The Golden Step by Christopher Somerville Page A

In the spring of 1999, reflecting on the regime of the Saracens, their actions and inactions seemed those of an alien civilisation whose motives, unless purely and absolutely mercenary, were incomprehensible. The Saracens appear to have destroyed much and built little in Crete. They left only a handful of coins to us – nothing of their art, of their architecture, of Arab culture. The Byzantines returned in 961 under their ferocious general Nikephoros Phokas to capture Rabdh-el-Khandak after a siege laden with every kind of savagery, including catapulting the heads of captured Saracens in among the defenders. Byzantine rule, once re-established, continued in prosperity for the next 250 years. Meanwhile the Arabs of Crete, and all they had done or failed to do in the island, slipped away down history’s river of oblivion.
    Limping on blistered feet from Argyro’s house into town, I find the Aphordakos clan about its several businesses. In the years since I was last here Billy Aphordakos has transformed his simple kafenion into a youngsters’ hangout quivering with brutal disco beats. Denim and leather hang heavy in the air. Lads slouch against their motorbikes on the pavement, posing for girls and each other. I have to pick my way over an obstacle course of crossed legs to get inside the bar. But this is nothing at all compared to the macho posturing in the north coast resorts of Crete where local bikers, fags in mouths, do wheelies all along the seafront with maximum noise and attitude. The boys and girls at Billy’s are village kids, and politely point out the way to the Kafenion Kamara, the Aphordakos owned café under the Moorish arch where I’ll be bound to bump into someone I know. Tonight it’s Iannis Siganos, the former mayor of Kritsa, bearded and forceful. He nods his leonine head, gives me a bear hug, orders mezedes and a little green flask of ice-cold raki.
    â€˜Well, Christopher, let me tell you …’
    It seems that Kritsa has been doing pretty well for a village of 2,500 inhabitants some miles from the sea. The 600,000 kilos of olive oil produced last year netted close to 400 million drachmas – something over a million pounds sterling. The touristas , Iannis says, are still turning up to buy the fine hand-loom weaving for which the village has a long-standing reputation. But it’s seaside tourism that underpins prosperity in Crete these days; and Kritsa possesses neither beach nor sea, a terminal drawback in this sector of the economy. The villagers have had to do some lateral thinking and come up with an alternative enticement. Iannis and the other business heads of Kritsa have initiated a programme of local and agricultural tourism under the slogan: ‘Come and see the REAL Cretan village!’ Local families are being urged to encourage visitors to stay in their houses, accompany them to their work in vineyard and olive grove, eat at the family table, join in with the evening stroll and the morning marketing.
    Kritsa, like almost every other Cretan town and village, is nervous about its future as a community. Can any of those youngsters hanging round Billy’s doorway be persuaded to throw in their lot with the village, rather than drifting away to wait at table and clean hotel rooms in Agios Nikolaos, or take the plane for the bright lights of Athens and the wider world? Upcountry places, even those as big and lively as Kritsa, are suffering from a steady drain on their most important human resource, the energy and optimism of youth. The steady leaching away of young people from the country to the town isn’t just a turn-of-the-millennium Cretan phenomenon, of course. It’s been gathering pace all over Europe since the Industrial Revolution. In any case, bold young men and women have always struck out from their home villages for fame and fortune. Now, though, sighs Iannis as he refills his thimble glass and mine, it’s as if someone has stuck