India is their country, and Crete their home

Kamanjit Singh arrived on the island of Crete from India 12 years ago to work. He remains on the island to this day and is one of about 1,000 members of the Indian community that has been established in two communities of the Rethymno region. Six hundred live in the Hamalevri and Stavromenos communities and 400 in Rethymno. “They came here [from the Punjab in northwest India] because Creta Farm was looking for employees, but also because there is a lot of arable land. We embraced them from the beginning,” says community leader Dimitris Serlis. The men arrived in the 1990s to work, mostly at the Creta Farm factory. Most of the women, some with their children, came to join them in 2002. Tellingly, at the Stavromenos primary school, 30 of the 180 students belong to the Indian community. What’s more, one of the prominent students that took part in the March 25 national parade was Bubhinder Singh, who excelled in his studies. [Nikos Kokkalias]