Sam Hammer, Crete...apparently the two mix together pretty well. Photo: Jeff Flindt
It was a freezing afternoon on March 10, 2011. After two days of travel, photographer Jeff Flindt and surfers Nat Young, Sam Hammer and Dane Zaun had logged a measly two hours of water time. Huddled around their rental car, de-suiting for the last time, the crew got that feeling you always get at the end of a trip; that little voice inside you that asks: Will I ever come back? It spoke to them in unison. And their answer was a resounding “No.”
“It was the most random trip of my life,” Nat Young would later say. “I mean, it’s not like Greece is really a surf destination.”
Or is it?
In November, a story I had written for the German surf magazine, Tide, about Young and company’s Cretan skunk mission went to print. Not long after, I received an email on behalf of “40 CST (Cretan Surf Tribe) members”:
“Feel free to let other pro surfers or anyone that wishes to disrespect our wishes,” the email went, “that there has been many attempts to expose Crete in the manner as you have done and many have been squashed and total serious action has already taken place.”
Localism? On Crete? Hold up. I clicked on the link that was provided in the email and for a moment I thought I’d landed on the website of some radical offshoot of the Spanish terrorist organization, ETA. Guns. Black beanies. Steely glares. Sacrificial lambs. This was bizarre. When, and how, I wondered, did surf culture ever veer in this direction?
A sort of Youtube anthem posted on the CST’s website, called “Freedom or Death: A Greek Surfing Saga”, attempts to parallel the group’s existence with that of the Da Hui and Z-Boys circa the 1970s by stating that the tribe began after a “young Greek boy” had returned home from Hawaii and California at the same time, to become the first surfer to paddle out in the Aegean Sea. The video seeks to tell the CST’s story using familiar localism jargon: “Chaos”, “fights” and “territorialism” made the cut—even “a murder attempt” finds its way into the drama.
To be sure, Crete is not another North Shore, California or Indonesia. Nor will it ever be. So how could this supposedly large group of angry Cretan locals—inspired by the Da Hui, Wolf Pak, and, most oddly, Z-Boys—rise and flourish without us ever knowing?
According to George Papandreou—a self-described “founder” of Greek surfing and an active promoter of surfing in Greece—there is little chance that the existence of 40 CST members on Crete is fact.
“Today, there are only ten local guys, 15 max, on Crete,” says Papandreou. “And I know of only five CST members. No more.”
Papandreou says that throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the only surfing that was done on Greece was by a half-dozen Greek-American surfers during the summer months. It was not until he and his friends—inspired by the TV hit “Hawaii 5-0”—started surfing along the Ionian coast of Greece’s Ipirus region, that year-round surfing was born.
Indeed, five militant locals versus forty is like the difference between a Chihuahua, rather than a Pit Bull, chasing after you. But, then again, Chihuahuas can be nasty little things when caught off guard. Which seems to be exactly the case on Crete, where each new summer the island’s small group of local surfers—the “15 max” that Papandreou mentions—are inundated with more and more relatively clueless newbies.
“Since the first [surfing] articles came out,” the CST spokesman explains, “hundreds [of surfers] per year have come and ruined almost every public spot for us in summer.
“But the real problem we have in Crete is all the hundreds of windsurfers who have picked up stand-up paddle boarding and surfing,” says the CST spokesperson. “They just don’t get it and many of them are even from here, so this is where the trouble really starts.”
