A shepherd living in a stone hut on a Cretan mountainside has caught the attention of the BBC, and the numbers behind his story are hard to ignore. Giannis Papasifakis, a Cretan shepherd from the Sfakia region of southern Crete, has built a following of more than 100,000 people on social media by documenting his daily life in the White Mountains.
Papasifakis spends several months each year in a mitato, a traditional stone shelter used by shepherds for centuries, sitting at roughly 1,800 metres above sea level above the village of Anopoli. There is no running water from a tap, no city conveniences. Supplies arrive by mule, solar panels keep the lights on, and his days are built around herding sheep and making cheese.
Despite that isolation, he films and posts regularly, and according to the BBC's Travel Show feature, as many as 1,200 people have tuned in live to watch him sit down for a meal. The British broadcaster featured him in an episode called "Guardians of Crete," profiling him as someone carrying on a family tradition of livestock farming that runs deep in that part of the island.
The BBC segment uses his story to show a side of Crete that has nothing to do with beaches or tourism, focusing instead on the people keeping the mountain traditions of the White Mountains alive. Papasifakis is not performing a version of the past for visitors. He is simply living it, and it turns out hundreds of thousands of people worldwide want to watch.
#Crete #Greece #GreekCulture

