A Standing Library, One Letter at a Time

That is how many people flew into Crete from abroad last July. In February, the figure was 2,859.

Same island. Same coastline, same mountains, same villages holding knowledge they have held for 4,000 years. For every traveler who arrived in February, 383 arrived in July. The only thing that changed was the month.

Worse, the gap is widening. That July figure was up 3.3 percent on the year before. February was down 23 percent.

The fault is not with the people on those flights. Almost every one of them is kind, curious, and glad to be here. It lies in the model, which decided long ago that this island is worth coming to in July and worth almost nothing in February.

The answer is not fewer people. It is other months, and other places. Crete has both in abundance. Almost nobody is selling them.

Fodele, ten kilometers from my door. Most people pass it at speed, on their way to a beach. Those who turn off find a valley of orange groves, but the fruit is just the introduction. Above the village, Fodele lays a proud, unyielding claim to one of the greatest painters in European history.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born in 1541 and became El Greco. The official record belongs to the capital: documents from Toledo where the painter himself swore he was born in Heraklion. The capital also holds the only two original El Grecos left on the island. But paper is fragile, and Fodele is made of stone.

The village simply ignores the archives. The house they keep as his museum stands opposite an 11th-century Byzantine chapel, guarded by a local conviction so deep it has outlasted centuries. The museum may hold only reproductions, but Fodele holds the earth. It holds the fierce Cretan light that first shaped his eyes, and a village of a few hundred that refuses to let him go.

The extraordinary hides in the places everybody drives past.

The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan. I am recommending it partly because I disagree with it. McClanahan argues there is no meaningful line between a traveler and a tourist. I have built my life on the opposite belief. She reports it honestly, including her own mistakes, and it sharpened my thinking rather than softening it. Read it, and argue with me.

If you have found the other Crete—the village that does not know it is August—hit reply and tell me where. And if you haven’t, write to me if you’d like to find it. I reply to every email.

Exactly 66 years ago this month, in 1960, researchers examined 686 men aged between 40 and 59 in 11 villages on Crete—97.6 percent of every man that age in those villages. Three quarters were farmers.

They were poor. They ate bread, wild greens, pulses, fruit, almost no meat, and an astonishing quantity of olive oil.

When the mortality data came in, these men had the lowest coronary heart disease death rate of all 16 groups in the study, and held it for 40 years. That is why the phrase “Mediterranean diet” exists: the world took its dietary advice from these 686 men.

Four decades on, researchers measured Cretan farmers again. Same work, same island. 86 percent were overweight or obese.

Between 1982 and 2002, 12-year-old boys in Heraklion gained 1 percent in height. And 10 percent in weight. Obesity among them rose 202 percent. Not two percent. Two hundred and two.

Last winter the University of Crete measured 760 children here. 98 percent still use olive oil. 77 percent skip breakfast. Two thirds eat sweets daily. Fewer than one in three still eats the way the world was told to.

Greece now ranks first in Europe for overweight and obesity among children aged 10 to 19, and second among those aged 5 to 9.

Sixty-six years. Three generations. From the healthiest people ever measured to the heaviest teenagers in Europe.

The olive oil survived. The meal did not.

Whole, unlabeled, cooked at home—the part of the diet that did not survive.

This is not a failure of willpower, and certainly not the fault of anybody’s children. The Cretan diet was a poverty diet. It survived every hardship this island was handed. What it did not survive was money—and on Crete, money means tourism.

An island that feeds millions of visitors a year builds its food supply around what a wholesaler can deliver at volume in August. That supply chain does not switch off in November. It becomes how everyone eats.

So the island grows the food, the visitor eats the import, and the diet becomes a themed evening sold back to the people who flew here for it.

In 1960, this island was eating better than any population ever measured. Nobody gave it a prize. It wasn’t heritage yet. It was just lunch.

In 2026, Crete holds the title of European Region of Gastronomy. For twelve months the island is being celebrated, across Europe, for the way it eats.

Its own children have mostly stopped.

Not a taverna. The laiki agora—the weekly street market. Go to the one in the Pateles district of Heraklion on a Saturday at seven in the morning, before the heat and the good things go.

Walk past the big stalls with signs in three languages. Go to the small tables at the edges, where somebody sells four kinds of tomato because that is what their field gave this week. September is figs, grapes, last peppers, first quinces.

Almost nobody speaks English. Point, hold up fingers, it works.

You will spend eight euros, eat better than in any restaurant charging 10 times that, and the money goes to whoever grew it.

Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino. Not a book about Crete: a BBC food journalist traveling the world to find the foods that are disappearing and the people refusing to let them go. I recognized my own island on almost every page. What happened here is happening almost everywhere.

What did your grandmother cook that nobody in your family can make anymore? Write and tell me. I am collecting them, and I write back.

That is how many were left in 1960. Through the German occupation they were the only meat in these mountains, and the men hiding here ate what there was.

In 1962, the gorge was made a national park, mostly for the kri-kri. The village of Samaria stood inside it. Its last inhabitants left that year so the park could exist.

A village was emptied so an animal could survive. It worked. Today there are about 2,000.

Nothing hunts it anymore. But that is not the same as safe.

It is being bred out instead, hybridized with ordinary farm goats, inside the park itself. And underneath that, the oldest fact: the agrimi was never wild to begin with. The molecular evidence says it descends from the first domesticated goats of the eastern Mediterranean, stock that got loose around 8000 BC. It escaped the farm. It is being walked back in, one leaf at a time.

Its picture is on rental cars, hotel signs, bottle labels. There are more kri-kri on Crete’s packaging than on its mountains.

And this week, a village did the opposite of what Samaria did.

The gorge has been closed repeatedly these past weeks, most recently yesterday, when forecast rainfall crossed its limits. Agia Roumeli sits at the southern exit. It has no road. The gorge is its only way in and its whole income. So the residents voted to unlock the gate themselves and keep it open through October 3.

A village with no road and one season was told to choose between the rules and the year.

Everything in this gorge has learned the tourist economy. Even the animal it was built to protect.

The last wild one has probably already been born.

Mount Gigilos, 2,080 meters, directly above the gorge.

Many have walked Samaria. Almost nobody has stood on top of it. The trail leaves from the Omalos plateau: seven hours, 10 kilometers, 1,100 meters of climb, through cedar forest and out onto open limestone, the last stretch done with your hands. From the summit, the whole gorge lies underneath you.

As I write, Crete is under a red warning, the highest EMY issues, for heavy rain and thunderstorms over Chania and Rethymno, running to Sunday morning. Samaria closes at the end of October anyway. Gigilos sometimes holds into November. Not this year.

Nobody argues harder than I do that this island needs a season longer than 10 weeks. This is the exception, and the mountain decides. Go in May.

If you do see a kri-kri up there, do nothing. Do not close the distance. Do not offer it anything. Being allowed to watch from where you stand is the gift.

The Making of the Cretan Landscape by Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody, long out of print. A botanist and an archaeologist who walked this island for decades, then took apart the story everyone tells about it: that Crete is a ruined paradise, deforested and grazed to death. It is not, and they prove it. Their working rule is the finest sentence I know about this place: “One should not assert that goats eat everything without having watched goats.” For a century we blamed the goat. Now the goat is the one going, and not in any way that looks like damage.

When did you last see a wild animal that was afraid of you? Write and tell me. I am collecting what people have lost, and I reply.

That is how many tons of olive oil the Region of Crete expects this winter, nearly double last year’s 57,000. Three winters ago, in the drought, the island expected barely 30,000, and a kilo sold for more than €8.

This winter, a kilo is expected to bring about €4. Nikos Michelakis, who once ran the Chania Olive Institute, says that does not even cover what it costs to grow.

Empty trees, expensive oil. Full trees, cheap oil. The more the tree gives, the more the person under it loses.

In Heraklion prefecture alone, 15 mills will stay dark this season. In the biggest harvest in years.

Nobody is bulldozing the groves. They are simply losing their people. In the east of the island, farmers say their children no longer want the work. They take steady jobs in the hotels instead. I do not blame them.

The hotels need those children in July. The trees need them in November. July pays better.

That is how tourism reaches a grove no visitor will ever see.

Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody, whose book The Making of the Cretan Landscape I recommended last month, showed that this landscape was never wilderness. It was made by hand, and it is kept by hand. More than 40 million olive trees cover about 40 percent of this island. Every one of them needs someone to come back. A grove nobody returns to does not go back to nature. It goes to scrub. Then it burns.

New oil here is supposed to taste bitter. This year, so does the harvest.

The mill, after dark.

From November into January, in olive country, follow the light and the smell of crushed fruit. The growers bring in the day’s sacks in the evening, and the oil comes off the machines green and cloudy.

Ask if you can buy some. Bring your own bottle. Ask whose oil it is, and say their name when you thank them. It will catch at the back of your throat, bitter and peppery and alive. That bite is how new oil is supposed to taste, and most visitors to this island never have it.

There is no more direct way to put money into the hand that carried the sacks.

In July, a researcher at the University of Algarve in Portugal wrote to me. Dr. Fatemeh Bagheri sits on the editorial boards of some of the most respected journals in tourism research, among them the Journal of Travel Research. She was building an international study of what a regenerative travel experience actually is, and she wanted my answers for the interviews it would grow from.

Then she asked me to take her questionnaire apart, question by question, before it went out into the world. Behind it were months of Fatemeh’s work: interviews, reading, expert review, and drafts cut down until only what mattered was left. I am in the middle of an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and have filled in a great many surveys. This is the first one I have helped shape.

It is finished now, and it needs 600 to 700 people. And not just anyone. People whose visit left a place stronger than they found it.

If that is you, Fatemeh needs your answers. It takes 12 to 15 minutes, and it is completely anonymous.

Some night soon, the mill will come back to life. I will hear it before I see it: that low rumble under the village, then the light, still on when I take my dogs out for the last time.

It will mean someone looked at €4 a kilo, did the arithmetic, and carried the sacks down the hill anyway.

The mill, the grove, and a study in Portugal are waiting for the same thing. None of them works unless someone comes.

The doors are open.