The killing of a 19-year-old has prompted many islanders to ask whether the pursuit of holidaymakers' money has gone too far
There is nothing like a dead man, lying cold and still on a hospital bed, to make an impression. At this time of year, the peak of the tourist season, Professor Manolis Michalodimitrakis, Crete's chief forensic pathologist, sees a fair share of them.
The wiry Cretan doctor trained in Detroit in the 1980s. Like all good professionals, he has long been hardened to the hazards of his job. And, yet, when a young person is wheeled into his surgery in the basement of Heraklion's university hospital, it always distresses him.
"After all," he insisted, "it is against the law, the law of nature, for a mother to have to bury her son."
On Thursday, Michalodimitrakis had to face the mother of Tyrell Matthews-Burton, the Briton murdered two days earlier outside a bar in Malia, the former farming village turned party resort on Crete. Such moments, he says, are "always sacred".
Burton was celebrating his 19th birthday when a drunken brawl with other Britons flared up and he was stabbed in the back and chest. The force of the knife thrust was such it pierced not only his lung but also his heart.
"And then there was the lack of defence wounds, which showed he had clearly been killed execution-style," added the softly spoken professor. "But as I told his mother, he would not have suffered. A lot of alcohol had been consumed. In 15 seconds he would have lost consciousness. Within three minutes he would have been dead."
It took two days for shopkeepers to scrub the pavement clean. Matthews-Burton lost more than half of his blood in the attack.
"The bar owners worked hard to remove the stains," said Maria Vlastou, who runs a fancy-dress shop up the street. "For a couple of days flowers marked the spot," she added, beckoning tourists inside. "Just when we thought things were starting to get better, this happens. It's horrible, very, very sad."
All week, local news outlets have focused on the killing. Television cameras have been trained firmly on the island's courthouse, where three British teenagers have been charged in connection with the crime.
As speculation about gang rivalry provoking the attack dominated headlines, draconian security added to the atmosphere. For the first time in living memory, guards patrolled not only the sandstone building in the heart of Heraklion, Crete's Venetian-walled capital, but paced its dark corridors, with guns at the ready, forcibly keeping friends of the victim and friends of the alleged perpetrators apart.
None of this is a surprise to Michalodimitrakis. In recent years the alcohol-fuelled antics of British visitors, often fresh out of school, have steadily got worse. Locals have looked on aghast as holidaymakers, egged on by tour operators or commission-seeking reps, have encouraged the bad behaviour. With all-Brit "party capitals" in Corfu, Rhodes and Zakynthos also competing for custom, the debauchery has plumbed new depths.
"It's never other nationalities, only the British, and in Crete it's only ever Malia," said the pathologist.
The people of Crete pride themselves in being the toughest of Greeks. Exactly 100 years after the Greek flag was raised on the island, locals still wax lyrical about the ability of their ancestors to resist the terrible Turk. Heraklion, they emphasise, was only conquered in 1669 after a bloody siege that followed 20 years of war by invading Ottoman forces.
"Our civilisation goes back 5,000 years, to Minoan times," enthused Malia's mayor, Zacharias Doxastakis, seated behind a desk in his impeccably neat office. "We have culture and history and just because our country is in economic crisis I don't want people to think that we have sold out and only attract this type of tourism. We have all types coming here."
To make the point the local town hall has been handing out "honour awards" to British tourists who have been visiting the area for more than 20 years. "We have little ceremonies here on the second floor," said Eirini Mastoraki, showing pictures of smiling older couples being handed the ornate certificates. "You see they are very nice, very good people."
But the newer arrivals are clearly causing angst. Around seven million tourists are expected to visit Crete this year, with charter planes flying in several times a day.
After midnight as many as 20,000 youngsters stream down Malia's main street, frequently in a state of inebriated fury after enjoying the "drink bongs" and "fishbowl cocktails" served by every bar and club. Most are Britons revelling in the unalloyed freedom of their first unescorted holiday abroad.
"Every night we are inundated with young English girls and boys coming through our door," said Nikos Katsaros, an orthopaedic surgeon at the town's medical centre. "A lot are injured in alcohol-driven games put on by the bars. Last night, a girl was brought in who had burned her entire crotch leapfrogging over candles in a bar. We have employed an English nurse to help us cope."
Confronted by the invasion, officials appear to be on a war footing, dispatching scores of extra police to patrol the resort where youngsters, wearing almost nothing, career about on oversized quad bikes throughout the day.
In the wake of Tuesday's murder, mayor Doxastakis announced that young Britons were turning Malia into a battlefield. "We love our tourists, especially the young, but Greece is not a free-for-all. They can't just come here and run riot. We're no longer going to tolerate it.
"We are even considering setting up special zones, with clubs and race courses where young people can do anything they want, but in an area that is closely monitored and not in the middle of a town."
Such measures had become urgent, he said, because exasperated locals were threatening to take the law into their hands: "Last year, the father of a young boy who was hit by a tourist on a quad bike chased after him, running down the street. We have managed to clean up our act and have close down bars and businesses that break the law. But people are protesting. They want the organs of state to do more."
Locals are not beyond blaming themselves for the uncontrolled development of areas that were once exclusively agricultural. Many complain that tourism officials in Athens should have waded in earlier.
"They should have helped us devised a policy that was not exclusively about the mass market," said Yannis Komantakakis, an aide to the mayor. "A lot of us were farmers before. We had no idea. Tour operators put pressure on hoteliers to drop their prices because they say it is the only way of attracting more people, and the result is tourists get younger and younger. It's a vicious circle."
Michalodimitrakis is the first to agree that radical action is needed. Alcohol was at the root of much of the mayhem, he said – not least the deadly cocktails that are sold in many of the bars: "Adulterated alcohol is a huge problem, and what I believe, and know, is that certain establishments have to close because when they serve such drinks to young people, the results are disastrous," he said. "They simply lose their minds."
Outside her fancy dress shop, 43-year-old Vlastou goes further. "I'm old enough to have known better times," she says, "when Americans and Swedes and the Danes would come here. Now our town is regarded as a paradise of lawlessness because that is how it is sold by tour operators in Britain. If you ask me, we should get rid of all these ugly bars and clubs and start all over again."
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