In 1976, Stamatis Moraitis was 60 years old living in the United States when doctors found lung cancer and gave him just months to live. He made what seemed like a practical, slightly grim decision: he moved back to his hometown on the Greek island of Ikaria so his family wouldn’t be stuck with expensive American funeral costs. “Let me be buried beside my family, by the sea, and where it’ll only cost my relatives a few hundred dollars,” he said. The island had other ideas. Ikaria happens to be one of the world’s five “blue zones,” regions where people reliably live longer than almost anywhere else on Earth. Once Moraitis settled back in, something started to shift. The fresh air, the clean water, and constant time with old friends and family seemed to be doing what chemotherapy and medication couldn’t. He took up gardening. He started building a vineyard, not because he expected to taste the wine, but so his wife would have something to remember him by. Instead of counting down his remaining months, he found himself catching up with friends over glasses of that wine. And somewhere in there, without really noticing, his body got better. Crediting the wine, the herb-heavy diet, and a thoroughly stress-free existence, Moraitis didn’t live a few more months. He lived a few more decades. He died peacefully on Ikaria in 2013, at the age of 102. That’s roughly 37 years after doctors told him to get his affairs in order. View this post on Instagram Ikaria specializes in what locals affectionately call the “art of doing nothing,” the kind of unhurried existence that sounds almost foreign to anyone trained to feel guilty the second they’re not being productive. People sit with cups of coffee and talk for hours. The guiding philosophy is “Siga Siga,” which roughly means “slowly, slowly.” Don’t rush. Don’t optimize your morning routine. Just take it easy. The food is a traditional plant-based Mediterranean diet, heavy on vegetables, legumes, herbs, and olive oil. Meat shows up mostly on Sundays. There are hot springs (mildly radioactive, but the locals don’t seem worried about it) and frequent village festivals that keep everyone socially connected well into old age. View this post on Instagram And it works. It’s common to see people in their 90s and beyond still breeding goats, tending herds, cleaning their homes, and taking long walks. Research published by Harvard Health confirms that blue zones have far higher numbers of centenarians, with residents living up to 10 years longer than the average American and showing markedly lower rates of dementia, cancer, and diabetes. View this post on Instagram The blue zone concept comes from journalist Dan Buettner, who identified five of them: Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. He wrote about them in his book and later his Netflix documentary, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. When Buettner interviewed Moraitis for that documentary and asked him how, exactly, he’d beaten a terminal cancer diagnosis by roughly four decades, Moraitis didn’t have a scientific explanation. He just shrugged. “I don’t know!” he said. “I guess I just forgot to die.” Follow Dan Buettner (@danbuettner) on Instagram for more lifestyle and entertainment content. The post Greek man went home to die of cancer. The island had different plans. appeared first on Upworthy.