With Olympian bravado, Lou Ruprecht delivers an audacious work charting cultural and ethnic mixing in Crete from the Neolithic Age to the present. Drawing on a vast range of reading, archival research, and archaeological excavation, the book offers a bold and urgently needed analysis of cosmopolitanism.

Gregory Jusdanis, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University

Louis Ruprecht has written a sweeping history of Crete as “the mixed place,” a place where peoples, cultures, and languages mingle, giving rise to the new and unforeseen. If Cretan mixing was a powerful source of political anxiety (as mixing so often is), Ruprecht insists that it was also a wellspring of pleasure and possibility. At once learned and lively, Cosmopolitan Crete is no less than a spirited defense of the traditions of encounter and exchange that can animate shared life in a diverse society.

Molly Farneth, Haverford College