Every time a story about celebratory gunfire or vendetta resurfaces, Crete briefly becomes something it is not: a caricature. A place reduced to loud myths and inherited clichés, where isolated incidents are mistaken for daily reality, and repetition hardens into reputation.
This Christmas, an incident of random gunfire during a social gathering in Heraklion once again fed that familiar narrative. Both stories are real. Both are serious. Neither, however, defines the island.
They are exceptions — dangerous ones — but still exceptions.
Crete, like any living society, is not immune to crime, foolishness, or tragedy. What distorts perception is scale. Rare events echo louder than the ordinary, and the ordinary is rarely reported. When a single bullet travels farther than thousands of uneventful nights, perspective is lost.
Random gunfire, for example, is not tolerated behavior. It is not quietly accepted, excused, or folded into “tradition” by the majority of locals. When it happens, police intervene, arrests follow, and the reaction within communities is one of anger and concern — precisely because such acts violate an unspoken social contract based on proximity, responsibility, and mutual awareness.
The same distortion applies to the word vendetta, so often misused. Vendetta is not a daily presence in Cretan life. It is not something visitors encounter, nor something that governs villages or social relations. Where it still exists, it survives as a tragic residue of history, not as a living social code. Modern Cretan society overwhelmingly rejects it — and treats its reappearance as failure, not folklore.
This growing gap between reality and reputation was recently addressed in an opinion piece published by eKathimerini, which warned that Crete is “getting a reputation” shaped less by lived experience and more by cumulative headlines. The article pointed to a series of unrelated but widely publicised events — a subsidy scandal, a vendetta case, disruptive protests affecting airport operations — and noted how, when stripped of context, they risk being read as evidence of systemic disorder. The concern was not denial, but proportion: that fragments of reality, repeated often enough, begin to masquerade as the whole.
And yet, daily life on the island tells a different story. It is visible in unlocked doors, in villages where children move freely, and in neighbours who notice immediately when something is out of place. It is present in rescue teams who risk their lives for lost hikers, in communities that respond quickly and collectively when something goes wrong, and in a hospitality culture that depends on trust rather than fear.
This is why reckless acts stand out so starkly: they are not normalised. They are recognised as violations.
As a new year begins, it is worth choosing which story travels forward. Crete does not need denial, defensiveness, or silence. It needs proportion. A place should be judged not by its loudest moments, but by how it responds to them — and by what continues, quietly and reliably, every other day of the year. Crete is not defined by noise, but by continuity. And that continuity remains, overwhelmingly, one of care, community, and life.
