History, culture, arts and food from the island we call home.

Crete isn't just the backdrop to our wedding. It's home. We live in Heraklion, on an island with thousands of years of history, its own dialect within the language, its own songs, and a cuisine studied around the world. What follows is a short, sourced tour for anyone who'd like to know a little more about the place before they visit.

Cretan music never stayed in the past. It's heard at feasts, festivals and weddings today, with the same lyre and the same couplets sung centuries ago, and it has given Greece some of its most important artists.

Cretan Glentia & Panigyria

A glenti is a celebration with live music, and a panigiri is the village festival held on the feast day of its patron saint. Both are usually open-air, led by the lyra and laouto, with mantinades, line dances such as the pentozalis and maleviziotikos, and long communal tables of roast meat, wine and raki that run well into the night. They happen all over the island in summer, so you may well stumble on one.

Dance & Music

Traditional song forms such as rizitika and mandinades are accompanied by the Cretan lyre and lute. Dances include the pentozalis (traditionally danced by men), the chaniotikos (sirtos), and the faster maleviziotikos, sousta and sitiakos.

Heraklion's Garden Theatres

Two open-air theatres stand side by side, built into the moat of the Venetian fortifications near the Gate of Jesus, each named for a celebrated Heraklion artist. The large Nikos Kazantzakis Garden Theatre (about 1,100 seats) was first used informally during the WWII German occupation and took its current form in 1976. Behind it, the smaller Manos Hatzidakis Garden Theatre (400 seats) was built in 1980 at the composer's own suggestion, designed by Dionysis Fotopoulos as a demountable structure so as not to damage the protected walls. Both still host concerts and cultural events every summer.

Mantinades

Improvised rhyming fifteen-syllable couplets, sung at weddings, feasts and everyday life. It's the very same verse form Vitsentzos Kornaros used in Erotokritos four centuries earlier.