September 17 – The curse of Lucifer

(Blackberries)

I grew up on the North Sea and now I live on the Aegean Sea. There are differences between the two seas: one is mainly grey in colour, the other is blue; one is cold and the other, in the summer, warm; one mostly finishes on sandy beaches, while the other sees her waves often lapping at pebbled and rocky beaches; one creates dunes behind the beach, the other leaves her waves to break on a rocky coast.

Rocks often offer up no more than a few small salt pools or the odd shell, like the Patella depressa. On the other hand dunes may provide home to masses of blackberry bushes. As I child I often used to pick blackberries in the dunes.

Greek islands are not known for their blackberries. Picking blackberries isn’t very popular with the Lesvorian people who gather food in nature (wild pickers) although there are plenty of blackberries to be found on the island. You can even find some real sand dunes at the beach of Kampos, without brambles but compensated by some huge caper plants.

What I really do miss on this island is the small fruit-like berries (like blueberries!) and raspberries. Blackberry is the only fruit whose taste comes near that of those other berries. There are strawberries (not wild ones), but their taste is too wayward to resemble berries. So I have to make do with gathering blackberries at the end of the summer and that is no problem because they grow in many places like on both roads from Molyvos to Skala Sykaminia, on the road to Old Andissa, or around Lisvori and Vatoussa. They are small, but very tasty. And they are very healthy.

Scientists say that blackberries can reduce the growth of a tumour, that they can lower cholesterol; brambles keep your heart vessels clean and for centuries they have been used to cure a cold. And yes, the ancient Greek did eat blackberries, although mostly to cure gout. So blackberries are terribly healthy.

To pick blackberries is not without risk because bramble bushes have mean thorns that love to stick into your clothes or your bare arms; and, not surprisingly, the parts they have played in different legends and myths have not been so nice either. Like when Lucifer was thrown out of the heaven, he fell into bramble bushes and cursed the fruit.

According to Greek mythology, a similar thing happened to Bellerophon, a son of king Glaucus of Corinth and a grandson of Sisyphus. Bellerophon, just like his granddad, was not a sweet guy. He once run into trouble with the king of Lycia; the king wanted to kill him but knew that the murder could bring him political woe, so he sent Bellerophon on an errand, to kill the fire-spitting monster Chimaera. Nobody expected Bellerophon to do the job or to return alive but Bellerophon got the help of a god (probably Athena) who gave him a golden bridle so that he could ride on the winged horse Pegasus. With the help of Pegasus, Belerophon killed the Chimaera and returned as a hero. His fame made him arrogant and one day he decided that he would fly with Pegasus to the top of the Olympos, home of the Gods. The outraged Gods made the horse prance and Bellerophon fell into some bramble bushes, becoming blinded in one eye. Bellerophon ended his life as a lonely hermit and blackberries have become a symbol for arrogance.

However there’s nothing arrogant about gathering blackberries, or serving fig-with-blackberry-ice cream or a blackberry pie with whipped cream. But while picking brambles one must remain cautious, not only for the sharp and mean thorns, also for the weather. Often in my youth we were attacked by thunderstorms and we had to run home quickly because more than once people got stuck by lightning. Since then I never stay outside when a thunderstorm is approaching.

Now that the last figs are being collected and fat blue-black brambles in their thorny environment are there to seduce you, the last of the summer brings threats of thunderstorms. The Greek mainland has already had plenty of rain but here on Lesvos there have just been light clouds roaming through the sky, sometimes making a small rumble and sending a few drops to the earth. Turkey in contrast can’t be safe for blackberry pickers because often you can see the rain showers fall and in the evenings you could enjoy a fascinating light show created by lightning.

Yes, it’s typical blackberry time, also on Lesvos, and it’s good that the big rains have not yet struck because Greeks believe that figs and blackberries are ruined after a good shower by insects creeping into them. In other countries they believe that blackberries are ruined after the Name day of archangel Michael on September 29, because Lucifer will trample them. Others claim that this happens on Halloween, November first, but I think that is rather late in the year.

Thunderstorms or not, Lucifer or insects, I just pick the blackberries when they’re ripe. They go so well with Greek yoghurt, a reason why I still have not make marmalade or a pie with them. Although I have made a fig-blackberry ice cream: a lovely combination of startling autumn flavours.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

September 5 - Lesvos: the island of angels?

Archangel Michael (photo from internet)

Everybody knows the myth of Icarus: along with his father Daedelus he was kept on the island of Crete by King Minos. Daedelus developed a master plan to escape: he made a construction with wings of feathers and wax for his son to fly away. Icarus got one warning: do not go too close to the sun; it will melt your wings.

If anybody wants to know why Icarus was so enthusiastic about flying too close to the sun and thus crashing into the Aegean, read the book When We Have Wings by the Canadian writer Claire Corbett.

In the beginning I had some doubts about this book which is about a new society consisting of people some of whom can fly. The flyers are the rich people who can afford to have wings. I myself hate flying and even to look at a movie just like this one about an aeroplane flying over Lesvos, gives me the creeps. But this book did the opposite: I had the feeling that if scientists were to read this book, very soon we would no longer have to be pressed like cattle into an airplane; but we could reach our holiday destination like Lesvos with our own wings.

Reading this book gives you wings, gives you goose bumps on your back where your wings should grow. This story has been written so convincingly that even if you have a major fear of flying, you will wish you could be flying like the characters in When We Have Wings.

Maybe this little movie will give you an impression how it feels when you take off into the air. Just imagine flying all over the island.

I am sure that this way you could easily spot signs of ancient settlements. The earth looks quite different from above than from ground level. An archaeologist says she found huge pyramids hidden in the sand in Egypt with the aid of Google Earth. The archaeologists who found traces of an pre-aeolian civilization in Kourtir (Skamnioudi) did not have the help of Google Earth, nor did the ones who excavated in Chalakies (between Skala Polichnitos and Nyfida), discovering traces of an even elder settlement from the copper or Neolithic era. Right now a group of international archaeologists is digging and discovering the remnants of a civilization possibly from 200,000 years ago! Even older than that of the Neanderthals. I wonder how these ancient people lived and if they, like Icarus, ever tried to fly.

In those times it was only the gods who could fly. Or could there have then still been flying mammals, like big flying dinosaurs? In the region around Lisvori and Vatera they found the remains of huge prehistoric animals like mastodons, camels, oxen, a tortoise as big as a car and the bones of a huge ape family. Around Gavathas they found the bones of a dinosaur.

The only dinosaurs who have survived are the birds, the giant albatross being the biggest, with an average wing span of 3 metres, a dwarf compared to the huge dinosaurs, of which the sauropode Amphicoelias could be 60 metres long.

Claire Corbett took the birds as an inspiration to describe flying people in a realistic way. And she created a sparkling architecture for the world of her flyers: a city with high towering buildings, steep abysses and even floating districts. She describes fabulous things like coloured waterfalls, transparent walls and paths which seem to go through space: a real joy for the fantasy lovers.

However, the real flyers in her story - the ones who do not fly because of being part of the happy few, but because they really love to fly - don’t float around those magic buildings, but prefer natural settings, of which there are plenty on Lesvos: a beach, a bright blue sea and rocks to take off. The one difference is that the Greek summers are pretty cloudless. The real flyers are studying birds and insect and cloud formations and aerodynamics in the sky.

Seeing people with wings makes you think of angels. Flying creatures are known on Lesvos; an example being the legend of archangel Michael, whose miracle icon in the monastery of Mandamados attracts thousands of pilgrims yearly. The story goes that archangel Michael with his wings and sword chased away the Turks – another story says pirates - who were raiding the Taxiarchis monastery, thus saving one monk. This man was so grateful to his rescuer he took the earth coloured with blood and created an image of the head of the archangel, later decorated with beautiful silver wings. Taxiarchis, the Greek name of the archangel Michael, is also the patron saint of Lesvos.

Robert Betz, the German guru who has settled on the island believes that Lesvos is an island of angels. Not only can you find plenty of images of angels for sale in his online shop, in seminars he also has the angels talk.

That’s why in the souvenirs shops of Lesvos now you’ll find plenty of angels along with the icons with archangels, made by artists taking advantage of this Betz-angel-trend. Claire Corbett however writes about human angels, not created with miracles as it is pure science that makes the flying possible. The flying people with their lustrous wings may look like angels from heaven, but the story is really human: about being a parent, about social justice and of course about love and betrayal.

I have no idea about which angels Robert Betz is talking. His angel-students are just like Corbett’s elitist flyers — a little arrogant, moving around like they are the only people on the island. I would say that they do not behave like angels, more like Icarus, whose haughtiness collapsed when his waxen wings melted.

I prefer the birdwatchers, studying the last flying dinosaurs, or the angel icons set in gold and silver, who may shed a tear once in a while but keep on attracting pilgrims without a fuss.


(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

August 27 – The song of retsina

(A taste of retsina)

Everybody knows the Greek wine retsina. Many love it, many hate it: yuk, what a turpentine taste! The haters have probably barely tasted the wine, or it was many years ago that they took a sip. For them there is good news: retsina has been adjusted for modern times, just as the cheap bulk wines are now making way for the upcoming quality wines of Greece, retsina now has a milder taste and drinking retsina is ‘in’ again!

Resinated wine is at least 2000 years old, created to preserve the wine for a longer time. The insides of the porous amphora were plastered with resin from pine trees (the Aleppo pine). This was the same material that they used to waterproof boats. Of course the taste of the resin got into the wine and so they said that this was a wine made with the tears of nymphs living in the woods.

Another story claims that when the Romans invaded Greece and started to seize the Greek’s precious wines, the Greeks added some resin to the wine. And so the Romans, not liking retsina, left the wine for the Greeks. It is also said that the Greeks did the same when the country was occupied by the Germans.

From the beginning of the last century up to the Seventies, Greece was very poor and masses of cheap wines, like retsina, were produced. When Melina Mercouri took exile from her country (1967 - 1974) during the colonels’ regime, she recorded music in France, like the record Delfini delfinaki with the song Melina Melinaki, a song about her grandfather:
“J’étais comme une reine (I was like a queen)
Assise à ses côtés (seated besides him)
Parmi les hommes d’Athènes (between the men from Athens)
Qui fument le narguilé (who smoked the water pipe)
Et boivent le vin résiné (and drunk resinated wine)”.

So retsina is a wine well known in musical history, because not only Melina Mercouri sang about retsina. You can find more than one song about retsina on YouTube, some sounding like the musicians had already hit the bottle, but that may be because of the age of the recordings: Retsina mou retsina mou from Manolis Fotopoulis, and from Michalis Geliotis, or this oldie from1937, Me mia koukla retsina mou by Orestis Makris-Loudiana,!

The more modern retsina sing-song of Karsten Hagen Frank reminds of an evening with plenty of bottles of retsina on and under the table. We were not yet familiar with this song when, last week along with friends, we set up a table full of different kinds of retsina, in order to have a real wine tasting. Had we known the song, we probably would have ended the evening with this boozy song.

We started the evening with the beautiful bulbous bottle of Ambelisious (Αμπελησιοuς) from Thessaloniki, which had a strong but elusive taste of resin, which grew on the palet. We compared that one immediately with the retsina Malamatina (Μαλαματινα), also from Thessaloniki. This retsina is very well known and the most consumed on the island. I even found a Malamatina-song on YouTube, best to be listened after some glasses of retsina. However popular this retsina might be, our verdict about its honey-like taste was that it had an artificial, chemical taste.

Then it was the turn for the big bottle of Mirina (Μυρινα) which raised some problems. The men immediately declared that this was a sissy-retsina for the ladies! And indeed the ladies did love this slightly perfumed, airy retsina from the island of Limnos.

Next was an old-fashioned style retsina from the big wine company Kourtaki (Κουρτακι). This had a pretty strong resin taste; nobody liked this old, strong taste and the yellow liquor ended up in the bushes.

Poured into the glasses next was the retsina Michali Georgiadis (Μιχαλη Γεωργιαδις) from Thessaloniki. I like to drink this retsina, when it’s available in the restaurants, but my friends judged it as having a very light, flat taste, tinny on he tongue.

And then at the end there was the surprisingly sexy retsina with the difficult name Tsakpina (Τσακπινα) from Halkidiki, easy to recognize by its nice label: a blonde girl with a seductive face in the colours red, green and yellow (probably inspired by the Mini ouzo label). Even late this Tsakpina seduced us to the verdict of having a challenging, slightly sweet taste.

Our conclusion is that the ancient retsinas that tasted so strongly of resin are difficult to find nowadays. In the popular years of retsina, in Athens there were plenty of taverns that only sold this wine. A friend remembers such a place where a series of barrels were lined up in the tavern, marked with numbers, and you could choose from which number you would like to have a glass. Probably these numbers corresponded to the level of resin. The lower the number, the longer the wine was in the barrel and the more the taste of resin. If you wanted a drinkable retsina, you had to choose a number in the middle.

Nowadays consumers only like just a whiff of resin in the wine, a retsina not lying too long in a barrel; although nowadays the resin is put directly into the pulp when the wine ferments – so this whole barrel-number system no longer exists. But retsina is still popular, proved by this entertaining little movie about a bottle of retsina (sorry, again a bottle of Malamatina).

However, Malamatina is ‘out’, because in our retsina test it ended on the fourth place. The one we liked best was the Ambelísious, followed in second place by the swinging retsina Tsakpina. The ladies that night were in majority so in third place was the sultry Mirina. Michali Georgiadis ended as fifth (for me it should have ended as fourth) and the Kourtaki was judged as the worst retsina of that event.

Of course there are many more retsinas to taste in Greece. But most wineries will all have adjusted the taste to modern times: mild retsinas that can be drunk in the Greek heat, almost like an alcoholic lemonade. So tasty they are worth a song.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

August 20: Fig and Fire

(A ripe red purple fig)

Sometimes I suspect time of secretly passing more quickly in Greece: before you know it summer is over. All village festivities, like the Sardine Festival in Kalloni and the Celebration of Teoktisti in Molyvos are over and even the highlight of the Greek summer, Maria Assumption has just been celebrated. These days are characterized by the shouting, pushing, illegal parking, making noise in-the-middle-of-the-night-home-coming, holiday-celebrating Greeks from the big cities and although they cause a festive atmosphere, there are people who hope that the quiet days will quickly return.

And that is what it does and as a bonus last week the long lasting heat also got chased away by a real thunderstorm with a refreshing downpour. Now there is a cool northern wind blowing, that has caused the temperature of the seawater to drop by many degrees.

August 15 also means that the figs start ripening, a festive event celebrated in silence: everywhere you see people savouring figs they have just picked. The first pots of marmalade appear and I myself have made a row of pots of Oriental fig marmalade (for the recipe, see: Almost Greek). Yesterday a friend passed by bringing bags full of figs, so I saw no other solution than to spend the day in the kitchen over a pan cooking figs.

Which was not bad at all because for two days now I have been following the Dutch music festival Lowlands, partly broadcasted live through YouTube. The music often made me dance in front of the stove. Isn’t it a miracle that from Greece you can enjoy the music that is performed so far away? Although my happiness soon diminished because of something happening closer to the island.

People in the south of Lesvos had to have seen it: dark clouds drifting above the neighbouring island of Chios because an enormous wildfire was raging through its south. Villages had to be evacuated, people who fled from the flames became stranded on a beach surrounded by the fire, other inhabitants had to fight hard to preserve their goods and an army of fire fighters, soldiers and volunteers are still trying to stop the fire with an extensive fleet of fire trucks, planes and helicopters.

The strong wind from the north made the fire mighty and swift, a tough adversary for all people struggling with the flames. Today (Monday August 20) the fire is ongoing and the wind still going strong, causing such high waves at sea that the planes fighting the fires could not take water and had to fly up and down to Lesvos to the more quiet waters of the Gulf of Kalloni (or Gera).

The fire is still raging around Anavatos, one of the locations of the James Bond-film For your eyes only. Anavatos was built on a steep mountain, with a near invisible access road so that the inhabitants were protected from the pirates. Flames however are licking this road and it is a miracle that the fire has not found the village yet. The few remaining inhabitants of Anavatos make their living from their olive fields, grow peanuts and raisins and have bees in the fields below. I guess there will be nothing left there and it is estimated that 60% of the beehives of the island are destroyed, a damage that will need tens of years to be restored.

At the south of the conflagration flames are threatening lovely villages such as Pirgi and Olympi, villages of the mastic region. On Chios for centuries now mastic trees have been cultivated to harvest mastic, one of the specialities of the island. It is a national disaster that huge parts of this unique area have been destroyed by the fire.

I regularly spent holidays in this mastic area where I used to pick lots of blue figs. There are many kinds of figs and I have no idea which tree provides which variety. On Chios you mainly find blue figs but on Lesvos they are green, which I thought to be very odd because I believed that ripe figs should be blue. Now I know better and I even know a few trees with blue figs on Lesvos, also a tree with purple red figs and one with nearly black figs and one with figs as big as an apple. I don’t think that there is a lot of difference in taste. As long as you pick them at the right time when they are soft and juicy, they all taste divine.

I divide the figs in four portions: one part lies in the sun to dry, another part I will use to make ice cream from figs and blackberries, another part I will turn into fig chutney and with the fourth part I will make some more pots of Oriental fig marmalade. While I stir a teaspoon of mastic through the marmalade, with pain in the heart I think back to this gorgeous mastic area, where the crickets were loudly singing, hidden in very ancient olive and mastic trees and trees full of blue figs. It has now probably turned into a blackened, dead silent eerie landscape. I cry for you, Chios!

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Trendy Greece

(A field of Salicornia at the Bay of Kalloni)

There are fashion trends, there are the newest games, there may be computer trends and there are food trends. There even are people whose job it is to write about food trends, like the Dutch Marjan Ippel: Talkin’ food.

Now Greece would appear to be a country with plenty of ancient culture, dusty taverns and a timeless blue sea, but when you take a look at the new food trends, Greek food fits into plenty of these food hypes. If you go for holidays around the Greek Aegean, you can boast that you have been eating according to these latest trends.

It is, for example, fashionable to eat what the region provides (Region Focused). Going to a Chinese or Greek restaurant (when not in China or Greece) is not done anymore. For Greek food you must travel all the way to Greece. But when you are there, you will find a trendy food paradise; for example, here on the island of Lesvos. it is hard to find products not coming from the island (well, I must confess, slowly slowly supermarkets nowadays sell more and more foreign products). Most restaurants cook with local products and prefer even to cook with home-grown vegetables and fruit.

Then there is Social Dining, in Holland trendy with online free markets: getting food from your neighbour or other local chefs who like to cook and share their food for little money. Greeks may not yet be so accustomed in sharing online, but sharing food is a Greek tradition: the more people join the dinner, the better. And then Greek men regularly – some of them even daily – visit the neighbouring tavern for a bite with the ouzo, where (mostly) women prepare food for a day, served on tiny dishes with the drinks: Mama’s Greek pot!

Tapas is another trend. Greeks do not serve Spanish tapas, because those are made in Spain (and it is not done anymore to eat tapas in another country). But it is easy to put up a table only set with Greek tapas, called mezès: little dishes with small portions of food like tzatziki, salted fish, cheese, salads, vegetables and whatever you want. When tapas are fashionable, Greek mèzes are also part of that trend.

Another trend is to eat the entire product: Trash Cooking. Most Greeks will not realize that they have been doing trash cooking as long as they have been behind the stove: nothing gets thrown away, everything gets served. The entire lamb is eaten: not only the legs and cutlets but also the heart, kidneys, liver, brains, eyes, tongue and balls (a delicacy when drinking ouzo). The green leaves from the beetroots are also cooked and eaten, just as beans are cooked and served in their pods.

Direct trade is another trend known to the Greeks: buying your food straight from the farmer. At Easter farmers are busy slaughtering their animals and during the entire year farmers sell their vegetables and fruit from their open cars.

Greek food is also very Low Fidelity: it uses only very basic food. Greek dishes are seldom primped-up with expensive frills like caviar or truffles, nor is it seasoned with cream or alcohol. The products are served just cooked, baked or fried and only seasoned with fresh spices.

Paleo- or Primalvega & Urbanibalisme are trends mostly for countries that have lost contact with nature: this is cooking as was done in primal times and getting food from urban areas. Well, Greeks no longer cook like in ancient times, but plenty of their methods of cooking (like using a wood stove, grilling an entire lamb or making syrup from fruit in a huge kettle on an open fire) are rituals centuries old. By the way, cooking on open fires (Primal Fire) is another trend that in Greece is more like a tradition. And yes, city or not, Greeks do get their food everywhere: in sea in front of their houses, from the garden at the back of the house and maybe even from the City parks. When a Greek townsman can afford a garden, he will not grow flowers but vegetables.

Then there is the Umami-effect. I have to admit that I did not know umami, but it seems to be one of our five basic tastes: there used to be salty, sweet, sour and bitter and now you also have umami. Umami has the ability to balance sweet and salty tastes and encourages salivation. I have no idea how it tastes but it is in many products like fish, shellfish, fermented meat, mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, spinach, cheese and sauces made of fish or soya beans.

The word umami (it means something like delicious taste) comes from a Japanese professor who in 1908 identified it for the first time and decennia later this taste was officially added to the already existing four tastes. Even though the name is Japanese, umami is found everywhere, like in Greece especially in summertime when you may get bored by all the ripe and shiny red tomatoes or when you try to cool down with a glass of ouzo (is there umami in ouzo?) while eating lots of sardines and cheese, both products with umami.

Yesterday I collected some samphire (Salicornia), dressed it with a mustard-cream sauce. I do not know if Salicornia contains umami, but this lovely dish certainly accords with other trends: Tapas, Region Focused and Social Dining (the neighbours also got a bite) and had I not dressed it up it would also have been Low Fidelity. So Greek food it hot! And I do predict the newest trend: Crisis Dining, having dinners in countries that are in crisis. Trendy Greece will be on top of that list.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Ice cold

(Water ice cream. Photo: from internet)

Different countries define ‘heat wave’ differently and in some of the larger countries this varies from region to region. In the Netherlands warm days are said to form a heat wave when on 5 consecutive days temperatures are 25 ºC or higher. A Greek heat wave is a lot hotter: 3 consecutive days with temperatures at 36.5 ºC or higher. For weeks here in Greece the mercury has barely fallen below 30 ºC and there are days when the mercury tries to climb over the 40 ºC. But officially it is not a heat wave, but a prolonged period of heat with separate heat waves.

This hot period started in the middle of June, long before the Dog Days started on July 20th and if measuring it according to Dutch definitions of a heat wave, this was one endless mega-heat wave (although the Dutch definition is only for Holland). The Dog Days are the hottest period of the summer, with the most heat waves and will last officially until August 20. So we still have some hot weeks to go!

According to the Hellenic National Meteorological Service summers are warming up, plagued by more and more heat waves.
If this doesn’t make you happy, you’d better think about other things like lovely cooling ice.

Centuries ago the summers were not that hot, but they were still pretty warm. There were no refrigerators then to keep a drink cool or to preserve food. How did they do it before refrigerators were introduced to households in the twentieth Century?

In ancient times they didn’t have cool boxes but ice houses, although I presume that those were only for a happy few of the rich and mighty. Ice houses were mostly round shaped buildings above a cellar where ice was stored in order not to melt in the summer. In Iranian texts from around 1700 BC there are descriptions of such buildings and around 300 BC Alexander the Great had made deep wells where snow was stored.

Well, I’d love to have such a well on our land. Just imagine, we could have a snowball fight in the middle of the summer. That would be really cool! I could also do with benches made out of those big blocks of ice, which formed a flourishing trade in the 19th century. Frederic Tudor, also called the Ice King of Boston, made a fortune by storing blocks of ice and later transporting them all over the world, to the Caribbean, to South America, India, China and Australia.

Blocks of ice were hacked out of frozen lakes in the winter and transported to the icehouses. Henry David Thoreau, who lived for three years in the woods at Walden Pond (Massachusetts, US) described in his book Walden, how each winter the Ice Men of Tudor came to take ice from ‘his’ pond, which would end up in faraway countries like India.

At the beginning of the beautiful movie America, America (1963, Elia Kazan) two men are seen to hack ice blocks out of a glacier on a mountain in Anatolia (Turkey). With horse and carriage the blocks were removed to the villages where they were sold and used to preserve or cool food and – who knows – just to eat it as a cooling treat.

When the refrigerator was introduced worldwide this ice commerce lost its profitability. Since then however the ice industry found other outlets. When the refrigerator was introduced it was the water-ice creams that melted the hearts of children. Now this industry has grown so big that children no longer know which ice cream will be the best. In earlier times your choice was as simple as choosing a red or a yellow coloured one. Nowadays they make ice cream from everything, even from hamburgers, garlic, salmon, whatever you want. Ice cream maker Heladaria Coromoto in Venezuela even sells 860 different flavours!

I am not such an Ice Queen and I only make ice from the fruit that comes off the tree in our garden which I combine with yoghurt or cream to make a delicious ice cream. And to be honest I am not waiting to turn a tsatsiki or a fava into a cool dish. Although I must admit that I once made a lovely fig ice cream and that I was not disappointed at all experimenting with tomato ice cream. The Tomato Sorbet with Garlick Sauce even made it in my cookbook Almost Greek http://www.smitaki.nl and is a delicious dish served in between a meal.

If this heat continues any longer who knows if I will be crazy enough to try out some souvlaki-ice cream, some aubergine-ice cream or even some sardine-ice cream!

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Dreaming during a heat wave

A colourful street in Agiasos

What are you supposed to do during a heat wave? You’d best stay inside if you don’t have to go out and the beach is too hot. And so it can happen that you find yourself spending long hours in front of your overheated computer, looking at funny things like The 7 longest streets of the world, or The shortest street.

I don’t think that any street from Lesvos will enter this category, nor does it have a restaurant that could compete with The weirdest restaurants of the world. Although you could easily place a table and two chairs in the hollow tree of Karina, or possibly in the one of Liota, thus creating a VIP-room for The Hollow Tree Restaurant (and I guess that it would be a wonderfully cool space).

There are also very strange hotels: in trees or in elephants, made from ice or sand, under water or in the air and many more choices. Lesvos also has some nice hotels, but not like the one in Kenya where the giraffes stick their heads through the windows at breakfast in order to get some bread. But Lesvos still has many donkeys and I am sure these stubborn animals could also learn to stick their heads through a window if it meant that they could get a croissant. So we could create a Donkey Hotel, where the donkeys not only ask for food, but would help out carrying suitcases, help the maids with the hotel linen or even do some gardening. Children could be taking care of them in the afternoon, thus winning a donkey ride around the swimming pool. There would even be a service to rent a donkey instead of a taxi to bring you to the village or the beach.

And then again I mention the idea of a hotel made of salt. One of the rare ones is built in Bolivia: Palacio de Sal. The salt pans of Skala Polichnitos would be ideal for such a project. You could stay in a very original hotel and have a superb view over the sometimes spectacular pink coloured salt pans where flamingos hop around and where other special birds have their habitat. It would be the dream of a bird watcher!

There is also an interesting list of abandoned islands, pieces of land in the sea where once people had great dreams, but where you now only find houses and buildings slowly uniting with nature.
Spinalonga, an island off the coast of Crete, once housing a leper colony and now a major tourist attraction, is not on the list, but it should be there. I could not find a list of islands that were abandoned by tourists. I mean, I don’t need that list for Lesvos, because there still are tourists around; but there are some days that you wonder if the island has been nearly abandoned.

Speaking about islands: there is also the possibility to rent an island and bring it to the place you prefer, see this floating island. Although I wonder what’s the difference between this floating island and a luxurious yacht. You might as well place a tree house, like those built by the company Bauraum - on a huge raft, plant it with flowers and trees and then you could rent it out to whoever wants to have a week on a private island in his favourite spot.

This way you could be king of your own kingdom and you might even figure on the list of micronations of the world. The newest nation figuring on this list is Filettino, a village in Italy whose mayor proclaimed the village independent in 2011, because they don’t agree with the severe economics dictated by Europe. Is this an idea for The Republic of Lesvos?

And then there is a list of most colourful cities of the world. And again no Lesvos on this list, although this island certainly has some very colourful places, like Agiasos, where they have a few such brightly coloured houses (on the way to the sanatorium) that sunglasses are needed to look at them. And there is a very bright and dark pink house along the Bay of Kalloni, going to Nifida, which has such a colour that it brings tears to your eyes, and Asomatos has a building painted in a colour that even from far away hurts your eyes. And if those villages do not compete with the existing list, we will charter the Dutch artists Haas & Hahn to transform a village like Argenos into an explosion of colours. These artists have been working in the favela’s of Rio de Janiero in Brazil, turning part of slums into bright colourful objects, hoping to brighten up not only buildings but also the inhabitants. For the same reasons they now work in a poor part of the American city of Philadelphia. If the Greek crisis carries on much longer, Lesvos also will be ready for a colourful and social refurbishment of this creative duo.

(Thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012