Timeless People in a Changing Time – A Memoir of Crete 1999–2022

Apostolis’s Shop For weeks he had intrigued me. Every day out in front of his shop, tap-tap-tapping a chisel through stubby lengths of olive tree limb, hailing out 'Kali mera,' Καλή -έρα to everyone who passed. To those who tarried he spoke a donkey-trot patois that made me think of what Linear B might sound like on the tongue of a tobacco auctioneer.

The only food I ever saw him eat was a dry crust of bread that didn’t look much softer than the olive wood he carved. Slowly, taptap-tap by tap-tap-tap, his chisel would shape the handles of vinetrimmers’ knives. The shape was so common all over Europe there was no mistaking what they were to be. Every day, tap-tap-tap, he went from rough bark to tough heartwood, turning out the exact same shapes in the exact same way. Yet the racks of knives in front of his shop hardly looked the local-vineyard type. His showcase knives had polished wooden handles and chrome-plated blades nicely engraved with 'Greetings from Crete' inside outlines of the island. Pretty enough to be sure, but these showcase products did not have rivets passing through the handles, which meant the blades were probably glued in. All that prettiness would last about a week in the Cretan bush.

My impression was that this was a well-disguised tourist trap with the interesting twist of someone actually making something authentic—or at least part of it anyway. Yet locals did enter his workshop. On closer inspection, a surprising number of them did.

They walked in with nothing, and walked out with nothing. Trying to noodle out his real business provided the perfect excuse for me to turn the little three-table cafe next door into an informal cafe-élleniko-&-Herald-Trib spy station. Giving the cafe even more a downat-the-heels Graham Greene look was the fact that it was hard to 101