Cretan poetry - mantinades

This souvenir shop owner near the Old Harbour really wants to be doing something else in his life: writing Cretan poems, what are known locally as "mantinades". These poems are created for a specific situation, for example: to show love for someone, at the baptism of a child, to comment on a current issue, etc. They are used to express joy, sorrow, anger, humour, just about any feeling. They are written in accordance with a set of rules concerning the number of syllables and the rhyming patterns used, but anyone and everyone makes them up as the occasion arises.

The white sign below the display window says:
"Here therein, are given, entirely free of charge, leaflets with our mantinades, and you don't have to buy absolutely anything."

The same is written at the top of the door, at the bottom of the window display, and on the left and right hand sides of the shop. Here are some mantinades, written on souvenir cups, shot glasses, paper towel holders, you name it, all made in white ceramic plate or glass, with a picture of Crete plastered on one side:

"Many times, your friend
Becomes your brother, too;
Because in times of hardship
He's always there for you."

Here's another one:

"That you're now a grandpapa,
Shouldn't worry you a bit;
But sleeping with a grandmama,
Now that's the shame of it..."

Multi-culturalism

We're in the Agora, the market square in Hania. The Asian peddler woman walked too fast for me, as we crossed paths in front of the souvenir shop next to the local products stall selling Cretan cheeses. I caught her wares in the photo: trinkets, torches, toys, tacky gifts, worry beads, all being carried in a box with a strap hanging off her shoulder. I wonder who buys this stuff?

Post-weekend story: Searching for utopia

Kambi, 1919

Nikolas had heard the word 'Ameriki' mentioned many times in the village. Ameriki was the land of a poor man's wildest dream, something akin to utopia, where everyone is happy, employed and rich, like his brother, who sent one single postcard to his family since he left Kambi.

When Nikolas' older brother Grigori returned to the village from Ameriki, he had enough money on him to buy 90 acres of olive trees in the village, and live happily ever after. After working in the restaurant trade for five years in New York, being the patriot that he was, Grigori decided to return to the mother country to buy the land his family could not afford to give him and to complete his Greek military service, at a time when Greece was under attack from an enemy.

"In Ameriki, people are prepared to fight for their freedom. How can I stand and watch when my country is in danger?" he replied to his family when they pleaded with him not to leave so soon after his arrival. His betrothal to a blooming village girl arranged (as befitted his financial position), he had no sooner invested his money in buying land than he left again, this time to Thesaloniki where his knowledge of English earned him the rank of officer. He managed to survive the Battle of Skra, only to die from malaria two months before the end of the campaign, having never set foot on the land that he had worked five years on foreign soil to buy. It was shared unevenly among his siblings: his four sisters received a large share each as a dowry, making them attractively eligible for marriage, while Grigori's brother ended up with the remainder, a mere pittance of the original amount.

Nikolas received 10 acres of the land that had been bought with his brother's money from Ameriki, along with the beautiful bride his brother never married. He married her out of pity; even though her engagement did not constitute a marriage (there was no marriage to consummate in the first place), she would have a hard time finding another husband after being betrothed once already. Word would have spread that she was engaged to be married; her fate had already been decided. Who knows when the next offer would come? Nikolas also felt that she had partly inherited his brother's fortune, so that she deserved to be in on his good fortune.

Aggeliki, for all her outward qualities, was not the most useful woman around the house. She had been raised in the 'mimou aptou' way, as if her beauty did not permit her to cook, wash and clean the way a less attractive woman might conduct herself with respect to these duties, lest by applying herself to such tasks, her beauty may deteriorate, fade away, disappear, as if age could never play a part in this demeaning process, and it was all to do with how often one's hands touched the soil on the ground or how much sunlight shone on a woman's face.

Nikolas' land was fruitful, especially once he had cleared most of it from the thyme and dictamo bushes, after which he set about planting it with olive trees. He hunted hares and wild birds, plentiful in his own fields, but the cook was wonting in culinary skills; the rumour spread all over the village, with its population of 500, that Aggeliki was a hopeless cook. Nikolas didn't know who to feel sorry for more: himself for earning such fate, or the oven-charred or water-sodden carcasses that came out of the kitchen, sometimes sporting their fur or plumage. When he sat at the kafeneio with other men from the village, and listened to their chatter about how their own wives conducted themselves at home, his gut tightened.

"Give her time, Nikola, you're not even into a year of married life," the others would comfort him. But he neglected to tell them that Aggeliki entered the marriage in this way right from the start, and that his clothing was now almost ragged and Aggeliki showed no sign of replacing them for him before they had become tatters. He felt that the land - and possibly Angela's inviting appearance - had cursed him into the misfortune of a loveless marriage.

*** *** ***

When Aggeliki became engaged to Grigori, she had hopes of leaving the village for good. She knew that Grigori had made a lot of money, but she didn't realise that he had invested it in the mountainous territory that made up the village of Kambi. She expected that, once he had finished his military duty, he would move to lower ground - as most villagers who prospered did - and build a suitable dwelling for them to live in. After all, this is what he must have been accustomed to living in in Ameriki; everyone there apparently lived in fully furnished houses and had their clothes made for them by tailors and seamstresses. They did not need to shear sheep, spin yarn, or weave cloth on the argalio, which would eventually be turned into bedsheets and men's shirts; like cooking, sewing was not Aggeliki's forte. So it was to her greatest disappointment that Grigori did not return from Thesaloniki. She knew what fate had in store for her.

(Crete in the 1960s, four decades after Aggeliki and Nikolas emigrated; the photos come from CRETE 1960, by John Donat, Crete University Press)

Aggeliki had not wanted to marry her fiance's brother, but there was no question of that now that Grigori was dead. Had she been married to Grigori before he had left for Thesaloniki, she would have inherited his land, a mixed blessing if ever there was one. She would have become a rich woman, highly ineligible for marriage; what man in the village would have been able to match her wealth? As it was, she suffered the cruel fate of being labelled a widow after Grigori's death anyway, even though she had never married; such was the nature of life in the impenetrable snow-capped mountains of Kambi, at the foothills of the Lefka Ori.

She looked around the house Grigori had built in roughshod style a short while before they were married: two simple stone-built rooms with openings for windows, blocked by wooden shutters to stop the winter cold from entering. There was an outhouse a little way from the house and an earth oven built next to one of them rooms. This was not the Ameriki she had dreamed of, nor was it the town of Hania that she had hoped to move to after her marriage. It was true that she had never known better than the village life she was born into, but no one could stop her from dreaming, which is what she did most of the day when Nikolas was away, clearing scrubland, planting olive trees, hunting hares and grazing sheep.

*** *** ***

Kambi, 1921

Nikolas was sitting at the kafeneio. He usually sat on his own these days, as he had little to share with the locals. It was almost three years since he married Aggeliki and still no children. He had by now grown accustomed to the way the kafeneio chatter died down when he entered the shop, and the compassionate smiles of the other men sitting in groups around the tables. He picked up one of the newspapers that had been left on the fireplace, to be used for kindling a flame. Although he had not finished primary school, his reading was at a reasonable level. He did not write anything apart from his name; there was no one to write to, in any case, and no one interested in reading anything that he wrote.

He had not grown tired of working the village land. What tired him most of all - and he seemed to have aged a decade since his wedding day - was that he was working with no future in mind. So what if he had thousands of olive trees; so what if his coffers were filled with olive oil. There was no one to eat it, and no one to sell it to; people were too poor in the village to buy more as their own stocks ran out, so they simply used it more sparingly. The economy of the country was still engaged in a new war effort; there was no interest in trading olive oil. So much effort for very little reward; produce-rich but lacking currency.

Every morning started off the same, as every evening finished. Routine after routine, with very little variation. Nikolas saddled the donkey, which lived in a makeshift shelter next to the main house, along with a group of six goats and sheep which Aggeliki milked each morning, and left for the hills. The land he had inherited had never before been touched by human hands. He worked most of the day with some paid labourers clearing the land of the scrub wood and rocks, digging it up, tilling it, and planting it with olive trees. Aggeliki had filled a woven bag with bread, some olives, a chunk of graviera and a carafe of wine for Nikolas to curb his hunger, before he came back home at midday. It was usually too hot to work after that; the sun did not rest even in winter. The midday meal was a very silent affair, one that always heightened the void between the couple. They could not fill the space between them with their presence. They had little to say to each other; their world had become static.

Without offspring, there was no one to work for but himself, and his wife, of course, who, at times, seemed to live in her own reticent world. Apart from his requests for better food and clean clothes to wear, he had very little to say to her. Yesterday, she had cooked youvarlakia in a tomato sauce, using the anidres tomatoes he had hung on the rafters of the house to dry for the winter, while the lemon tree was bulging from its own weight, laden with fruit. Hadn't she ever had youvarlakia? Didn't she know how to make an avgolemono sauce?

"What were you thinking, using the tomatoes I was saving for the winter? Where are we going to find them when we need them, woman!" He could hear the rumble in his own voice as he shouted at her. Usually the house was so quiet. He wasn't used to hearing himself speak like this. He left the house feeling more angry with himself than his wife.

(Kambi village, 1974)

Things were not looking good in Smyrna: according to the front page, war was imminent. His mind immediately conjured up the image of his brother leaving the village to fight against the Bulgarians. What was it that his brother had said? "In Ameriki, people are prepared to fight for their freedom. How can I stand and watch when my country is in danger?" Did he understand what he was fighting for? Had he thought about whether the cause was worth fighting for? Did he know how close the war was to the end when he lay sick and dying? Nikolas did not share his brother's patriotism. He did not want to fight a war that he hadn't started. He did not wish to be one of the victims of war like his brother. Now seemed a good time to leave the village, maybe even the island, and why not the country if it got to that stage. The shame of childlessness could be avoided if he simply lived elsewhere, far away from anyone who knew him. Nikolas put it in his mind to seek a passage to Ameriki.

(The kind of Crete Nikolas and Aggeliki left when they decided to emigrate to Ameriki; the photographs are works by George Meis, taken from a souvenir calendar of Crete )

*** *** ***

The video shows how Cretan families from Kambi were living in California in 1948; Crete at that time was extremely poor, while Greece was in the midst of a civil war. To the average Cretan, this picture would have seemed like a scene from paradise; poverty remains the main reason why, up to the early 1980s, Greek people emigrated to the New Worlds.

This post is dedicated to all the Cretans from Kambi, my mother's village, living in Modesto and Manteca, California, where very many of them congregated. It doesn't matter where they were born, whether it was in Crete or America, or whether they continue to speak Greek or not; they are still Greek at heart, and they know it.

©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.

Skywatch Friday: The old harbour of Chania

It's SkyWatch Friday again and today's weather is calm, breezy and mild.

Anyone for coffee? What about an ice-cream or a fizzy drink? Maybe just a souvenir? The beautiful old port of Hania is calling out to passersby, tempting them into it with its calm waters. The dome of the former mosque is barely visible behind the open white umbrellas.

Morning coffee

Today I have to make sure that I get to do every single errand that involves going into Hania, as it's the last day my children are at day camp (ie being supervised by someone else). After parking the car a zillion miles away from the centre (as usual), and carrying a computer screen in my hands (it broke down while under guarantee), I started on the little tasks that make me walk from one end of Hania to the other every time I need I go into my hectic little town, with its erratic traffic problems which are always exacerbated in the summer.

Coupled with the congestion, there is the heat. Sweat poured down my back, my clothes were sticking to my skin, my head felt as if it were on fire. To make things worse, I had forgotten to fill my water bottle from my home, meaning that I was carrying extra useless weight in my bag aside from mizithra, okra, vine beans, children's books, among others. My mouth was dry, my body slowly dehydrating, and it was only half past nine. I needed a sit-down in the shade with something cool to drink.

My errands had taken up to the Agora, behind which there is a large square with cafes and bars surrounding it. I walked along the road and chose the first empty space offering ample shade; the name of the cafe and what it served did not interest me at that moment. In fact, whenever I'm eating out, the food and where it comes from never interests me, because I know that I can never be sure of the truth of anything the restaurateur claims about the menu. Luckily for those who live in Hania, when eating out, there is usually a choice of views, scenery and atmosphere to enjoy apart from the food: this is the motivating reason for me to eat out.

My view was not the most alluring: double parked cars, souvenir shops, tacky jewellery stores and other nondescript eyesores. Even the sight of the tourists who were milling about the area - a well-known tourist spot which may also be referred to as a trap by some - was not uplifting: after a certain point, one easily tires of seeing old-fashioned travel book images from a bygone era, young lasses clad in bikini tops and wraparound skirts and bare-chested men, their shoulders laden with a dusty backpack, in the middle of the town where we all conduct both our formal and informal business. As AA says, this is the image most people still have of Greece: a place where everyone lives by the sea beating octopuses on rocks and traveling by donkey. My tired feet and aching arms had not foiled my senses.

I looked up, spotting the name of the cafe: Ano kato: Serraiki Bougatsa, which could loosely be translated as "Topsy Turvy: Sweet Pie from Serres." Bougatsa from Serres? Foreign food, food that our foreign tourists are aching for, the term foreigners including urbanite Greek travellers from Athens, the kind who buy bougatsa in Athens which bears no resemblance to the bougatsa served in Hania, the kind of place a non-Cretan Greek would look for if words like boureki, dakos and stamnagathi scare them, fearing the unknown as we all do to some extent, which is why many of us will search for a Casa di Pasta restaurant in Thailand, or a burger chain in China.

"Parakalo?" Just when I was thinking that this might be a self-service cafe, the waiter had arrived, carrying a serving tray with coffees and glasses of water with lots of ice cubes. He had been busy preparing orders to be served to the local shop-owners, another one of those traditions which gives Greece a picture-postcard image: a waiter crossing the street with a tray of refreshments, specially ordered by businesspeople. No messing around with the cafetiere for them; silver service that even the plebs can enjoy. He left one of the glasses of water on my table.

Being on a diet - always one that is broken - I had left the house without having breakfast, so I decided to order some bougatsa, in full knowledge that it would contain three times the number of claories that my home-made breakfast would contain. I noticed the food display case: croissants, rolls, pastries, but which of all of them was the Serraiki bougatsa?

"A plunger coffee and a serving of bougatsa, please."
"The bougatsa's going to be ready in about ten minutes," he replied very politely. I was beginning to like this place.
"No problem," I smiled, I'm in no hurry."
He smiled too. "And you know it's the cream-type of bougatsa." Oh, the joy of being treated like a local...

As it was still early morning for some, the cafe was empty. I was being kept company by three empty seats round my table. I laid all my bags on the seat opposite mine, when it occurred to me that those inanimate objects might just have a better view than I did. I got up and changed places with the bags.

My whole world changed. No more cars and tacky souvenirs. I saw a different world: traditional handcrafts and woven textiles, a huge linden tree, the wall of the main square where the Cathedral of Hania is located. The most basic elements of the area had probably not changed since my parents' time before they left Crete to emigrate to New Zealand. I wondered whether they had walked in the same side street - probably it had not been pedestrianised in their time - before they left the country. It had the kind of look we are familiar with in those old Greek black and white movies which I used to see at the cinema in Wellington during a private screening for the Greek community.

The ten minutes it took for the bougatsa to arrive passed pleasantly watching the shop owners waiting for business, sweeping the outside of their shops and chatting to their neighbours. A hotel owner sat in the alley opposite with a bowl of uncleaned horta reading her newspaper. Even the cobblestones on the street took on a new interest.

Serraiki bougatsa was surely very different to the bougatsa traditionally served in Hania: custard instead of mizithra cheese, icing sugar and cinnamon instead of white granulated sugar. Even the filo pastry tasted different. But it was tasty and made perfect breakfast fare. If only the woman who's always serving at the counter in Bougatsa Iordanis could be as polite as the waiter at Ano Kato...

©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: Double identity

Recently, I had the odd task of having to prepare my children's school meals 160 nautical miles away from home. Really weird, but that was the agreement between me and my husband if I wanted to go to the big smoke and meet up with a friend. The food had to be able to remain relatively fresh; all I'd have to do when I came back home would be to put it into my children's schoolbags within the same hour that I arrived. What kind of healthy prepared street-cafe food can you buy for your children's Monday lunchboxes on a Sunday, when you're flying back home 160 nautical miles away at 5.30 the next morning?

(Sintagma Square in the distance)

I had arranged to meet up with my friend in the middle of Athens. Σύνταγμα - Sintagma (Constitution Square) - was teeming with people that day, even though it was a Sunday and all the commercial shops on Ermou St were closed. The day was sunny, warm and breezy, a perfect day for a Sunday βόλτα (volta - stroll), which most of the town's residents were doing. There were pigeons flying all over place on the pavement, people were taking photos of Parliament's guards in their sentry boxes, the McDonalds on the corner was full of youthful faces enjoying their happy meals and a whole range of foreign languages could be heard all over the place, interrupted occasionally by the Greek language. I had some time to spare before the appointed meeting to search for what I could buy from around the area that could travel safely, not go off or become stale, stay intact without getting mushy in my backpack, and more importantly, resemble a nutritiously rich meal that could constitute a child's school meal.

(laidback atmosphere in Plaka)

The side streets of Sintagma Square leading to the Acropolis abound with mini-markets, cafes and παντοπολεία - pantopolia - literally a 'sell-everything' shop. In terms of edibles, the one I chanced on sold croissants, potato chips, sweets, sodas, fragile φρυγανιές (crumbly rusks that look like miniature toasts) as well as tinned goods. About the only healthy item in it was fruit, which was out of the question: bananas will go black with the merest touch, while the other all-time classic morning-break fruit, the apple, bruises easily, and may need peeling if you don't know what its pesticide content is.

(the bagel lady at Sintagma)

I was beginning to feel I had lost the battle for a healthy mid-morning school snack when I spotted a lady selling the classic Greek bagel - κουλούρι, koulouri - at a stand on the corner of the road on Μητροπόλεως (mitropoleos - Cathedral) and Φιλελλήνων (filelinon - Philhellenic) Streets. Bagels are quite durable; in any case, they don't lose their taste, nor do they become stale in 24 hours. A perfect choice; I bought two plain soft bagels, two hand-shaped hard ones and a tomato-and-feta filled soft bagel, ditching plans to buy the full range, which also included chocolate-filled ones. Koulouria are usually eaten on their own, but if you manage to avoid the temptation of munching into them on the street, they go great with a piece of cheese, a few olives and a glass of wine, which I didn't have handy on me at the time, the reason why I didn't deal with my own bagel choice (the filled one, naturally) till I got back to Hania.

Monday's school lunch wasn't tricky at all. The cafes in the area served luscious looking sandwiches and πίτες (pites - pies) of all types: cheese, sausage, sweet cream, spinach, hotdog, mince, you name it. My only caveat was that they would be subjected to all sorts of bruising, temperatures and humidity levels in my bag, so I decided not to buy anything from the road, except for my own lunch (before I was treated to a sumptuous dinner by my friend. I could easily buy my children something similar for their lunch from the airport cafeterias, which served this kind of food.

I had almost forgotten to have lunch that day (such a rare occurrence in my life), I was so excited, not just about meeting my friend, but because I had managed to achieve so much in one day. I had seen a few relatives in Aspropirgos (a dingy Western suburb in the Greater Athens area), walked through the neighbourhood I had lived in for two years before settling in Hania permanently (Egaleo, another neighbourhood of Western Athens), and enjoyed the luxury of the organised Athenian mass transportation system, via the suburban blue buses and the Athenian underground.

(pottery shards and the ground layers found when the underground was being constructed)

It is a fact that Athens has not improved its dreary image since I was last living there, but that is simply not true about the means of transport: the underground in Athens is clean, modern, awesome, even beautiful. Walking into the underground world of Athens is like entering a museum full of ancient antiquities: in some parts of it, when the lighting is set in such a way that it highlights a particular monument on display in the foyers, you might even get the feeling that Hades is lurking somewhere in the twilight, ready to turn you into a pillar of salt if you dare to turn around and look, like he did to Eurydice when Orpheus wanted to check that Hades had kept his word about his lover's return. Most of the treasures found in the foundations of the underground during its construction were eventually turned into a museum display piece.

(Some of the Parthenon marbles Elgin stole; these ones are the fakes, on display at the Acropolis metro station)

A long time had passed since I last went to see the Acropolis. Of course, the whole area has changed since I was last there, but my instinct led me in the right direction during my short interlude in the area. I got out of the metro at the Acropolis stop, located right next to the brand new Acropolis Museum, a strategic environmentally-friendly station, enabling people to have more efficient access to an important landmark, without the need to bring their own car to an already over-congested area (top marks to the town planners). The hot autumn sun made up my mind for me: the Acropolis also looks good at lower ground level, and I don't need to work up a sweat by walking up the hill to get to see it close up. (Believe me, I've been much closer to it than anyone can get to it in modern times.) It was at this point that I remembered I was feeling hungry and thirsty. Right across the Acropolis metro station were a few strategically positioned cafes and snack bars. Everest was located on a highly visible corner near a row of crafts and souvenir shops.

(above - the Acropolis of Athens; below - the foundations of the Acropolis museum among excavated ruins; a view of the apartment blocks facing the Acropolis - dingy as they look, they enjoy one of the most amazing views in the world )

Everest is a chain store selling snack food and refreshments right throughout the country. Its food is prepared in the way most chain stores run; it is very centralised. At one of a few places in some industrial areas of the country (like Aspropirgos in Athens, where I overnighted with relatives before my Sunday adventure in the centre of Athens), people are busy preparing food in different ways for different businesses, most likely using processed ingredients: a fast-food chain may sell profiterole desserts in octagonal plastic tubs (like Everest), while another fast food chain might want chocolate mousse served in smooth round plastic bowls (like Goody's). Another chain may order spinach pie made with thick pastry (like Everest), while another chain may prefer to serve a spiral spinach pie made with thin filo pastry (like Greogry's). The food is prepared according to each customer's specifications, after which it is stored appropriately, and trucked or shipped to the branches of these fast food outlets, be they close to the production plant or a remote island.

The advertising of each company may claim that their food is 'fresh', but this is all relative. A product that is stored under artificially controlled conditions to keep its appearance, shape and smell 'fresh' cannot be compared to the same product that was made and eaten on the same day in someone's kitchen, which will not be subjected to any kind of unnatural treatment in order to prevent it from spoilage. My Everest spanakopita cost me 1.95 euro and it was very satisfying; having said that, I must admit that I am a spanakopita fanatic, and it is usually the only thing I buy from a snack food outlet when I need to have a meal on the run. I ignore the ringing bells in my head sounding out warnings against fast food; we do this irregularly, and only when we need to. I even went into a McDonalds while I was at Sintagma; the coffee was OK, the toilets excellent.

Spanakopita was the kind of thing I had in mind for my children's school lunch. I decided to buy them each a piece of Everest spanakopita at the airport, another place where you can find 24/7 fast food chains en masse, each one claiming to serve you the healthiest food made with the freshest ingredients possible, served warm after a short zap in a microwave oven.

When I arrived at Athens airport, I checked out each food outlet and wondered what kind of money people make in Athens in order to be able to afford to eat here: hot drinks cost well over 2 euro a cup, while sandwiches and pastry-encased cheese, spinach, sausage, chocolate or cream cost at least 3 euro a piece. A family of four with a long delay between flights would need to spend at least 20 euro to eat here. In Hania, we spend about 40 euro for a modest but well-cooked fresh taverna family meal. I was in shock, and it was not just the cost of living that knocked me out: Everest was selling exactly the same spanakopita that I ate in central Athens for 3 euro and 30 cents at the airport; that's 1 euro and 35 cents more than in the other branch.

I was in two minds about what to do. In any case, there is an Everest outlet at Hania airport (which I was hoping would be open), so I decided to buy my children's meals when I arrived in Hania instead. That way they would also be 'fresher'. I hopped off the aeroplane at 6.30am and walked through to the arrivals foyer. Everest was open there too: same spanakopita, same price as at Athens airport. It was too early in the morning to argue, but I've kept the receipts: one price at one outlet, a different one at another. Where I was born, we would call this a bloody rip-off. I bought two pieces of Everest spanakopita (individually wrapped, thank you), and took a cab, which, coincidentally, cost me twice as much as what it cost me in Athens to be driven the same number of kilometres. Where is the country heading to? I ask myself.

©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.

ABC Wednesday: H for hotel

It's ABC Wednesday again, and H is for hotel.

The most popular hotels in the central town of Hania, a Mediterranean summer resort town in the biggest Greek island, are the ones that go by the name of 'pension', a French term used for small rooms in the style of the English bed and breakfast.

All the three-story buildings seen around the port are hotels, while the ground floor operates as some kind of business associated with the tourist trade, eg cafe, bar, restaurant, souvenir shop.

Here's a sampling of the more picturesque, quainter hotels lining the narrow streets in the old town by the old port.

What I like most about them is their names, which usually show the foreign influences. Casa del Amore, Castello and Villa Venezia clearly attest to the Venetian origins of the town, while Lena and Irini are probably the Greek names of former or present owners. Soultana (the name of a restaurant) comes from the 'sultan', a Turkish chief; the Ottomans (Turks) dwelled in the town for four centuries.

There are also other more traditional styles of hotels with large dining areas and swimming pools, but not in the old town, as the streets are too narrow; they're found outside the ancient walls of the old town in the more modern parts of Hania. Not as picturesque, but probably more functional.

Closed for the winter

Stivanadika, a tourist shop avenue, looking quite empty.

The souvenir shops are locked,
the tourist season is over,
the lease on the town has expired.

The citizens of Hania
have got their town back
for their own use.

That's not where they go
to buy their leather sandals, T-shirts,
olive oil soap and herbs and spices.

They want the shops
made with glass and concrete -
the chic boutiques,

the big bright supermarkets
with their sliding doors
selling all kinds of plasticulture.

Good bye stivanadika,
have a good rest
till the next summer.

Souvenir shop

Souvenirs, anyone? Stall in the Agora, the central market of Hania.

deep sea sponges
black and white scarves
olive oil soap
and ouzo carafes

old men's worry beads
refrigerator magnets
postcards, key rings
I-Love-Crete gadgets

It's all Greek
but made in China
where it's cheaper
to buy labour

©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: Traversing four continents

In the globalised world that we live in, it becomes an unavoidable necessity to buy goods that have been imported. It has long been recognised that ASIA is more than willing to produce products that all countries right around the world can import cheaply, while the wholesalers can still make a reasonable profit selling them off to consumers at an equally cheap price. This is the commercial curse of modern times. If you want to buy something that hasn't been manufactured in Asia, you have to pay considerably more for it.

This is probably where this little coffee and saucer set took its first steps, in a factory somewhere in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of these white demi-tasses were probably made in a a noisy dirty factory, by underpaid overworked employees of rich and powerful businessmen who had people in the right places to turn a blind eye to the working conditions their employees were subjected to. It's hard to imagine what kind of injuries they might have sustained to produce these ornamental cups and saucers. A stack of badly stored boxes may have crashed onto someone's head; maybe someone else suffered first-degree burns by improper handling of the pottery in the kilns.

Nevertheless, this little coffee cup and saucer, appropriately decorated with a map of the island of Crete, travelled intact to EUROPE, eventually making its way down to Hania, on the island of Crete. Knowing the Greek authorities, it's not difficult to imagine the Cretan cups ending up in Kerkyra by mistake, or the Kerkyra ones accidentally being sent to Crete. These ones made their way to the souvenir shops of Stivanadika, where most tourists buy their souvenirs from: T-shirts, old-fashioned summer dresses, handmade leather sandals, I-love-Crete keyrings, gold jewellery fashioned in Cretan-inspired designs, olive oil soap, mugs, tea-towels, among a host of others. Cups and saucers always comes in 6-packs; it must have had another five siblings, all packed in the same box, waiting to start a life in a person's home.

*** *** ***

The Daughter of a Poor Farmer had been born into a poor agricultural family in a village in the foothills of the Λευκά Όρη (Lefka Ori - White Mountains) of Hania. She would have liked to go to school - there were 150 children enrolled in the village when the second world war broke out - but this was impossible. After second grade, she didn't attend much at all; there were more important tasks to be done. One of the easiest for a young girl her age was to lead the family's cows to a grazing field every day and milk them. By the time her tasks were completed, while her mother looked after her four younger siblings, there was just enough time to clean up and tidy the two rooms where the family lived: one room for the humans, and another for the animals.

As she left childhood and entered adulthood (there was no such thing as adolescence in those days), she began helping her mother carry fresh produce to Hania, where they would sell or exchange them for products they didn't produce themselves: rice, sugar, coffee, coloured thread for the rugs she made on the αργαλειό (argalio, weaving loom), buttons for shirts. They would start walking in the afternoon with the donkey laden with goods, and keep walking until it was very dark. There was a spot in the mountains which was sheltered and they overnighted here, sleeping on the ground. In the early morning, they'd wake up and continue on to the road for Hania, in order to get to the market to do their trade. After the days' work was over, they'd make their way back up again, stopping in the same place. The journey was more difficult this time, as the walk was uphill, getting steeper and steeper as they walked back up. They could only ride the donkeys if they had not once again been loaded up with more goods.

Although her family had a few patches of earth of their own, they did not have many olive trees to produce the amount of olive oil that their family used; five adults and two parents needed about 200kg of olive oil a year, especially if the main form of sustenance was psomi me ladi. The Daughter of a Poor Farmer became a μαζώχτρα (mazohtra), an olive picker for other wealthier families. In those times, olives were left to fall on the ground, and were then picked up, one-by-one, with the pickers' backs bent the whole time. Either they were collected into large baskets, or they were thrown onto large sheets. (Technology, as well as the black plastic netting that is now used to collect olives that drop onto the ground, took a long time to get to the mountainous villages, by which time, rural life had suffered a decline.) From this job, she was given a small share of the crop to take home with her, after it was ground into oil.

She had by now reached the age of 30, but she was so poor that she was never considered a worthy bride. As the oldest child in a family of five, this spelt doom for the family: if she didn't get married first, then the girls next in line would also have the same fate. Eventually, the family had enough oil to cover their needs from the girls' work, so The Daughter of a Poor Farmer asked to be paid in money instead. She worked with a bent back one whole olive season and dreamed of what she would do with the first real cash that she had received in her life.

All spring, she waited patiently to be paid for the work she had done all that winter, but the money didn't seem to be coming forth. There being no telephones in those days (no electricity, let alone phone lines!), she had to walk to the olive press herself to find the owner and ask him for her pay. She put on her best clothes and the only pair of shoes she had, which was quite clean, since shoes were never worn in and around the house when work was being done. They were saved for 'good' days.

The Daughter of a Poor Farmer entered the olive press. No one paid any attention to her, even though no one was doing any work in particular at that moment. She asked someone about being paid by The Rich Landowner for her last olive-picking season's work.

"Φαλίρισε (falirise)," was the one-word reply she got.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Φαλίρισε," the man repeated without looking at her. "He's got no money to pay you with. The bank's repossessed all his assets."

The Daughter of a Poor Farmer returned home and told her parents what she had learned. All that work for nothing, fake promises, false aspirations. If this was life in the village, they were resigned to poverty, and all because The Daughter of a Poor Farmer was still unmarried. It was at about this time that an announcement went up near the community offices about a paid passage to a relatively new country in AUSTRALASIA, offering the opportunity for women to work as cleaners and cooks, in return for a small salary which they could save and a paid return trip to their homeland. They needed to stay for two years in the job that they were offered, and there would be a training period in an institute in Athens where the girls would be offered English lesons and basic training in the service sector. To The Daughter of a Poor Farmer, this sounded perfect, even though she had no idea where she was heading to.

*** *** ***

The Daughter of a Poor Farmer was assigned as a chambermaid in a boys' agricultural boarding institute. She cleaned the rooms and kept the lobbies clean. The work was not very difficult, but the hours never seemed long enough. Once work was over, there was nothing to do, nothing at least for The Daughter of a Poor Farmer, who was not used to going out on the town, drinking alcohol in pubs, meeting up with the opposite sex. Imagine if her parents found out where she was now: how could she prove to them that she did not carry on as the other women did? They were all from the same island, but for the first time in her life, The Daughter of a Poor Farmer wondered whether she had anything in common with her compatriots.

The institute housed its own church on the premises. The Daughter of a Poor Farmer was invited to attend the church service, along with the other employees. She accepted the invitation. As she entered the church, she wondered why there were no icons on hanging on the walls, like in the Greek Orthodox Church that she had been raised in. No one seemed to be making the sign of the cross. Even if she wanted to do so, she couldn't understand what the priest was saying, and where was his petrahili? She looked at the pale faces of her employers and the dark faces of the young male pupils, and wondered what she was doing in their church. She felt that she did not belong here. The thought suddenly struck her that were she to die here, there would be no place for her to be buried, because there was no Christian Orthodox church. She suddenly felt very alone, and the two year-contract now seemed to her a long way away.

*** *** ***

The people at the institute were very kind to all their staff. They knew that the Greek girls wanted to see the other girls that they had travelled with, most of whom eventually settled in the Capital City. The Capital City had a Greek church in the centre of the city; wherever there is a Greek church, there are Greek people, and wherever there are Greek people, the Greek language will be heard. The Daughter of a Poor Farmer had met many Greek people in the Capital City on the day trips that the institute organised for their foreign workers. At the end of her contract, she decided to move there, instead of going back to the island. Sofia and Tasos, islanders like herself, had befriended her. They liked her so much that Tasos declared: "I'm going to find you a husband from the island." And that would end the blight on her family: the stigma of the unmarried eldest daughter.

From The Daughter of a Poor Farmer, she was transformed into A Successful Immigrant with a faithful husband and university-educated children. She still longed for the island, and went back to visit her sisters and their husbands and their children as often as possible, but she could not change the fact that her heart was on the island, but her home was thousands of miles away. Every time she visited her homeland - it was getting harder to do that as the years went on - she bought a trinket to remind her of the place where she was born. One of her favorite souvenirs was a set of demi-tasse coffee cups with a picture of the island. She kept them as far away from dust as possible, in the confines of her elaborate wall unit in the lounge which she opened up on just a few days a year - you could count them on the fingers of one hand: Christmas, Easter, her nameday and her husband's nameday; the children were by now celebrating their own namedays in their own homes. But the demi-tasses with the island motif were her favorite coffee cups, and she always served her guests Greek coffee in them, even if they didn't take it in the formal room where the cups were kept.

*** *** ***

"Talk about a hoarder. How many coffee cups can a person own?"
"Do you think they have any resale value?"
"Let's organise a garage sale."
"Do charity shops collect?"

The children of the Successful Immigrant had all been back to their parents' homeland at some point in their lives. They all had fond memories of the place where their parents were born, where they had spent a few winter holidays when they were young, before their grandparents had died. Since then, they never really felt any attachment to the island, since their last direct link had away, and they all had lives of their own in the New World, which had now become part of the globalised universe that the Earth had turned into.

The Youngest Daughter of the Successful Immigrant had herself moved to AMERICA, where she was recently called from on her mother's passing. She had never been a supporter of her mother's hoarding excesses, always berating her for spending money on yet another useless dust-collecting trinket, but when she saw the coffee cups with the picture of the island plastered across them, her mind flooded with memories of her parents, her grandparents, the village house, the souvenir shops, the blue sky, the golden sand of the beach, the light lunches at the tavernas that she had enjoyed under the shade of a tamarisk tree, her first love. It suddenly occurred to her that her mother had sacrificed her entire life to give her family a better opportunity in life, all the while living her life in an adopted homeland. She looked around the lounge, the most under-used room in the house she was brought up in with a twenty-five metre hallway, and everywhere she saw Crete: on the wall as an embroidered hanging, on the glass door as a sand-blasted picture, on the coaster set on the nested tables, in the tablecloth of the dining room table, in a faded postcard that her aunt had sent, now long gone herself, all signs that her mother had been living a temporary life in the New World with a permanent sense of home in the Old World, the lounge being transformed into a mausoleum of Crete.

The house was emptied of its contents and sold to a new owner, a property investor, who planned to turn it into four self-contained apartments, the latest fashion for old inner-city houses. After the expenses were paid, the inheritors all received their share of their parents' estate, and The Youngest Daughter was now free to go back to America, the place she now called home, her suitcase packed carefully so as not to disturb the demi-tasse coffee cups nestled safely in amongst her clothing. They would now start a new life in a new wall unit in a new house in a new country, where people would constantly ask The Youngest Daughter about the history of these cups, where they came from, and how she acquired them.

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Camera critters: Buzzy Bees

We recently visited a children's fun park in my town. Imagine my surprise when I noticed a coin-operated buzzy bee in the playground.


Buzzy Bees are a New Zealand trademark. They are now known the world over as one of the best wooden toys especially made with children's motor skills in mind. They decorate my children's bedroom and I keep a few as a souvenir of my homeland.