Crete

Crete was the home of the oldest European civilization, and one of the most ancient in the world, the Minoan. Since that time, Crete has been a crossroads where many different cultures met, often collided, and influenced each other. The most important of these influences would be those of the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Venetians, and the most recent of the Ottoman Turks. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to analyze with absolute precision what influence, if any, brought all these peoples on the music we hear today in Crete.
Cretan music undoubtedly belongs to the family of the tropical musical traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and has also remarkable common elements with other traditions of the wider region such as Arabic, Turkish and, of course, traditions of different regions of Greece.