Sally and Marion, your description of the food at Fotinis has me drooling. I will definatly be trying to find it when I come over at the end of march. Cant wait,havent had a decent moussaka in months 

Jeansy,

probably sooner than that. I'm coming over 27th March for 1week. Their wedding will be my 4th visit this year.

Ros.

Thanks for the info.  Congratulations to Lea and Lou.  It is very refreshing to see the attitudes to weddings in Crete.  My son married in England and it was just met with cynicism.  One friend commented Why on earth does he want to do that?  Why don't they just live togehter.  I am now the grandmother of two beautiful grand children and the time was hurt by some of these comments.  I was looking at the numbers of people who live together in crete and it is still very low.  In England it is considerable. 

But obviously I am old fashioned??????

Regards

Marion

Know of a lot of children born to "unmarried" parents here in the East of Crete.  But then I'm not sure whether their parents may have had a CIVIL marriage some time before the church one.  People here under 40, say, tend to have 2 weddings, the civil one first & the church one later, often considerably later.  We've been to weddings recently where the couples' children,  5 and 6 years old respectively, were in attendance as bridesmaids/pages. 

Villagers do not regard a civil marriage as the real thing, so often refer to these couples as unmarried when in fact they're legally married.  Hence the inverted commas.  Those who have had ONLY a civil marriage are regarded with great puzzlement, and I know only one Greek couple in this situation.  Even those who are stronly anti-church will undertake a church wedding.  I know one mixed couple (Cretan & foreign) who had a civil ceremony only, and when their neighbours heard of the coming event, their response on hearing that it wasn't to be held in the church but at the municipal office was "Never mind"!  We've also  noticed that people give their wedding gifts (where family are concerned, often large amounts of money, or property) for the church wedding only, not the civil one.  The couple who didn't have a church wedding, and won't, will simply not receive these gifts.  It seems to be rather like a sanction! 

This is just what we've experienced & heard of first hand.  The interpretations are our own, and I'm sure an anthropologist/social scientist would make better sense of them, or at least understand the reasons better than we do.  We've been quite struck, here, by the power of tradition in the society and the difficulties experienced by those who don't "tow the line".

Quote:


That's not quite right. What they must have said is "xorise" which means "she split up" and can be used both for relationships and marriages. The proper term for divorce is "pire diazigio" and there's no way they would have said that if the couple had only been living together.