“Cretans – Stories of a Beach” is the story of events following a native son’s return from London to Crete, the island of his ancestors.
Alexis Mantheakis returns to the ancient Mediterranean island from where his family emigrated to Africa and the United States a century ago. He decides to build a villa by the sea at Lalaria, a deceptively idyllic hamlet on the northern coast of Crete where numerous hilarious and some tragic events subsequently take place. The local peasants’ lives change drastically when the author introduces an upmarket British tour company to the hamlet.
“Cretans” is a series of anecdotal stories about the author, his British clients and the locals whom he observes at Lefteris taverna and from the terrace of his villa overlooking Lalaria Beach. Colourful and often eccentric characters, indigenous and foreign, cross the writer’s path over the next ten years.
We meet Telis, the bearded Düsseldorf surgeon who has gone native, Lefteris, the shepherd running the taverna where the English clients congregate, and Minos, a diminutive reformed pimp who becomes the author’s building supervisor. A convent in the hills with its young attractive nuns poses a mystery as does the presence of a strange monk with a gun on his hip living alone in another monastery nearby. A minister of the Thatcher government falls ill before help comes from an unexpected quarter. A disturbing new theory about the death in an air rally of Prince William of Gloucester, a close friend of the writer, comes to light. A woman architect and her married lover’s steamy illicit affair gives birth to mass tourism on Crete, aided by a succession of young male lovers.
The reader will meet Pericles, a Cretan psychiatrist with a strange obsession and Makis, the bulldozer driver called on to demolish a 3,500 year-old Minoan palace. The writer has heard from his parents and grandparents about mysterious phenomena on the island and scoffs until he encounters the Drosolytes, the shadowy skywalkers of the Libyan sea. East and West clash.
The narrative is written with biting humour and an observant eye that cuts like a scalpel through myth and character to reveal through its stories and characters the inside workings of a society in transition.
Mantheakis spares no one, including himself as he describes his personal journey to discover his Cretan roots in the cove of Lalaria where so much is happening under a deceptively placid surface.