One of the major differences between Crete and the UK that we found in our first year here is seasonal variation. I’m not talking the four seasons here – the edges of those are a little more blurred here than back in Blighty, as we get almost no autumn and summer seems to begin sometime in April. What I mean is that you can tell exactly where you are in the year by what is going on around you, what people are doing – and what is available in the shops.
Most of us in Northern Europe take completely for granted that if, for example, we have a hankering to buy strawberries in February, oysters in June, need to get a swimsuit in November or send roses to Mum for Christmas, we can do so. Very convenient. But how many times have we said “Tomatoes don’t taste like they used to”, or “Strawberries were a lot more flavoursome when I was a kid”?
Here in Crete if it’s not in season, you probably won’t find it. Yes, it means we get a glut of something and then a famine, but it also means that vegetables and fruit in the shops and markets are probably no more than a day old and are ripened in the old-fashioned way – by the sunshine. And they taste fabulous! The marble slabs in the fishmongers glisten with a variety of fish according to the natural movements of the fish around the oceans, not with mussels from New Zealand or salmon from Alaska, or something weeks old and frozen on a factory ship. The family menu throughout the year reflects what is currently available; the globe artichoke features strongly in dishes during Lent when the Orthodox Greeks are fasting and the artichoke is plentiful; the ubiquitous ‘Greek salad’ is on every table in every taverna in the summer when tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are available everywhere; lamb is popular at Easter when the new lambs born before Christmas are of a size to be eaten, and so on.
Work is seasonal as well. Our area is well-known for its olive cultivation –there are olive trees just about everywhere. From about the middle of November until the beginning of February, the olive groves are alive with pickers. The nets are spread, the generators are started up and the flails strip the fruit from the trees. After that, until the end of March, the trees are pruned and the trimmings are dragged away and burned. The view is coloured with the bluish haze of hundreds of bonfires. With the beginning of April, all the men are in the vineyards, pruning and fertilising, while the women start to clean out the holiday accommodation and restock the tourist shops for the start of the summer season. From May to October, in the heat of the summer, the farmers seem to get two days’ work out of twenty four hours – they start at 6 in the morning and work until 2, then again from 5.30 until 8 in the evening.
The shepherd runs his famished flock of skinny sheep through the olive groves morning and evening, trying to supplement their poor diet with a few mouthfuls of greenery. By October he is getting desperate and hacks down branches of the fig and mulberry trees to feed them.
In the square in most towns, if you are up early, you will see labourers waiting for hire. These days many of them are illegal immigrants – but they are tolerated when there is plenty of work for them, during the winter months. It is also said that many are rounded up and sent home just before the tourist season starts – to give a better impression. You know summer is over when they start appearing again in the square in increasing numbers.
I remember back in the UK that shops were always having a ‘spring event’ or a ‘mid season sale’, or there would be ‘Manager’s special offers’. Not here. The Government specifies that normal shops can only have sales for two months of the year – February and August. So if you come to Crete in September and are hoping to buy some summer clothes, you can pretty well forget it (except in the tourist shops).
I like to watch the hardware shops to see what is happening locally. One month you will see huge piles of wire netting for fencing; the next there will be thousands of metres of black irrigation pipe everywhere; the olive harvest is signalled by a wealth of flails, generators, nets and storage vessels; soon followed by a mountainous display of chainsaws and pruning implements. One week the machinery repair shop is slumbering quietly – the next it is overrun with clogged-up rotavators with overheated engines or damaged tines. As winter draws closer, the wood-burning stoves and flue pipes appear.
What would happen if you tried to buy any of these things out of season?
Even here in the village we are not immune. During August, the women were all drying figs and making pasta for the winter. In September, everyone who was not out in the fields was treading grapes. At the end of October the illicit stills will start up for the raki (tsikouthia)-making. But most noticeable of all, here in the village, are the cicadas. You can almost set your watch by their arrival and disappearance. We hear the first one on June 12th and the last one on September 14th. Then we know summer is almost over.
I recall the days when I used to sit in an air-conditioned office, looking out over a car park towards another office block. These days, I am trying to carve a garden out of a lump of hillside, so I wait eagerly for the first rains so I can sow seeds, shift plants about and do any major earth-moving. During the hot summer months I have a punishing regime of water-carrying, helped a bit by a huge black tank of stored rainwater off the roof, to irrigate all my pockets of planting and dozens of pots. The stored rainwater is because – again, seasonally – the water pressure in the village is so low in summer that some days our cold water tank in the house gets no supply. Nothing seems to germinate during the summer, but with the first rains in October or November, everything goes into overdrive. Trellises seem to get covered in growth overnight; seed trays green up in days and the brick-like soil becomes actually workable again.
Seasons used to pass me by. No more! And I know which I prefer!
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