Aliens in the kitchen

Calabrese, finnocchio, kohlrabi, all grown in Galatas, Hania.

The olive harvest

What would Greece be like if it didn't have any olive trees? First of all, the fields would be bare: vast expanses of dry brown fields in the summer, damp green fields in the winter, absolutely useless terrain, good for taking a dog out for a walk while the person holding the leash jogs ahead of them. There also wouldn't be any olives to eat; instead of a few black olives in a Greek salad, there'd be a few capers, walnuts or almonds. And there'd definitely be no olive oil, so all our dishes would be cooked in water. Our food would taste a lot as Gilbert, a Jamaican soldier in WWII Britain, describes the food he ate in my favorite novel "Small Island" by Andrea Levy:

"...every last one of us was too preoccupied with food. The only flesh we conjured was the sort you chewed and swallowed. This was war. There was hardship I was prepared for - bullet, bomb and casual death - but not for the torture of missing cow-foot stew, not for the persecution of living without curried shrimp or pepper-pot stew. I was not ready, I was not trained to eat food that was prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste and texture. How the English built empires when their armies marched on nothing but mush should be one of the wonders of the world. I thought it would be combat that would make me regret having volunteered, not boiled-up vegetables - grey and limp on the plate like they had been eaten once before. Why the English come to cook everything by this method? Lucky they kept that boiling business as their national secret and did not insist that the people of their colonies stop frying and spicing up their food." (Read the next (very funny) paragraph, also related to food.)

Luckily for us Cretans, it was never like this.

(fasolada, black-eyed beans, fried potatos, fried salt cod)

(kalitsounia fried in olive oil, gardoumia, dakos)

Throughout this month, there has been a flurry of activity in the olive growing sector in Hania. Some varieties of olives are ready for harvesting in early December - but only if they have received adequate irrigation, and most olive trees growing in the town are not artifically irrigated, which means we must wait for the rain to fall. Olive oil producers waited patiently for the rain needed to give the olives a final growth spurt, which, by the end of summer, had already formed into little hard drupes as hard as pebbles. It must have rained before the olives are picked; if it hasn't, the olives will be too dry to produce a good ratio of olive oil per kilo of raw fruit. But olives are never picked in wet weather - this would increase the water ratio in the oil produced, and give a lower grade olive oil. This winter was a particularly dry season. The rain finally made its appearance in mid-November, lasting about a week. As soon as the rain stopped, the heat was on: everyone involved in the olive trade in Hania frantically began to harvest their olives for oil.

The day starts off like this (yes, that's my hand on the steering wheel)...

Every morning, as I take the children to school, I drive by olive fields. On the road, I pass countless pickup trucks, olive picking gear in tow: large nets to lay under the tree (usually black or green), a beating rod, a generator, among other bits and pieces. This means that the olives to be picked will be beaten, not allowed to drop naturally. Certain varieties (the one we call tsounates in Crete) are allowed to fall on their own, hence the nets, which allow the soil to breathe. They are laid over the ground below the trees and the owner of the filed goes there about once a week to gather whatever crops have fallen. This process is time-consuming, and it does not work for the lianes variety of olive, which has a stronger stem holding it onto the tree.

These nice young men (they were Albanian) were very obliging when I asked if I could photograph them. Their payment is often made according to the quantity of olive oil produced. This encourages them to work as fast as possible.

The nets are laid carefully under the trees and the beating starts. This was once done by hand with a large stick, but times have changed: a noisy diesel generator is now an essential element of the olive picking season. As each tree is shorn of its fruit, the nets are gathered up and the olives are poured into sacks, leaves and all at this stage. The sifting process was once done by hand, but this has now been made obsolete with high technology and the modern olive press: the olives are sorted mechanically at the factory. The sacks are piled onto the truck, to be delivered to the olive press. This process is repeated on all the trees. If the trees are close to the road, the nets are laid on the road. No matter how carefully you drive, sometimes you can't avoid driving over a net. This has happened to me countless numbers of times, as I live in a village setting with narrow country roads.

The olives - along with some of the leaves from the tree - quickly drop off the branches when they are beaten with an electric beating rod.

The olive pickers are mainly foreigners who have made their home in Greece: Albanians, Romanians, Bulgarians. They make good money doing this work; the owners of the fields are Greek, but they more often than not have another (main) job and cannot pick their own olives, not even as a part time activity, unless they literally have nothing else to do in their free time.

Our olive trees are no fun to work with at all...

Olive picking is a very tiring job, it must be done in its season and it is usually performed in cold weather. And it all looks like an easy job if your trees are on a level field; try picking them on a steep hillside, where each row of olive trees is on its own little strip of land, barely wide enough to walk by...

The olives are usually taken to a privately owned olive press located near the area they were picked; this one has a lot of customers waiting for their olives to be pressed. Notice the leaves on the left hand side of the building: they are used as fertiliser and a fire starter. Olive oil production also leaves sludgy residues which have to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner; it's not all as clean as it looks...

The olive trees get quite a beating from this rod (beating them by hand is very time-consuming and tiring, but much gentler the tree; it is hardly ever done now). This creates one more job for the olive pickers: the broken branches need to be cleared away from the field. This is what happen in the field before the olives get processed in the olive oil press. That's a totally different story. Check out Jude's blog to see the fresh olive oil pouring out of the press. What a sight...

The end of the day - the olives have all been picked off these trees, and only the broken branches remain...

MAICh carries out a lot of research on olive cultivation, olive oil processing and the adulteration of olive oil. The findings are just as depressing as

the recent crisis the country of Greece finds itself in:

"Greece devotes 60% of its cultivated land to olive-growing. It is the world's top producer of black olives and boasts more varieties of olives than any other country. Greece holds third place in world olive production with more than 132 million trees, which produce approximately 350,000 tons of olive oil annually, of which 75% is extra-virgin. This makes Greece the world's biggest producer of extra-virgin olive oil, topping Italy (where 40-45% of olive oil produced is extra virgin) and Spain (where 25-30% of olive oil produced is extra virgin). About half of the annual Greek olive oil production is exported, while only 5% of this quantity reflects the origin of the bottled product. In other words, only 5% of the Greek olive oil is exported as a trade mark and the rest is exported as a raw material while being processed and bottled in different countries, mainly Italy. Greek exports primarily target European Union countries, the main recipient being Italy, which receives about three-quarters of total exports" (MAICh study on organic and conventional cultivation of olive, 2008).

So there you have it, in a nutshell: Greece can't even be bothered to make an effort to market its own natural resources. The next time you buy olive oil bottled in Italy, you know where it's really from: Greece. Yet, there is hope: advances in knowledge and technology have led to greater success in the fight against adulteration of olive oil; progress in DNA technology can now detect whether olive oil is purely from one region as well as being able to identify purely extra-virgin olive oil and adulterated oil mixtures (ie olive and non-olive oil mixes).

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Post-weekend story: Urban garden

(I originally published this post on my other blog - Organically Cooked - on the 5th of December, one day before Greece was plunged into chaos after the death of Alexis.)

There's a serious economic crisis reigning in Greece, invisibly infiltrating the town of hania, visible only the those who read between the lines. People want to work, but are either denied the right to do so, or can't find enough of it. The state has always made a show of their provision of free health care to their protegees, the privileged public servants of Greece. But it has recently been revealed that this free care was at the expense of private businesses and promises that the owners would be paid; the chemists' union has stopped providing drugs to state-insured citizens, and doctors have stopped treating state-insured patients for free. Boutiques and specialised stores are void of customers. The only businesses doing well in Greece are the banks - they're always full of people, people paying off their debts, people withdrawing cash, people taking out loans, people transferring their debts from one bank to another; in general, people needing money.

The economic crisis has hit food sales. In Hania, stamnagathi is a prized green, usually selling for at least 7 euro a kilo; in the heart of winter, I've paid more than 8 euro a kilo, which in some cases is more than the price of meat per kilo. Stamnagathi is a fortnightly staple in our house, alternating with other more conventional greens such as cabbage and brocolli. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to find it selling at less than 5 euro a kilo last week. At that price, I should have bought the whole crate and washed, boiled and frozen it to last me until the end of winter.

As with any cheap product, I was worried about buying low quality: price is nearly always associated with quality, even if this supposition is only in the mind. I decided to ask the shopkeeper why the price of stamnagathi had dropped dramatically. The price of petrol has fallen dramatically, but here's what the shopkeeper had to say:

"This year, stamnagathi has had a slow start because it hasn't rained so much. There has been a sterady supply of it, but it hasn't had that lush green look it used to have at this time of year last year. (I had bought some at this time, and it was rather tasteless and dry.) Now that it's been raining more, it has started to grow more profusely. I was selling it last week at just under 7 euro a kilo, but it wasn't selling. Stamnagathi has always sold at constant levels right throughout the winter. I think it's got to do with the economic crisis. Now stamnagathi is being brought in to us sorted into two types (that's never happened before): the large thick glossy type which sells at a higher price, and the small thin type which sells at a lower price. It gives people a choice price-wise, but it's really the same thing."

This discussion made me feel very guilty about spending my hard-earned income on a bag of spinach, since the garden is full of nettles, and nettles really do taste like spinach in a spanakopita. I was too lazy to bother harvesting them.

The economic crisis was made more obvious to me recently by an amazing discovery I made while getting some chores done in the town centre. I was to meet up with someone while I was there, and we arranged a meeting place. I was the first to arrive at the shopping mall - the only one in Hania - so I wandered around it until my friend arrived.

The shopping centre reminds me of other shopping precincts around the world, the kind I used to go to in New Zealand, where the shops were always crammed with colourful wares, while the street kids hung around on the benches in the middle of the squares, sniffing glue to while away the time; all that glitters is not gold.

The shopping complex on Boniali street in Hania was modelled around typical shopping malls in large cities, in the hope that it will attract an atmosphere of shoppers that come to view the place as an events arena. People could window shop, try out new things, have a bite to eat from one of the eateries, maybe even food-court style, and entertain their kids. One look at the mall now, and you will think that the economic crisis has had a serious impact in Hania; most of the shop windows are dusty and the units empty. The ones that are being used are divided into two categories: the street-facing units are used as shops selling consumer items (they are all being used), while the offices tucked away in the large marble corridors of the complex, invisible at street level, are being used as offices for private businesses such as engineering and graphics firms. There are many unused compartments, turning the wide corridors into unattractive alleyways that look unsafe. There is underground parking available, but it is expensive; the suers of the car park are usually people who run businesses in the shopping mall and its environs rather than shoppers.

The shopping centre has not been affected by the economic crisis; it was simply never a success. The local community does not do their shopping according to the laws of a shopping mall culture. People use stores referred to them by contacts, or on their own judgment; they love walking down the main shopping streets checking out the windows. If it isn't at street level, then it's invisible. Even food shopping is specialised: if it isn't general supplies which you can pick up from your one-stop shop, the supermarket, it's mizithra, xinohondro, and hand-made filo pastry, sold in stores that have a long established tradition of selling the same product in the same location. Why would anyone want to buy their mizithra from a specialty store located in a modern building with no history? The shops in the mall that opened up and shut down, one after the other, represented markets that were affected by recessions and booms in the economy, as well as seasonal differences, mainly knick-knack articles which made suitable Christmas gifts or interesting artistic additions to the household furnishings - when one could afford it.

Life in Hania does not centre around a shopping mall. Events in a small Mediteranean town have never centred on a commercial enterprise. People have their own private circle of friends; either that, or they organise a get-together with their families, entertaining in their own homes, or going out to cafes where they would be seen, as well as being able to people-watch themselves. This plush clean modern complex, comprised of three different buildings with offices located at the higher levels, became a lunar wasteground with a clinically clean white appearance. Its flower boxes, surrounded by benches for visitors' comfort, are void of colour, filled mainly with weeded earth, save a few sturdy yucca shrubs, planted at a time when there was some hope that the shopping centre would be more successful. But if someone cared to look more closely, they would also have found something else growing in the flower boxes, which would probably seem preposterous in another town:

some spring onions, ...

... a few lettuce plants with a climbing pumpkin creeper and grapevine in the background...

... and some coriander.

Someone's using these useless flower boxes as their garden. Maybe it's one of the more organically-minded store owners in the mall, maybe it's someone who lives in one of the boxy little apartments in the inner-city, maybe it's someone who simply doesn't have a garden, but wants to eat fresh greens that they have planted themselves. Could it be someone who's feeling the economic pinch, trying to feed a family? It was the coriander that got me wondering: maybe it's an economic migrant that wants a taste of his (or her) homeland. Coriander is never sold at the fresh produce section of our supermarkets. Although I've started growing coriander at home, this herb is too pungent for my family's tastebuds; it's already starting to seed before I had the chance to use it.

Behind the facade of the big flash cars that don't fit onto our narrow roads, the flashy Christmas decorations in the shop windows and the expensive price tags in the high fashion boutiques, a cloud of insecurity hangs over Hania, a fair distance away from our senses so as to seem intangible.

(And the next evening, that cloud of insecurity burst into a violent thunderstorm, drenching us with riots, demonstrations and strikes.)

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Street market

Fresh produce stall at one of the daily street markets in Hania.

This photo was taken six weeks ago, so the peppers may now be hothouse varieties.

Winter garden

It's not all doom and gloom: our garden is looking rather prosperous.
We harvested our first broccoli last Sunday, and now the cauliflower is also ready.
But the cabbages still need some more growing time.

Cheese and honey

Locally produced cheeses and honey at a farmers' stall at the daily street market in Hania.

The practices of old-time producers often reflect the use of the products: Soft curd cheese (mizithra), hard yellow cheese (graviera) and honey are often used in combination in local food products, for example, kalitsounia.

Bread

In Greece, sliced bread is found in the convenience food counters of a supermarket. It is hardly ever sold in bakeries, and it never competes with the uncut loaf of bread. Most people buy their bread at the local bakery. I buy it from the supermarket because I like the bread produced by their suppliers. It is made in the same way as fresh bakery bread.



Another staple bread product in Crete is the wholemeal rusk, commonly known here as paximadi, made by double-baking bread slices.



As you can see, it's a popular product, judging by the well-stocked shelves.

Rusk is popular in Cretan summer salad.

Yesterday's quiz answers: Kalamata olives, corn, avocado, daikon (white) radish, (purple) kohlrabi, rocket salad, quince (yellow), pomegranate (streaky red-yellow)

Vegetable quiz: guess what?

Can you name all these vegetables?



Answer tomorrow!

Yesterday's quiz: ΦΟΥΡΝΟΣ = oven; 'bakery'

Tomato plants

These tomato plants seem to be producing, despite their sad appearance, caught in a light shower...

Geared up for winter

All set for the winter; onions and garlic strung up and dried, in the village of Galatas, Hania.

Post-weekend story: The grape harvest

The baptismal sacrament in the Greek Orthodox church is probably the most joyous one, the one that does not involve changing your life too greatly, nor dealing with sadness, afflictions and confusion. Achileas had been instructed by his parents never to turn down an offer of becoming a godfather, which is how he ended up with four godsons, all of whose parents were distant relatives of his parents. The family of the last child he christened was quite a case in point, the one that made him realise he could not keep accepting godparenting offers in the future.

Stavros was Achileas' third cousin; this fact was disputable, as no one could quite remember the names of the great-great-grandparents, all long gone now, involved in forging this relationship. Before his parents' deaths, Achileas had only met Stavros, ten years his junior, once, at a funeral. Stavros had not made a favorable impression on Achileas at the time: a thirteen-year old black-shirted lad driving his father's pick-up truck. A mother managed to pull her child off the road before Stavros zoomed past the main square of the village which was filled with mourners. Horiati, he thought to himself. Just over a decade later, his parents received a wedding invitation to Stavros' wedding, from Stavros' parents, as custom dictates: invite all the relatives, even if they don't know you.

"Stavros?" Achileas racked his brain to see if could remember who Stavro was. "Stavros who?"

"And he's marrying Persephone's daughter, Stavroula. Amazing how both sides of our family managed to get it together one more time!"

Achileas had little to do with either of the relatives concerned. Once he graduated from high school, he left Hania for Scotland, where he completed a Master's degree in Business Management. His marks were too low to pass into the school of his choice in Greece, so he preferred to leave the country and study abroad where he had a sure chance of being able to continue the studies of his choice, rather than play hit-and-miss again in Greece by sitting the university entrance exams again. He now preferred to keep company with the relatives he had more in common with, the ones who'd left rural life and become more urbanised. Not that he disliked the agricultural communities of his forefathers; it simply wasn't feasible to maintain both a life in the town working all hours of the day as an accountant, and then play the role of farmer-shepherd-horticulturalist-winemaker in his free time. By choosing the relatives he associated with, he felt a sense of content in that he was trying to fit the old adage "you can pick your friends, but not your relatives" more appropriately into his lifestyle. Therefore, he did not bother to attend Stavros' wedding.

The second time he saw Stavros was at his parents' funeral. They had both died tragically in a car crash. The congregation at the village church was far too large to accommodate the mourners; some of them he knew, others he didn't. A Greek funeral was like a wedding or a baptism: first you meet the couple, then you meet their children, then you say goodbye to them. Stavros had been living a comfortable life in the town, away from the familial bonds for so long, that he had neglected the oft-forgotten duty of remembering and honouring one's ancestors. The funeral had brought this fact home to him in the cruellest way. He felt out of touch with his own people.

Being an only child, he was very grateful to God - he wasn't sure who God was, but he did believe there was a superpower controlling the fate of mankind - that at least his parents had met his fiance, Korina. She was from the town, and shared his desire for a regularised urban lifestyle, away from the muck and bother of rural life. A pharmacist by trade, she worked shifts. When they had first met, she made it clear to him that she would not give up her job once she had children, something Stavros agreed to. He knew that this relationship of his could not be compared to his parents', where his father worked at the state electric company and worked the fields in his every spare hour, while his mother was a housewife, and turned the fruits of her husband's labours into various comestibles. His was a relationship based on equality, something he had got accustomed to during his six years in Scotland among the campus community. His wife was not able to continue Achileas' mother's constant adoration of him. The new woman in his life expected him to be strong and independent, like herself. Korina had helped to wean him off this kind of devotion. But he had never stopped loving his mother, who always had his favorite meal cooking in the oven, and had a stream of tupperware ready for him to take home with him after each of his visits. So when his parents left him together, he broke down. He had no idea how to start planning a funeral.

Korina's parents were very helpful in this respect. They contacted the head of the community in the village, who put Achileas in touch with Stavros. Stavros called the priest and made arrangements for the funeral, the opening of the family tomb - his father's family were all buried there right up to his father's grandparents - the trimera, the enniamera and the koliva for all the memorial services ending in the 12-month mnimosino. At the funeral, Achileas met Stavros' wife Stavroula for the first time; she seemed timid, quiet, reticent, more a young girl than a woman, carrying her first-born as if it were a piece of porcelain that she hadn't got the hang of holding correctly. It was after the trimina memorial service that Stavros asked Achileas if he would oblige to his request to become the godfather of his son Manousos.

With the renewal of his family ties, Achileas and Stavros had now forged a dual relationship: they were both cousins and koumbari. Achileas could not have turned his offer down, even if he had expalined to him that he had already become a godfather, after all the help that Stavros had offered and continued to offer to Achileas, even after the funeral and memorial services. He had taken him round the village and showed him the location and borders of every single field his father had been tending, including his mother's family's fields, which her siblings had been secretly hoping Achileas would never bother to find out about, so that they could trespass, with the hope that they could eventually claim it for themselves.

*** *** ***

Now that Achileas had a family of his own, Stavros' three children were the perfect playmates for his own two. They were similar in ages, and whenever they visited Stavros in the village, which was not often due to the pace of modern life and the various activities both families were involved in, seven-year-old Maria and nine-year-old Dionisis found an outlet to the expend pent-up energy that could not be used in the tightly enclosed space of a city apartment, no matter how large it was. Achileas had seconded the job to Stavros of caretaker of his fields, something that he now realised was essential if he were to maintain his father's olive fields in a tidy state, even if it meant that he produced just enough olive oil for his family's needs and did not make any profit from them. This was done without too much face-to-face contact with Stavros, as his cousin lived in the area himself. He preferred this situation to having to make regular journeys up narrow roads carved out from the mountains, with precarious driving conditions in the winter.

Whenever the families did meet, it was usually - nearly always - at Stavros' house. "Apartments aren't for me, koumbare," he explained to Achileas. "I want to run like a goat, I need my space. I'd be hitting my head against one of the the walls if I was ever cooped up inside one." Stavros folded his arms under his armpits and moved them up and down like chickens' wings. "Dunno how you manage it yourself, koumbare," he would tell him every time they met.

A favorite pastime of Maria and Dionisis when they visited the village was to check out the animals with the youngest of Stavros' three sons, Yiannis, who was the same age as Dionisis. Achileas was thankful for the contact his children had in this way with nature, but there was also the other side of the coin. The last time they had visited Stavros was at Easter, just when he had killed a sheep and had left it hanging to dry under the grapevine. He had felt a slight revulsion on first sight, as it had been a long time since he last remembered his father bringing home freshly salughtered meat. He knew his mother handled the chickens, but she had never let him watch her kill one, her way of protecting her one and only from all the bad on the world. His children did not seem perturbed in the slightest; perhaps it was Yiannis' mock taunting of the carcass that negated the psychological effects of such a sight and turned it into a game. In any case, he felt a slight sense of relief that he did not have to explain the process himself to his offspring.

Some time in the summer, just as they were ready to leave Stavros' house, Stavroula came out with a plastic supermarket bag containing a freshly slaughtered hen. She smiled as she held out the bag; she was a woman of few words. Achileas was used to his wife's dominating voice and he wondered, as he watched Stavroula, whether this simple woman who had never been to high school would have been a suitable companion for him; would it suffice to have food on the table and a clean house, as this was the whole of Stavroula's world. She did not work outside the home, she did not drive, nor did she accompany the children around to and from their schools and extra-curricular activities. Could the comfort and solace she offered replace Korina's organised mind? "Here," she said to Achileas, and gave him the bag. Then she disappeared into the kitchen, as if she had a good excuse to escape the farewell formalities.

Just at that moment, a shot was heard being fired, and there was a quick movement in amongst the vlita bushes in the garden. Maria started screaming and crying. As he tried to comfort her, Stavros walked by carrying a shotgun. Moments before, he had seen a cat entering the garden and had surreptitiously gone into the storeroom without anyone catching on to what he was doing. "Their blasted piss spoils the taste," he spat out as he made his way tot he storeroom to put the gun back in its place. He kept his rifle loaded at all times. "You never know who's lurking, koumbare; one day it's an Albanian, the next, it might be a Turk." He sounded serious, as though he really believed what he said.

*** *** ***

In mid-September, Achileas found himself at the village once again, uninvited this time. It was Stavros' - and Stavroula's - nameday, and it is common practice never to invite guests to lunch. if they couldn't come, it was up to them to inform the celebrant. If their nameday fell during the week, Achileas would have called them and apologised for not being able to visit, citing the usual school-work-homework excuse. But today was Sunday. His wife happened to be working all day at the emergency pharmacy, so she would not be able to accompany him to the village. he would have to go alone; there was no excuse not to turn up. Korina had laid out the children's clothes for him so that he would not have to rummage around the wardrobes and drawers to find them himself, and had reminded him via an SMS to buy some cakes and to give Manousos some money in lieu of a new-school-year present; now that Manousos had entered high school, it was difficult to choose a present for him anyway.

View Larger Map

On leaving the motorway, they passed the greener lower-lying villages with their tree-lined streets and fountains surrounded by cafeterias, where some tourists were having a pit-stop as their coach was parked on the side of the rather inadequate road, given the increase in its traffic.

"I wish this was the village," Maria said. In some ways, so did Achileas, but he knew how cold and damp it could feel in the winter. Stavros' village - and Achileas' too, if only he could convince himself that he was no different from Stavros as they both shared the same family lineage - was located on a steep incline, which meant that flooding and damp conditions were not a worry to him. The main problem was the remote access; few people ventured up the narrow windy road that led to the village, and the residents there were all old, mainly women, one decrepit black-attired wrinkled bag of bones per five houses. Stavros had been very bold to renovate his parents' house and live here with his family.

"It's only half an hour from the town," Stavros would say to anyone who complained about the time he spent on the road. He dropped the children off to school on his way to work, and picked them up at the end of the day. He was a state employee, having gotten a position as an orderly in the hospital, and he had enough pull to bend the rules so that he could work the hours that suited him.

Achileas entertained the children by telling them stories about how he remembered the road when he was young.

"It was much narrower, and the bridge was very badly in need of repair, because it was constantly being destroyed when it rained," he was telling them.

"But it doesn't rain much in Hania," Maria said.

"It used to rain much more when I was young, dear."

"But if it rained a lot," his son was now talking, "why aren't there more trees on the mountains?"


"Climate change, I suppose, son."

"Oh," said Dionisis, as though he understood the expression; no doubt, it was something that had been discussed in shcool. Children were much more environmentally aware now than they were at Dionisis' age in Achileas' time. Being an only child, Achileas could not get enough of talking to his children. He had become a father much later than his peers and he felt grateful that he could offer his wisdom to them at an early age. He felt his mortality when he realised the age difference between him and his children. Like his parents who left the world before their time was due, he wondered if he would ever become a grandfather.

"What's this, Baba?"

A rocket-like instrument was lying on the ground next to what looked like a crater in the mountainside. Achileas explained to the children that in the past, the mountain, which was made of a grantite rock-like substance, was exploited for its use as a source for raw building materials. The hill next to the road was broken and the extracted rock was broken up into smaller pieces. It looked like a desecration of the countryside had taken place rather than any other useful exercise; the area had become an eyesore, and cretaed a ghoulish landscape where there should have been cypress trees, eucalyptus and mulberries.

*** *** ***

As they ascended into the thickness of the Apokoronas region, Achileas noticed a hive of activity in the fields. People were loading sacks onto 4x4 pick-up trucks. It was grape harvest time. At this point, he braked hard and the car came to a sudden halt. The children were admonishing him for making them crash into each other, but he wasn't listening to them. As he watched the workers haul up the sacks, he remembered his father bringing home the juice of the first pressing of the grapes of the season, and asking him, first, to put a glass of it to his ear to hear the fermentation process, then to smell it, and finally to taste it. He loved to drink it fresh with a couple of ice-cubes to cool it down, as it was always still very hot at that time of year, even though autumn was supposed to be setting in.

"What's wrong, Baba?" Dionisis was talking to him. He had been wrapped up in his own thoughts.

"Nothing son," he replied, as he set off again.

When they arrived at Stavros' house, all seemed quiet. Stavroula and her mother-in-law were sitting in the yard, which meant that Stavros and his sons were away at the fields, where he always spent his free time at the weekends, unless he was working one of the rare night shifts. He had converted an old store room in the house into a bedroom with an outhouse for his eighty-year-old mother; "two women can't cook in the same kitchen", he had once told Achileas.

"Χρόνια πολλά, κουμπάρα," he said to Stavroula as he gave her the box of sweets. "And here's something for Manousos," he added as he gave her 50 euro.

"Δεν έπρεπε, you really shouldn't," she insisted, even though they both knew that this was part of the custom of being a godfather.

"Come, come," Stavroula beckoned to them to sit down on one of the rickety woven chairs or the dried up cracked plastic ones in the yard. "Korina's at work, isn't she?" she asked, out of politeness perhaps. She could not understand why any woman would want to work, especially at weeekends. Her mother-in-law smiled and nodded her head. She was dressed head-to-toe in black, her grey hair swept into an untidy bun, a slight woman whose appearance had the look of weariness. Her fingers were short and knuckled, her cheeks bright red. She was wearing plastic slip on shoes over black nylon stockings, even though it was 30 degrees Celsius, and that was in the shade. She reminded Stavros of his own grandmothers. They had both died in the space of three years, the second one passing away only six months before his parents. "Better to bury your parents than your children," many people had said to him at the funeral in empathy.

"Stavros' at the trigo," Stavroula informed Achileas. He had gathered that that was what he was doing, as there was a can of grape must (used to make grape syrup) boiling away over a makeshift outdoor fireplace in the middle of the yard. It added to the heat of the day, creating a stifling atmosphere. There was plenty of shade, though; Stavros carefully tended the vine above the yard simply for that purpose.

The time passed slowly before Stavros' return. Achileas let the children run around in the yard, all the while worrying what Korina might say when she discovered that their clothes were dirty. Had she been here, she would have chastised them with her constant nagging; she was a cleansiness fanatic. Achileas was softer than his wife on the children. Being an only child, he had missed having company his own age when he was young, and this was why he wanted children - not just a child - as soon as ha and Korina married. They had decided that if their first born was a boy, he would choose the name, and if it was a girl, Korina would choose it. As it turned out, Dionisis was named after his paternal grandfather, as tradition dictates, while Maria was given her maternal grandmother's name.

Stavros and his sons - they had become fine strapping lads, all height and muscle - returned to the house after two hours. Yiannis was thrilled to see Maria and Dionisis. They scrambled off to the bedrooms - Achileas had forbidden them to go there in the absence of the occupants - to play with his toys.

"Ιντα κάνεις, κουμπάρε, σε χάσαμε!" Stavros greeted Achileas as if he hadn't seen him in years. He was sweating profusely, and there was still work to be done; Achileas helped him unload the truck with the sacks of grapes, ready to be poured into the wine press that he housed in a corner of his yard.

"Kopelakia!" Stavros cried out to the children. "Elate ne mpeite!" The five children trotted out into the yard, Achileas' children at first crious to see what was in store for them. He placed a white plastic chair near the tub and told them all to take off their shoes and socks. "Come and wash your feet before you get in," he instructed them as he carried a hosepipe to the chair and turned on the tap.

"Can we get in too?" Maria asked her father.

"Of course, honey, I'm going to get in myself!" Achileas rolled up his trousers, ignoring Korina's ranting face that was being played in fast forward motion in his mind. He helped the children out of their trousers and washed their feet. It was the middle of the day and boiling hot. This would end up being the best way to cool down in the sweltering mesimeri. Everyone stomped and stomped until the grapes had become slush. Maria jumped up and down as if she were on a trampoline; her brother was not all that keen on getting dirty, but Achileas insisted that he had to stay in the tub until all the other children got out.

When the pressing was over, Achileas helped to rake up the remnants of the stalks and squashed grapes and place them in separate containers, to be used later in the month to make tsikoudia. When he had finished, he looked around to find his daughter. She had gone to the tap on the other side of the vat from where the must was slowly dripping out, and sat under it with her mouth open.

"Kalo?" her father asked her. He had taken her by surprise. She spun round and looked at him, waiting for his approval. They burst out laughing together.

Stavroula in the meantime was preparing a feast. Achileas was not as carnivorous as Stavros' family was, but today he had worked up an appetite. After everyone had cleaned up and the must was poured into the various containers that Stavros had set out for this purpose, the yard was cleaned up and everyone helped to set up the tables and chairs. Stavros' second son, Yiorgos, lay the table. Manousos brought out all the dishes laden with food: pilafi made with rooster, pork steaks, garden fresh salad, graviera produced from their own sheep's milk, and of course, a 5-litre bottilia full of last year's wine to help the food go down.

Achileas started to feel the tiredness of the day wash over his body; he expected that Stavros and his family were probably also feeling very tired themselves, as they had put in a great deal of effort into turning this day into a successful one. They farewelled each other and thanked one another for the company. Stavroula came out of the kitchen at this point, just like she two months ago when Achileas was last here, with a supermarket bag containing four bottles of grape must. She smiled as she passed the bag to Achileas.

"Mousto?" He wasn't sure what Korina would think when he showed her the bottles.

"For making moustalevria," she replied. Korina wasn't going to like the sound of this. Achileas realised that he was going to have to make the moustalevria himself.

*** *** ***

Wine production in Hania is limited to self-consumption, despite the fact that the earliest evidence of wine production in Greece has been found on the island of Crete. There are cooperatives that collect wine must and turn it into a type of house wine that can be brought directly from them, but most wine production in Crete takes place in the region of Iraklio where there are also large companies that bottle and export wine to various parts of Greece, Europe and America. There are some vineyards in Hania that are involved in wine production on a larger scale, and there is some evidence that they will prosper, but that remains to be seen. It is generally the case that consumers are unaware of the wine production of Crete. The regions of Hania that do produce a lot of home made wine offer it for sale to tavernas and restaurants, as well as specialty stores for the general public. Apokoronas and Kastelli produce more wine than other regions in Hania, but it is possible to plant vines all over the island. Most of the houses in traditional wine-producing regions will have their own wine press tucked away in the yard, a vat-like tub made of cement; this is a sure sign that you will be able to find tasty barrel-aged wine (as well as tsikoudia) in that area.

This post is dedicated to my late father, who passed away five years ago, leaving behind four barrels full of home-brew; we have yet to get through it...

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