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Coming home after 130 yearsWhen a Syrian stonemason and his family were granted asylum in Greece last year they immediately made their way to the island of Crete - completing a journey begun by their great-grandparents 130 years ago.Entering a small shop in Chania, on Crete's north-west coast, Ahmed began to introduce himself. The owner looked at him open-mouthed. He understood what Ahmed was saying, but some of the words he was using were unfamiliar and old-fashioned, and others he didn't understand at all. It was as though Ahmed had arrived not just from Syria, but from another age.Ahmed, 42, was speaking in a version of the Cretan dialect he had learned from his parents, growing up in a village in northern Syria in the 1970s and 80s. His parents had spent all their lives in Syria - but some members of the previous generation had been born in Crete and, living together as exiles, they had kept Cretan culture alive.