This is a glimpse into the daily lives of a Cretan family, my family, entitled Life from Death, Κρήτη. The reason for the title is because my family has sustained a livelihood as butchers. Literally, they live – put food on the table, pay medical bills and mortgages, cloth their bodies – from the death of animals. Four years ago, my uncle Yanni died, suddenly, from a heart attack. He left behind a wife and three children. Obviously, things have changed, but Κρήτη is a place where things don’t change to often, and any change that does occur is gradual.

Κρήτη, Greece’s largest island, has an extremely strong sense of self-identity. My grandfather, featured in the essay, speaks a dialect of greece that is unintelligible to mainland Greeks. Cretans identify themselves as Cretan, not Greeks, within the larger Greek community. Their dance, music, language, and dress is distinctly different. I remember as a child my cousins bringing my brother and myself to what was supposed to be a club with pretty girls, telling us stories of “tangas” (thongs) and laughing about it. Instead, they brought us to a mass slaughterhouse; a hollowed out warehouse with a oval steel bar running from the celling, fierce hooks hanging low and butchers from all over Crete slaughtering their livestock and “shooting the shit.” I was 10, my brother 12, and my cousins were laughing, and that was life back then. I remember one summer where a goat rammed my brother in the butt, and our uncle Yanni took the goat, and us with it, to the back of the shop and he severed the goats throat to sooth my brothers pain. He obviously did not know how removed we our from our food and death in America. I have an uncle that made a fortune smuggling guns in car tires from the U.S. to Crete; I remember seeing the guns in a cupboard long ago, during a wedding; in Crete, weddings and gunfire are synonymous.

The grandiose stories you hear in Crete are endless, of men killing cattle with their bare hands (an uncle of mine), a town of men all about 6 feet tall that hitler never took; real machismo type stuff.  Cretans are tough, but their reputation is even tougher.  The fact of the matter is that Cretans are people, no different from you and me.  They have a different sensibility; perhaps to their benefit.  It’s a way of life that is truly authentic to itself, and because of it’s geographic location it has been able to maintain it’s identity.  The runoff of capitalism and consumerism has only begun to leak in, and it frightens me, as I’ve called Crete a home before …  Crete is still a pristine landscape, where you can see a way of life that once was 100 … 200 years ago.  But it too is fading, as all our old country cultures do.

Modernity will have it’s way, it always does … except in pictures.

Vasilios Sfinarolakis

View the essay on VIMEO.