist areas often are imbedded. Many tourists appeal to this own history when they feel uncomfortable, “threatened” or anxious, simultaneously accentuating their tourist being and tourist behaviour. It is worldwide a typical reflex of an ethnic category (group) “in danger”.

Confrontations between Cretan culture and touristhood: sorne observations

The expanding and even more demanding touristhood in Crete is countered by the Cretans in many ways. For most Cretans tourism is “business” in the first place. Persons who come each year to Crete staying in the same family hotel or family pension may be become acquaintances or friends of their hosts hut even “they remain tourists” from a Cretan viewpoint. “The sentimental times” when tourism started in Crete, are a long time passed. In this matter, Cretans like to tell “horror-stories” about the past when good meaning Cretans were ripped off by tourists who refused even to thank their hosts for so much hospitality. That has definitely changed now, the Cretans stress. Tourists have to pay for the supplied services, and some Cretans will without any embarrassment to the outside admit that there are sometimes two prices on the market: one for the locals and a higher one for the tourists. This “commercial” starting point of attitude is important to understand the actions and the reactions of the Cretans to the expanding touristhood.

Many traditional village feasts are colored through tourism today. Not unusualy the Cretans themselves took the initiative. On some occasions such as family feasts the Cretans shun “the tourist presence”. Some families will postpone the wedding to the winter, whereas others are charmed by the many snapshots of tourists. One of the most difficult matters is a funeral. Cretan families generally try to escape from “the tourist gaze” with varying success. Some official important feasts as Easter -popular among many tourists- float between public and private celebrations where the public part decreases. Some Cretans (and tourists) deplore this evolution. Still others are stating that Easter is a real family feast and therefore “foreigners” better stay away.

In the tourist areas on the shores one often finds a commercially staged authenticity culture. It may not come as a surprise that Hellenic images are flourishing here, sometimes in a hilarious way: “Pizzeria Minos” or “Zeus, Rent a Car” (in several sources of Greek mythology Zeus was born on Crete). Some hotels even have built small concrete amphitheatres. Most tourists do not seem to care about this “fake culture”. They also do not seem to be concerned about the Minoan open air~museum of Knossos, which is Number One on the list of tourist excursions. In fact it is an archaeological Disneyland with hypothetical and even outwright wrong reconstructions (1900) of the Minoan culture by the protagonist of the site Sir Arthur Evans. It was the French painter E. Gillérion who was commissioned by Evans "to reconstruct" some paintings and "suddenly it becomes clear why the art nouveau of the turn of the century seemed to have been “anticipated” in the distant past” (Ceram, 1958: 47). In fact, even the term “Minoan” is a dubious invention of Evans, inspired by the mythical king Minos. The very popular so-called “Cretan nights” can also be classified under “staged authenticity”. Cretan and foreign “amateur actors” evoke a traditional wedding or a traditional feast with ample folkloric dancing in which the tourists can join. “Traditional Cretan dishes” and a series of invented traditions about Cretan history are served.

These are only some general observations of the confrontations between the Cretans (Cretan culture) and the tourists (touristhood in Crete) in the tourist areas (“on the stage”). These outlines must be further developed “behind the stage” and linked to smaller units of specific Cretan groups. Traditional families in some cases create dynamic watch-posts to guard their “girls and young women” when they go “in the wicked tourist areas”, with bars, discos, and even the beach while some parents of a transnational family stimulate a shy daughter to go dancing. In confrontation with the demands of touristhood some Cretans working in tourism complain that they even have no time left “to wish a good morning to a friend”. This can lead to an idealisation of the traditional lifé. Yet, such images are rapidly countered by many Cretan seniors who have not forgotten the hunger and the hardness of their earlier existence.

“The waiter-captains”

The “waiters as captains" (waiter-captains) refers to a research term that I developed during my fieldwork. It is about a growing group of poorly educated Cretan males, born in the midst of the 1970s and 1980s and often raised in very traditional families living in thriving communities for tourism on the north coast. They mostly do humble jobs in the tourist sector as a waiter, a lift boy, a barman, “a jack-of-all-trades” in taverni and hotels. During their childhood, they often dream of working in tourism and becoming the owner of a successful tourist business. Only a tiny minority actually succeeds in this dream. The lack of investment capital is one of the main reasons. Another lies in the absence of a general education. They leave school very early -a lot of them are drop-outs- and in school they are only interested in learning fluent English, “the language of the touristhood in Crete”. Some of them even attend, to their own surprise, English private courses.

“We are moulded (zimomeni) by tourism!” That’s what the waiter-captains are stating. In their jobs they often develop “a tekhni” (skill mingled with art and experience) of a great empathic intercultural communication which provides them with diverse possibilities to earn some extra money (guiding, extra jobs). Their wages are indeed low, even to Cretan standards. To the waiter-captains their family is important, as well as the well-being of their closest friends (parea). For every Greek, life without parea seems meaningless, but for the waiter-captains the parea is like their family. They meet each other very regularly, discussing important and less important matters. In the parea of the waiter-captains a great internal solidarity is maintained but that does not mean that their gatherings are sometimes not rough. Drinking huge quantities of alcohol is seen as an act of masculinity. During the winter most waiter-captains are technically unemployed and a lot of them create “a winter personality”. Than they are bored, watch television and videos endlessly, brag about their experiences of the past summer with (chasing female) tourists, play cards or gamble.

The waiter-captains distinguish themselves clearly from the Greek (and Cretan) students of the University of Crete. “Those students do not know true life!” Towards the youth of the rich Cretans, they often develop bitter feelings. They also have not much contact with the youth of returned migrants or with elder children of the transnationalist families. For many waiter-captains “the tourists” are “their field”. In reality they are indeed mediators between Cretan culture and touristhood. Often the waiter-captains themselves take the initiative to make the contact. They talk and listen to the tourists, solve tourist problems, give them a skill in Cretan culture or inform them about tourist interests such as excursions or restaurants. In the internal network of the tourist communication the waiter-captains are mostly taken seriously. Of course, sometimes they quarrel with the tourists, certainly when the tourists appeal to what I call “the Zorba, the Greek-image”, meaning “all Greeks are Zorba's” in a very pejorative and “primitive” sense. It is only then that some waiter-captains refer to the Hellenic dimension of being a Greek to neutralise such images. Today they create a renewed palikaria in confrontation and interaction with the foreign touristhood in Crete. How the waiter-captains of Crete rediscover the palikaria in confrontation with their "old world" and in interaction with their new friends, international tourists, will be discussed in our Summer Schools. It's about a biting empirical new world, creating new cultural patterns, touching a new life, coloured by a search for social bodies of a renewed identity.

Marc Vanlangendonck