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Epilogue
‘Seventy years old, seventy goddam years, and you know why?
Listen to me, son, you know what my father says to me? He says to
me, don’t go with whores, and he was goddam right, the sonovabitch.
That’s why I look fifty today, because I don’t go with bad women. You
listen to me, son, you find a clean woman and settle down. . . .’
And so on and on. It would be unfair to write about Crete without
mentioning such things. And it is not surprising that there are times of
boredom on an island whose people are content to sit around all day.
Of course, these times can be minimized.
If one must ‘sum up’ Crete, then one must find out what she has
meant to the Cretans and the Greeks. That is what this book has been
about. I wrote in 1960 of the village Asi Gonia: ‘Her simple message
rang in my ears as we came down to Canea and civilization:
The courage of man is great wealth;
Eat, drink and enjoy this deceitful world.’
It is time to see what this message has meant to modern Cretan writers
and how they have treated of it in their work.
There have been three distinguished Cretan novelists: John Kondylakis,
Nikos Kazantzakis and Pendelis Prevelakis. All were preoccupied
by Crete. Kondylakis was born in 1861, and therefore grew up in
Turkish Crete, in the village of Viannos in the east. At the age of sixteen
he broke off his studies at the Gymnasium in Athens in order to
return to Crete and fight the Turks. After the revolt he worked as a
clerk in Canea and read prodigiously, then went back to Athens to try
journalism. Apart from a period spent teaching in Crete – which
inspired one of his best works, When I was a Teacher – he lived and wrote
in Athens. He returned to Crete only at the very end of his life. The
trip was a bitter disappointment. The island was changed. The excitement
and colour which was associated with his youth, was gone. He
died in hospital in Heraklion in 1920.
Kondylakis lived in exciting times for Greece and Crete, and was
fortunate in the time of his death, for the Smyrna disaster two years later
was a horrific shock to men of his generation. His work was a perpetual
dialogue with Crete. In his journalism he wrote directly of the Cretan
issue, and his stories are set in Crete. Patouchas, the most famous, is
about an awkward Cretan lad growing up and falling in love and finding
himself (Patouchas means Big-Feet); and apart from all else, it is a
wonderful picture of life in a Cretan village in the last century, far more
accurate than Kazantzakis’s picture, not only because Kondylakis
knew Turkish Crete at first hand better than Kazantzakis did, but
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