Tables for four with a view at Taki’s Taverna, Limeni Bay in the Mani.
WHAT happens when a few hungry friends get together on Twitter one afternoon and start talking about food – more particularly, Greek food? A global event is hatched! And that’ s pretty much what happened when the group, including a couple of Greek Americans, toyed with the idea of holding a huge Greek dinner Stateside.
One of the group, Keri Douglas, editor of a popular news and culture website based in Washington, took it up a notch and said: “Well, why not make it a global Greek event?” Why not indeed, and the event was launched.
She put the call out on her website and on social media for people to host a dinner at home, or in a favourite Greek restaurant. The idea was to connect Greeks and philhellenes everywhere on one evening (January 15) and help promote Greek produce, restaurants, recipes, food and wine businesses, as well as authors, bloggers and, well, everyone who wanted to join in. The condition was that everyone should Tweet and Facebook their event and share pictures.
The idea quickly went viral and by the time the dinner evening arrived there were four continents involved, 14 countries and 52 cities. And no-one was more surprised than Keri Douglas at how many people had jumped on board, giving their time, their cookery expertise, and even free produce. All for a good cause – Greece.
Yiouvetsi and moussaka at the restaurant we picked, Mediterranea, Stirling, Scotland.
Keri summed up the Greek Dinner on her website (www.9musesnews.com) saying: “Imagine a paradigm of connecting the culinary dimension of Greek culture with the intangible Greek heritage that influences people around the world!” Well, we couldn’t imagine it before, but we can now. And this amazing event looks set to become the first of many. Opa!
The Greek art of simplicity: fresh Mani figs, peaches and Feta cheese.
How food lies at the heart of Greekness
Greek holidays! What do you always remember, apart from the sun and sea, the laid-back lifestyle? Most people remember the fabulous meals they ate at sunny, beachside tavernas: Greek salad with feta, souvlaki, juicy stuffed peppers, fresh green olive oil, carafes of local wine. Food and Greece have always had a sensual partnership, but it’s more than just the joy of eating wholesome fresh produce in fabulous surroundings. The ritual of the long Greek meal is a social and cultural mainstay.
Through good times, and especially bad (and Greece has had its share of catastrophe), the Greek meal has been the thread that has united the community, family, the generations from the yiayia, who has passed down precious recipes, to the youngest children who will carry the traditions on. And it’s also about parea, company.
Villagers and priests from Megali Mantineia in the Mani celebrating a saint’s day and toasting their new village oven (behind).
To me the most enduring symbol of Greek life is the village yiorti (celebration), usually the feast day of a saint, where tables are set under the olive trees and you will see the local priest and village elders sitting beside goat farmers, olive harvesters, the rich, the poor, and all enjoying lively parea, good village food, and some local wine, of course.
In Greece, food shared together can be sumptuous or simple, like the vegetable dishes eaten by the more devout during Lent – a platter of horta (wild spring greens) collected from hillsides and fields, boiled and served with lemon juice and a drizzle of olive oil.
My own memories of holidays in Greece will always be bound up with the meals we shared with Greek friends.
Fish, salad, wine and good company, with Artemios on his Santorini balcony.
In 2003, Jim and I were visiting the island of Santorini and became friends with a farmer called Artemios who was 80 years old but energetic and spry for his age. He rode a donkey, kept goats, grew his own food in the rich volcanic soil around his small rural home, and also made his own wine.
The first time he invited us for lunch on the tiny balcony of his house, he made us fried fish, roasted eggplant and Greek salad, with a jug of his own wine. A simple meal, bursting with flavour. More than just the food, it was the length of time we sat eating, talking, sharing stories – despite my stuttering Greek. And also the time it took him later to sit and peel the spiky, fiddly fruit of the frangosika (prickly pear) for us to try for the first time.
I will always remember his words on that first occasion. It sums up the Greek philosophy of food and parea exactly.
“Now that we have shared a meal together at my house, we are friends forever,” he said.
And he meant it. On subsequent visits to Santorini we went to see him and shared other meals, sometimes at his house, sometimes in the nearby villages, and we remained great friends. It’s an ethos that Greeks all over the world share, which was reflected in last month’s event. Friendships forged on that January night will hopefully last a long time.
Artemios and Marjory sharing a Greek coffee on the island of Santorini.
I have enjoyed many, many fine meals in Greece with some wonderful people, but the meals Artemios gave us remain closest to my heart.
There have been entertaining meals as well in Greece that I remember for different reasons, like the meal Jim and I shared with a big-hearted family in the village of Megali Mantineia during our three-year stay in the Mani.
It was during a scorching, August lunch where we had to try tsikles, the little picked birds with the heads left on, so loved by the Maniots but not to everyone’s taste. Not to have tried one would have been an insult, and so we went through a kind of TV Bush Tucker Trial in front of all the other guests, with amusing results. The experience formed one of the chapters in my book Things Can Only Get Feta.
To share a meal with Greeks, or anyone for that matter, and then be friends forever. In this life, it doesn’t get much better than that!
For a full report on the Greek Dinner Around the World, visit Keri Douglas’s site www.9musesnews.com click here
If you share notes and pictures on Twitter about your Greek dinner, use the hashtag #GreekDinner to connect with international followers.
Books about Greece
To find out more about my two travel memoirs set in Greece Things Can Only Get Feta, and Homer’s Where the Heart Is, please visit the books page on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com
To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:
You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey
And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta
www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs
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