A visit to the Minotaur

For more than a year, my day begins and ends with reading news. Every morning, as soon as I turn off the alarm clock, I immediately open Twitter, Facebook and bookmarks of information sites. To wake up and leave the house, I need 20 minutes to get to work - another 40 minutes. All these 40 minutes I update the news feed, if there is no news - I move to another bookmark, application or email service. All this time, somewhere in the background, the subway car rumbles, and an automatic voice announces the names of the stations. Passengers around are silent, look at the floor and prepare to take a profitable position in order to rush to the escalator at the right stop and get out of the subway. Five minutes with a quick step, and I am at the workplace-I read and write the news so that someone also read them.

Somewhere in the middle of the day I eat a sandwich with a phone in my hands in a couple of minutes, drink a mug of tea and return to the news feed. Without a computer or phone, I hardly remember at least five events that I wrote about last Monday. The last page that I close before bedtime is the page of some news resource. For two years that I live in Moscow, my dark skin has become white, white teeth - yellow, my vision fell into another diopter. I never got rid of the South Russian accent, but became less emotional and open. Alarm clock, news, metro carriage, news and sandwich, metro car, news, alarm clock ...

But the problem is not at all in work. News are the most interesting thing I have ever written. The problem is round -the -clock dependence on them, and this ailment, especially in recent years, is characteristic of many Russians. It doesn’t matter if they watch television or post “socially significant” Facebook notes.

On one beautiful August day, I flew to rest on Crete. Closer to midnight, I ended up on the northern coast of the island in the small village of Bali.

The first thing that residents of Crete are trying to teach any tourist is to drink the grape moonshine Raki, which is poured for you in every tavern, and also there is a lot and slowly. You get used to the latter for the longest. Food for the mind in Crete is no less: 2500 years BC, this island was the center of the Minoic civilization, which is considered the oldest in Europe. It was Minoan mythology that became the basis of ancient Greek. Here, according to legends, Zeus was born, here, this minotaurus killed in the Labyrinth. If you plunge into these myths deeper, it turns out that already two and a half millennia BC in Crete there was a system that ensured the replacement of power.

The Minotaur from the ancient Greek is translated as a “tsarebian” (a king in a mask of a bull), and seven girls and seven boys, whom the monster, according to legend, was given every eight years to eat, were not by anyone, but by applicants for the tsarist throne. In a duel with them, the king who ruled had to confirm his strength, and therefore the ability to rule further. This duel was held in the Knossos Palace - a huge (by the standards of those times) the city, which served as a place for ritual rites. Once in eight years - because it is precisely such a period that must pass in order for the full moon to coincide with the day of summer or winter solstice, symbols of eternal life. Now the Knosso Palace is the ruins restored after the excavations of archaeologists, and the Critites are looking for eternal life in Orthodox churches and monasteries.

So far no one has found matches, I advise you to buy oranges and scatter them in their apartments

As for Russian tourists in Crete, they cannot be distinguished from Germans, French, British, Italians or Americans. Only local ones can be distinguished from "non -named", so the situation when a brown smiling Russian in English apologizes to the brown smiling German for his child, who accidentally broke the sand castle of his foreign peer, is repeated quite often. Only the nationality of the participants and the cause of the action change.

By the third day of my stay in Crete, I again became dark. He woke up not from the call of the alarm clock, but from the rays of the sun. Then breakfast, sea, lunch, sea, dinner, book and sleep. In a few days of silence, huge portions of multi-colored food, turquoise water, flowering grenade, sweet-salt air, olive oil, floating at the extended hand of sea turtles and grape moonshine, I generally began to forget where he came from, and began to doubt whether Russia with all its sanctions, wars and corruption. The debt crisis in Greece, which in the summer has become one of the main topics of world journalism, is not felt in Crete, at least tourists do not feel it. Banks and ATMs are working, new hotels are building in the mountains, the taverns are full of curses, oranges are lying underfoot, and after lunch a comprehensive siesta occurs.

I do not want to think about a crisis in such conditions; The average temperature of the summer in Greece is 32 degrees of heat, five warm seas are washed by its shores, banners grow all year round, oranges, tangerines, lemons and grapefruits are ripening, from March to September - cherries, strawberries, apricots, peaches, watermelons and melons - apples and pears. This country, as the heiress of ancient Greece, is considered the cradle of Western civilization, the birthplace of democracy, philosophy, physical and mathematical sciences, theater and modern Olympic Games. Her motto since 1820: "Freedom or death." In 2015, Greece accepted the terms of European creditors to carry out numerous reforms in order to pay for debts, avoid default and stay in the eurozone. In my country, the authorities with an eye on a rich history are ready to hunger and war, if only not to carry out any reforms at all.

In Moscow, when I returned from vacation, there were 15 degrees of heat. I have not smoked for five days, did not talk about politics and did not look at news tapes. After a few hours of stay in the capital, I began to understand that not smoking here is much easier than not reading the news. My hand rummaged in telephone applications, I again plunged into the news of the unconditional victory of the great state over enemy products, Ukrainian directors, common sense and humanity.

It is with such news that the life of Muscovites resonates. Reading this news, they are depressed from dissatisfaction with what is happening or simply from the oppression of reports from some invisible front for them. But, without reading them, they become even more unhappy. They are in anticipation of an unknown explosion, not understanding: a barrel with gunpowder is just a barrel with gunpowder, if you do not set fire to a wick. Therefore, so far no one has found matches, I advise you to buy oranges and scatter them in their apartments. This is the most effective that today can be opposed to the surrounding madness.

Ivan Martynenko - employee of the news department of Radio Liberty