“Glories That Are Still Greek”

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

by Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—3/5/10—With Greece provoking so many dire headlines in foreign papers, with our radio and TV talking heads ranting 24/7 about reforms and restrictions, with strikers closing off the heart of Athens almost daily, I think it’s time to put in a good word for this blessed, but problem-stricken country.

Last weekend, “Joy of the People” (literal translation of my Greek husband’s given name) and I were invited to Aigina. It’s a big island just an hour’s ferry ride south of Piraeus. So close that many Athenians have made it their home and have either retired there or commute into work. It could be a suburb, a weekenders’ playground, or a tourist resort. But it is more than that.

Miraculously, Aigina occupies a bubble in a time warp. It has all the ingredients that could lead to ruination: beaches, a magnificent Archaic temple, Byzantine churches and fish tavernes galore. Although bits have been spoiled by all these attractions, much of it could be lifted from a 60’s scrapbook.

When you step off the boat, you find yourself in a small town with no aspirations to postcard immortality. It’s picturesquely rundown, yet tidy. On drowsy back streets, rickety facades slump next to hardware stores; on others, plump neoclassical houses with newly painted shutters modestly affirm a bourgeois past and present. At the near end, a single Doric column sticks rudely above a mess of ruins going back 5,000 years. At the far end, and in between, handsome stone buildings proclaim Aigina’s shortlived reign as the capital of modern Greece in the 1820’s, even before the country (or the southern part of it) wrenched independence from the Turks.

On the pleasingly low-rise waterfront, cafes and ouzeries spread tables onto the sidewalk, clustering on either side of the vintage fish market, where the catch lies displayed on marble slabs. Across the road, caiques double as greengrocers, saving on rent.

And, well placed to lure visitors on arrival or departure, is the souvenir souk: rows of tiny shops as well as barrows, dedicated not to kitschy knicknacks but to the island’s single crop—the pistachio. In any form you can imagine: from raw to roasted; shelled or unshelled; in various degrees of saltiness; in honey; in tooth-loosening brittle; in cloying syrup; and in cookies . . . .

The pistachio has kept Aigina agricultural, saved it from the fate of other islands. Although the groves were not planted until around 1860, the nut has come to be identified with the island. It’s even called fistiki aiginis. Locals (and other Greeks) will tell you these are the best in the world—certainly better than the rounder ones from Turkey, Iran and, especially, California.

Working the land has not only kept families tied to it but it has preserved another tradition that is vanishing in the Athens area—the simple, family-run taverna. We would have been happy in our friends’ light-filled kitchen surrounded by their sea of olives (199 trees), while gazing at ships, islets and the Peloponnesus, but they wanted an excuse to go out.

For two dinners and one lunch we were time-travelers. Spirited back three  to four decades by pitchers of pale, delicate retsina. Now, you may be among those who blanch at the very mention of Greece’s notorious wine. For you it’s merely glorified turpentine, abhorrent and revolting. But you have never tasted it home-made, lightly flavored and freshly drawn from a good barrel. The bottled stuff never came close and it’s true that sometimes the pineyness was overpowering.

In my early years in Greece, though, from 1963 to the late 80’s, we almost never drank anything else but wonderful barrel retsina. We never bought it from a shop but used to patronize a selection of “unofficial” purveyors. We would exchange addresses with friends, for a good supplier was a treasure, indeed. I remember our house painter was one, a retired postman another, and there was a woman who kept her TV on in the good old days before we had round-the-clock programming (taking comfort from the signal the way my mother used CNN as background company).

We used to arrive at these places—usually dark cellars—with our wicker-wrapped demijohns (3 ½ liters, if memory serves), rinse them out with a handy hose, and wait for the proprietor/tress to squat down and fill them from a tin measure, a liter at a time. There would always be agreeable chatter, maybe a glass or two on the house and, sometimes, a table where old-timers sat, with a bit of feta, olives, and bread, served on wrapping paper.

Sadly, these speakeasies no longer exist. And retsina has gone the way of the Dodo too. A casualty of the Wine Revolution that began when Greece joined the EU. We now have some stellar reds and whites and a huge choice of varietals from Agiorghitiko to Zitsa, but tavernes today dole out unresinated Chateau Cardboard instead of genuine barrel wine.

Except on Aigina. As we sat and sipped from “a pitcher with a hole in it,” we realized yet again how retsina complements simple Greek food. Garden-fresh broad beans stewed in oil, fried cheese crescents, local bitter greens, crisp baby calamari, rabbit lemonato. But when the motherly owner heaped Joy of the People’s plate with two rabbit haunches, “because it was so good,” we knew we’d slipped back into a kinder, gentler era.

This generosity reaches beyond the table. On Aigina we also discovered a sense of community—of islanders cooking for the poor and elderly, cleaning their houses, organizing giveaways of special tomatoes, peppers and eggplant seedlings. Artists and writers, Greek and foreign, established there give New Age seminars, paint murals on abandoned shacks, initiate Pistachio Festivals, and much more.

In antiquity, Aigina was so prosperous and powerful, the upstart Athenians crushed it after the Persian Wars even though they had been allies. Aristotle called it “the eyesore of Piraeus.” But from Aigina, it’s Athens that looks like the blot on the horizon.