The Crete blood feud
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The Crete blood feud is John Kiriakou's explanation of a mass shooting on the Greek island, offered on 5 November 2025 in response to a viewer who asked whether he had seen it. His answer is one of the clearest instances of him reasoning from Greek family knowledge rather than from intelligence experience.

Why he was smiling

He flagged his own reaction before explaining it. "Somebody also asked me if I had seen the mass shooting in Crete, the Greek island of Crete. And I'm smiling because, being Greek, every Greek knows about Crete. Everybody's armed and everybody's pissed off at somebody else."

The comparison he reached for was Mediterranean rather than Balkan: Cretans are "like Sicilians. Very much like Sicilians," and the host's addition of Corsicans in France drew agreement, "that's how Corsicans are. It's the same thing."

The threshold for a feud

What makes the pattern durable, in his telling, is how little it takes to start. "If you look at me cross-eyed, or you insulted my sister, or you cut my dad off in traffic and didn't say you're sorry, blood feud. And it'll go for generations."

The shooting itself he places inside that frame: "one of these feuds bubbled over and a guy started shooting and killed a whole bunch of people from the other family." His classification is explicit and exclusionary, "so it's not a terrorist attack. It's just Cretans being Cretans."

The prime minister's complaint

Kiriakou closed by reporting, in paraphrase, the reaction of the Greek prime minister, whom he identifies as Cretan himself: "Look, we have to stop this silliness. Every time you get mad, you just go get your hundred-year-old Ottoman rifle and start shooting people you don't like. You can't do that."

The detail of the Ottoman rifle carries the point he is making about time depth. The feuds are old; so, in his account, are the guns. Nothing in his answer treats the killings as forgivable, the prime minister's line is quoted approvingly, but he refuses the category of political violence, and the refusal is the substance of the answer.

The transcript's auto-captions garble the island's name and its inhabitants throughout; the spellings are regularised here without change of sense.

See also

- Kiriakou's Cypriot ancestry
- The Greek Orthodox Church
- John Kiriakou
