An international wedding (Διεθνής γάμος)

We rarely go to weddings. I attribute this to the fact that my husband and I were older than average when we got married, so most of our friends and relatives had gotten married by the time we did. Having come from another country, I missed out on this aspect of coming of age - I never got to attend friends' weddings. Due to the times that are a-changing, people get married differently too. For instance, the open invitation to all friends and relatives as was once done in Greece is a thing of the past. People have smaller weddings now, inviting fewer people. They also get married at a relatively older age than they used to, and in many cases the traditional protocols are not followed: some marry after they have a child, while others don't marry in a church.

So it was somewhat of a nice treat to be invited to a wedding of a young woman who has been a family friend for many years. Nadia Wahab is the daughter of a mother with origins in Asia Minor, who settled in the richly historic Ptolemaida, a city in Northern Greece. Her father is a Palestinian Christian whose family is based in the occupied territories of Jerusalem. With roots in Jerusalem since Christ's time, they are honoured by being one of the first to receive the Holy Light on Easter Saturday during the church service at the Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Bassem met his wife while studying in Greece, following her to her home town where they have been living for the last three decades.

I met Nadia through the apartment my father left us in his inheritance. Nadia was studying in Hania and she lived in that apartment during most of that time. This was followed by her sister Natasha, and finally by her brother Taoufik. Since then, I have met her parents and grandparents, and now I got the chance to meet her husband, George, whose family derive from the Greek diaspora of Georgia. They migrated to Crete about the same time I did, joining a large number of repatriating Georgian Greeks whose ancestors had lived for many years on the coast of the Black Sea. Nadia and George met in Hania, where they are now getting married, and I suppose, they are here to stay, in continuation of the social fabric that makes up the local culture which has not changed much from the past: Hania is a predominantly Greek town, made up of Greeks from all parts of the world.

I may not have gone to many weddings in my life, but that was one my family won't forget in a while. It was more like an international event: we were joined by Nadia's family from Jerusalem, George's family and friends from Georgia, and their many local, Greek and Cretan friends. We were treated to some of the most exotic dancing that we've ever seen performed live, while the food was generic Greek, typical Cretan wedding fare.

It could be true that I have seen Nadia grow up over the years, but Nadia was always grown up from the time I met her. When the apartment caught fire due to a short-circuit in a kitchen light fitting, she didn't panic . She still remembered to switch off the electricity from the mains, and then grabbed the kitchen mat to smother the flames. Thi was all done before she called the fire brigade. Her sister Natasha told me just how glad she was that both of them were there that night. "If I were alone," Natasha said, "I would have just panicked and left. I'm sure the apartment would have burned down." It's a personality thing, I guess.

We stayed at the reception until past 1am. We would have stayed longer, had it not started raining - the wedding was held outdoors. Who would have believed it: rain in Crete in June, followed by another bout of very strong winds similar to the ones that nearly burnt our village less than a week ago...

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Feast (Γιορτή)

The wedding feast in Crete consists of a standardised menu which is based on a display of wealth and prosperity. To have a full table was once a way of showing how wealthy you were. On a feast day, the same wedding feast is also prepared at home, in smaller quantities. Such feast days are mainly of the nameday type.

The most important part of the feast is the pilafi rice. Strong fatty stock is essential:

The chicken came from a coop in Apokoronas, while goat was reared on land near Sfakia. We don't really eat much meat these days, but when we do, we like to know where it's from.

Meat is boiled until all tender and the fat is left in the strained stock.



The boiled meat is often served as is, but this is getting increasingly unpopular in modern times. It doesn't not always get eaten. I par-boiled the meat instead, and turned it into two more dishes that are also seen at wedding feasts: the chicken became a roast:

The chicken was cooked in tomato, the potatoes in lemon. Most Greek meals can be based either on lemon or tomato: this goes for practically all bean, vegetable and meat dishes.

... while the goat became tsigariasto, a slow-cooked stew using just olive oil and wine. 



The pilafi is cooked in the stock just before the time of serving - always. This means that you must know that all your guests have arrived. Pilafi is served piping hot, slightly undercooked, and oily-creamy, so that the rice takes on a pearly effect.



At a wedding, the order of the food is pilafi rice and boiled meat first, then roast meat and potatoes, while tsigariasto may be served as an appetiser. Too much meat, you may be thinking, but a feast demands that you put on a good show; therefore you put out your 'best' food. One salad is also served with the whole meal - but its purpose is simply to make the table look full and perhaps to add some colour to the meal. I was recently given a few cucumbers which I turned into a tzatziki; this paired well with the pilafi. Yoghurt is often used as an accompaniment to rice. But salad (and beans, and vegetables, and other healthy foods) are generally regarded as foods for non-feast days, something you would eat more often on a daily basis. A feast in Crete demands meat.



Desert is not a necessary part of a meal, although in modern times, a wedding feast will also include a creamy wedding torte, an influence of global cuisine. Fruit is also very common. I decided to make a karidopita, to use up the last season's supply of walnuts and oranges (I had a hunch one of our guests would be bringing with her my new supply of walnuts). Karidopita goes well with ice-cream, another fridge clearance item: it's November, and rural Cretans rarely eat ice-cream at this time of year.



All the food can be cooked in stages. I boiled and strained the meat on Friday night, while watching Downton Abbey. as I was thinking that I could have used at least one servant myself). The next day, I prepared the cake and salads in the morning, and got the meat going at about midday. Apart from an hour spent par-boiling, the meat was cooked on the element or in the oven for another four hours, on very low heat. It did not require very much attention, I just needed to keep my mind on the job. The pilafi was the only dish that needed quick work. 

It goes without saying that wine is a very important part of a Cretan feast. Most rural folk like their rose-coloured home-brew. I've gotten a bit tired of this stuff as of late, as that is all I have been drinking for the last decade. I bought some light fruity bottled white wine which was highly appreciated by my guests, who left after midnight last night. I went to bed thinking about those servants I could use to help me clear up this morning, but when I awoke, I found the kids working together to clear up. Times are moving fast these days.   

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Wedding (Γάμος)

I recently read an account of an English couple's wedding in Crete. Each person's wedding is a very personal affair, but there was a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that the wedding in question was anything but a Cretan wedding. Two non-Cretans, with no family in the area, wishing to marry in a civil ceremony, whose biggest worries were the picturesqueness of the scenery, being on schedule for mani-pedicure appointments and whether noise pollution from the nearby airport would spoil their big day; this scenario contains none of the elements of the traditional staging of a Cretan wedding.

A typical traditional Cretan wedding is a large scale event. It often starts at a village church, usually in a remote or very scenic setting, and ends up at a large function hall where the primary emphasis is not on décor, but on space; a traditional Cretan wedding usually involves more than 500 guests. The most important aspect of these function centres is capacity, so that all the guests can fit in comfortably and the food can be served efficiently. In the past when life was a lot simpler and function halls did not exist, weddings were held in the village square, while guests bought the chairs and tables from their own houses. Globalisation has taken care of aspects such as this one, and weddings in Crete can be as simple or as complicated as your purse can afford, an inevitable sign of progress. Weddings may have become more and more elaborate over the last few years, but the basic principles have not changed.

We were recently invited to a wedding in Hania. The church service took place in a lush green beautiful setting not far from where we live.

Traditional weddings in Crete are an orchestrated event of food and music. The bride and groom play their own roles in this orchestration. They are not the main attraction; they are the motivation behind an opportunity given to all parents to organize a day when the whole family, nuclear and extended, even entire villages, come together to celebrate a union between two people. A commonly said joke is that if those two people had asked anyone if they shouldn’t get married, there’d be no event at all...

The important role in a Greek wedding is played by the koumbaro, the best man (who could also be a woman – koumbara). This is the person that ‘marries’ the couple; the priest is simply the religious representative. The koumbaro is always treated like a member of family for the rest of his life. The number of wedding guests swells because not only are the bride’s and groom’s families invited, but the koumbaro also has the right to invite guests to the wedding. The more guests, the more food; the more food, the more expensive a wedding becomes. But the reception costs are often indirectly met by the guests themselves. Bridesmaids and page boys are not at all common. Bridal stores toss in a flower girl’s dress for free – it’s included in the price of hiring the costly wedding dress; a bride typically spends about 1500 euro to hire one. Some brides are now getting their wedding dresses made at an even more expensive price, a sign of the materialistic times we live in.

Once the priest has chanted “kai i gini na fovatai ton andra” (the wedding liturgy surely needs to be rewritten to say something like "kai o andras na fovatai tin gini"), the koumbaro has crowned the bride and groom with the stefana, and the couple has taken their first steps together in Isaiah’s dance (the couple makes no vows to each other in the Greek Orthodox wedding service, which sounds good for those with committment problems), the bride and groom stand next to the koumbaro, along with their close family members, lined up outside the church, and are blessed by their guests with the phrase ‘Na zisete’ (a wish for long life) and a small business-card sized envelope (fakelaki) containing their ‘gift’, which is placed on a silver tray (diskos). Cretans are still used to being given money for their wedding.

The Western fashion of a wedding list at an expensive home store is also catching on, but it’s still not very popular; in any case, it only makes sense to pass on some money (hidden away in an envelope which you can choose to sign your name on) to the couple when you consider how the wedding reception is organized. The cheapest function centres will charge about 20 euro per guest, but there are also the hidden costs: at this price, the wine, raki, xerotigana and musicians are not included; the bride's rented dress is usually paid for from the guests' monetary gifts. The tradition of marrying in a church is still strong in Greece, maybe because of family pressure, but also because it's what people like and prefer. Greeks prefer to get married in a church rather than the mayor's office, whether or not they had known each other before they got married (in the old-fashioned biblical sense). They will have set up their new home before they get married, so they may already be in debt for this reason, and will be hoping that the proceeds of the wedding will help them to pay off some of the expenses. In any case, it makes better sense to give the couple money so that they can spend it on their choice and taste in material goods rather than end up with ten coffee makers which they have to return to a store and exchange.

The wedding favours consist of boubouniera, usually a tulle pocket containing some koufeta, which are candy coated almonds traditionally associated with weddings all over Europe. Cretan wedding bread is part of the traditional offering to guests, as well as xerotigana, a fried pastry sweet coated in honey syrup. The kouloura is considered optional, but the koufeta and xerotigana are never missing from a wedding in Hania. The wedding in question used a clever combination of koufeta and kouloura, omitting the usually wasteful part of the tulle pocket.

Food is not chosen randomly for this event; the menu is pretty much fixed and has been this way, with very few changes, for the last few hundred years. Guests know what to expect to see on the table as they arrive at the function, and what the main dishes are. Very few people will stray from the set menu; they may add some extra items, to make their wedding appear more luxurious, other food items, but some things are never replaced or omitted. Even those with small pockets will endeavour to provide the parts of the menu that have always been included in a traditional Cretan wedding feast.

This is a typical table set up at a Cretan wedding reception hall; the folded napkins in the glass and the tablecloths show that it's upmarket. When a large enough reception centre isn't available, traditional weddings are held in a village square, as they were in the past, which also explains why weddings were (and still are) usually held in the summer (the month of May is said to be when only donkeys and kings get married, while people also avoid marrying in leap years (pregnant brides excepted). The xerotigana may optionally be handed out either at the church or the reception (as here).

After the guests greet the couple, they pick up a boubouniera (the favours passed on to the guests), the first food offering, a small tulle pocket containing sugared almonds. This may be accompanied by a wedding kouloura (traditional Cretan wedding bread) and/or xerotigana, the traditional Cretan wedding sweet, which consists of fried pastry rounds, dipped in syrup and sprinkled with finely ground walnuts. This dessert is completely vegan, so it is a miracle that it made its way into one of the most carnivorous food events in Crete. Even though they are in essence a lenten food item, xerotigana aren’t ever made during fasting periods because of their joyous connotations. If the xerotigana and/or kouloura weren’t given away with the boubouniera after the church service, then they're bound to be waiting for you at the reception centre.

The table will be decked out with drinks and hors d'oeuvres. It's important to know where to sit at such a large function: we were invited by the koumbaro (the best man), so we sat at the tables that were marked out for his friends and family. We did not know the bride and groom at all, although we did meet up with them by chance a month before their big day, which just goes to show, it's a small world...

The Cretan wedding menu is based on a plethora of meat. Vegetables and horta are simply not on the menu. The rationale behind this is that in poorer times (Crete was always considered a poor part of Greece until the advent of tourism in the 1960s), beans, greens, legumes and salad vegetables (the basis of the Mediterranean diet) were considered ‘humble’ foods, eaten regularly by people who could not afford to eat meat regularly (ie, they were poor). Meat was seen as a rich person’s food, an item that could not be wasted (due to the fewer options available to preserve food in earlier times). Hence, it was eaten during festive times, at gatherings where the killing of an animal was warranted, when the number of diners was high enough to ensure that the whole (sheep, goat, pig) would be consumed. For this reason, being invited to a wedding meant that you would have the chance to eat some meat. People looked forward to this; they weren't getting enough protein in their daily diet. This may sound strange to the unintiated, but such was the meaning of poverty in the past.

Here's what you'll find set up at the tables of the reception hall: sweet biscuit rusks, graviera cheese, honey, and an individual serving of traditional appetisers. The salad is sometimes bought during the later courses of the meal. The appetisers consist of traditional Cretan mezedakia. Click on the photo on the right hand side to see the notes.

After the church service, modern couples choose to go to a photography session, while the guests continue on to the function centre. The guests are often kept waiting for a while until the bride and groom arrive. This is (supposed to be) a once-in-a-lifetime event, so it's just part of the game. While the guests are waiting, some parts of the lavish meal are being served. The table is set for a lot of eating and drinking. There will be a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, a carafe of tsikoudia and some soft drinks. Don't go in search of beer; that'll be found in a modern (rather than a traditional) Cretan wedding (pregnant bride included). Food-wise, the first thing guests look for is the xerotigana. Always bring a plastic supermarket carrier bag with you to pick up your share of them - this delicious delicacy is hardly ever eaten at the reception; it becomes breakfast, dessert, and coffee time sweet at the guests' home the next day.

There is usually a little plate of appetisers (individually served to each guest) which includes Cretan specialties like kalitsounia and locally made country-style sausages. The more upmarket places will serve these to you freshly, while others may leave the plates on the table before the guests arrive, covered in plastic wrap (you get what you pay for). The offerings represent the age-old tradition of serving the 'best' food on a day of celebration, and the best cuisine Crete has to offer is in these unique pastries. They may not seem like haute cuisine, but they are some of the finest quality (not to mention unique) food items Crete has to offer. Think about how developed societies view honey, cheese and pastry sweets; you'll understand the offerings much better in this light. There will be a plate with a few thickly sliced rods of graviera, a little bowl containing honey with a spoon and a plate of sweet paximathia. The cheese is dipped into the honey before being eaten. This is a special wedding tradition, but it's not as unusual as it sounds: honey is often poured over Cretan cheese pies.

As the bride and groom (finally) enter the reception area (you're bound to hear shotguns being fired at this point), the traditional Cretan wedding march is played by the band, while the couple are 'honeyed': the bride is fed a spoonful of runny honey mixed with walnuts. Honey is seen a symbol of love and tenderness, a way to 'soften' the bride to accept her new role in a predominantly patriarchal society. This tradition is slowly dying out, due to the messy trails that honey leaves on a bride's perfectly made-up face and once-in-a-lifetime dress, and possibly the greater equality between the sexes. The couple could have fun honeying themselves after the event if they're that desperate...

Some formalities are taken care of at this point. A western-style wedding cake is cut (but not served at this moment), along with the modern custom of opening up a bottle of bubbly. Guests who couldn't make it to the church but came only for the reception line up to bless the happy couple, leave their fakelakia and pick up their boubouniera. This takes a while; traditional weddings entail whole village communities going through these motions. Once it's over, everyone starts clicking the cutlery against their glass to see the bride and groom take their first kiss. The couple at the wedding in question either forgot to do this or didn't want to, despite their audience's pleas; maybe they were both simerinoi (ie they were born yesterday)...

As this meal is a purely carnivorous celebration, the meat that is served is generally given the name of its cooking style. The first lamb to come on the table is the vrasto, the boiled meat (you read that correctly - plain boiled meat), accompanied by the pilafi, rice cooked in the strained broth of the boiled meat. Don't expect to see pilafi at a wedding in Iraklio - they serve spaghetti cooked in the meat broth there. It is so unrefined (read: slurp, slurp, slurp); there is nothing like Cretan wedding pilafi. Pilafi at weddings is always tasty, due to the quantity and quality of meat used.

Pearly creamy pilafi is THE wedding food in Hania, followed by roast meat and potatoes. This wedding was a little more lavish, serving tsigariasto with some fried potatoes as part of the appetisers. Vegetarians are not catered for in any way. It really was a shame that so much meat was served, because the roast remained untouched on our table; a lot of food is unfortunately wasted. People used to come hungry to these events; nowadays, our stomachs are full before we even get to the church...

The second meat dish to be served is the psito, the roast meat, accompanied by roast potatoes and a salad. If the reception is a lavish one (like the one we went to), then there may also be another meat dish served, like tsigariasto, braised lamb or goat in plain olive oil. This is purely optional; the vrasto-pilafi and psito-potatoes are mandatory. The meat is visible, and cooked in the simplest fashion. There is nothing fancy about wedding meals in Crete, so that means that the meat must be of very high quality - very fresh, not fatty and plentiful. The world may have become more complicated over the centuries, but Cretan weddings retain the element of timelessness, as if nothing has changed...

The groom is a traditional Cretan musician, so we were treated to a lot of traditional Cretan songs, music and dancing. A special dancing troupe from Apokoronas (the groom's birthplace) performed a show of Cretan dancing; the traditional Cretan dress (in both the man's and woman's case) is sometimes worn in place of the Western style wedding outfits. The bride and groom were the first to dance, starting off the party with a traditional Cretan wedding dance. No other music genre was heard on this night, which may have to do with the fact that both the groom and his father (he was playing in the band) have been involved in the traditional Cretan music scene all their life. What's with the fireworks, you may be asking. Well, you can't fire a gun indoors, can you? (it's also been outlawed in any case).

The food is served slowly enough to digest it throughout the evening at a leisurely pace. There is no rush to eat quickly at this event. In any case, the bride and groom are the last to leave their wedding (not the first, as in the West), and dancing is just as important as the food - a Cretan bride is expected to dance with every single one of her guests (though not everyone gets up to dance). Cretan music will be performed throughout the night. Foreign music (ie pop and rock songs) aren't actually a part of a traditional Cretan wedding, although it is often heard in the modern version of a Cretan wedding (the one with the pregnant bride).

Apres-wedding take-home gifts

Dessert consists of the creamy 'pasta' style wedding cake. This is often followed by fresh fruit. There is usually no room for much else by this time. If you were saving your appetite for the chocolate fountain, you'll be immensely disappointed to find out that there is no such thing at a Cretan wedding, no matter whether it's traditional or modern; this is Crete, remember. But you do get to take home a few gifts - the boubouniera, the kouloura, the xerotigana, and in our case, the wine bottle which had a poem specially dedicated to the happy couple in question.

The next time someone tells you that they got married in Hania, you'll know to ask them if they like the xerotigana and the pilafi, because without those two items, it's not a Cretan wedding, is it?

And if you exclude the traditional Cretan dancers and the kouloura, my wedding a decade ago was no different.

©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.

Xerotigana - Cretan wedding dessert (Ξεροτήγανα)

The tourist season was in full swing. Despite the sunny weather, the cold breeze whipped bare skin under the shade. While the locals were wearing long-sleeved T-shirts, the Northern Europeans - where so many of the tourists came from - were wandering around shirtless in their jandals (the women wore bikini tops). Some had already turned beetroot red, completely unaware that they were only an hour away from sunstroke. Ifigeneia stared at them as if they were aliens.

"Mama, aren't they crazy?" she asked her mother.

"Very much," Georgia replied, feeling satisfied that the flood of foreigners in her town did not greatly affect the culture in which she was raising her children. Had she been in New Zealand, Emmanuel and Ifigeneia would surely have gone with everyone else's flow. And Georgia herself wouldn't have been able to stop it because her children would tell her that they were Kiwis, even though their parents might call themselves Greek.

"They're eating ice-cream, mama. Is it summertime now?" Goergia was feeling like an ice-cream herself. Today was a good time for the first one for the summer season, even though Easter was only just over and spring hadn't finished. During the Easter festivities, she had suggested to her husband to buy some ice-cream for dessert, if of course there would be any space left after the lamb, the kalitsounia, the pie and all the other Easter food.

"Ice-cream, Georgia? Spring isn't even over yet, and you're thinking about ice-cream?" Her husband was very much dependent on the seasons, which dictated to him what he should eat, what he should wear, where he should go for a Sunday outing. The artichokes in the garden would be at their heaviest, harvest drooping with the weight, but Lambros would say: "It's too early for artichokes. Let them keep growing for a couple more weeks," in which time the artichokes would start blooming in purple thistles, their hearts too tough and fibrous to chew. In a September mini-heatwave, he'd carry a jacket in fear of a change of weather, even though climate change had already taken care of that. It could be a fine sunny day in the middle of winter - as so many were during the halcyon days in January - but he'd still want to drive up to the mountain plain of Omalos, because 'that's where everyone goes in the winter.' Georgia had been raised in a season-free country; all year round, one minute it rained, the next it hailed and then the sun shone through the clouds as if signalling that the worst was over - until a gale-force wind blew the roofs off the houses. Ice-cream was eaten anytime of the year. If Kiwis wait to eat one on a fine day, they might even miss out on having one in their own country altogether, as they'd be taking their holidays in Tonga or Tahiti when the sun finally did arrive in Aotearoa. And right now, Georgia felt like a Crazy Joe popsicle.

They were now nearing the Agora, where Georgia wanted to get some shopping done. She needed some malaka to make a meat pie with the leftover lamb from Easter. There was always too much leftover food at Easter; she had already frozen what she could, but it seemed pointless to freeze the lamb as it was - it would involve defrosting, making a pie crust, preparing the filling, and then cooking it. It was easier to freeze a pie in individual servings, ready to defrost and serve up on a busy day when she was at work once the schools opened again.

"Are we going to a park, mama?" It was always a problem entertaining the children when she had to cart them with her in town. Boredom was never a problem; they just wanted to stop at every toy shop window and then go in and buy everything on display. Their faces dropped when they saw the Agora. "What are we going to do there?" asked Emmanuel.

"Well, I just need to buy some cheese, it won't take long."

"Can we go to the park afterwards?"

"We'll see," she replied, something the children were used to hearing from their mother, who was at that moment thinking about the traffic jam she'd have to encounter to get out of the town centre in the middle of the day. The Easter holidays always brought a flood of Greek tourists from the mainland who always travelled with their private cars - usually SUVs - and drove in the same manic way as in their residential Athenian neighbourhoods. They stopped to let other cars pass at STOP signs, while ignoring them themselves. As they were coming into the town, a car with Athenian licence plates had stopped in the middle of a narrow road so that the driver could make a withdrawal from an ATM. He only got back into his car when the taxi driver who had queued behind him got out of his taxi and proceeded to enter his car, presumably to park it onto into someone's driveway, thereby unblocking the flow of traffic.

An idea suddenly struck her. "Would you like something to eat or drink while we're in the Agora?" Snacking out was always a spiritual enhancer for Georgia, even if it was only a coffee or a pastry, as long as she was sitting at a cafe and she could people-watch.

"Nah, I wanna go to the park," said Ifigeneia.

"OK, if you're feeling hungry, don't ask me to buy anything for you, because I won't." Georgia was sure that there was no way the children would pass up an opportunity to sit at a cafe and be served a snack. It's too tempting to pass by a food stall in the Agora and not feel hungry, even if you weren't hungry when you entered. And as Ifigeneia and Emmanuel entered the Agora, they came across a range of bread and pastry products, which filled their eye, as much as they would fill their stomachs.

"Let's buy the cheese first," Georgia told them, trying to lure them away from the buying from the first shop they found, "and maybe we might find a place to sit down and have these."

The cheese store was on the other side of the cross-shaped market. As they walked past the central part of the Agora, Georgia noticed a few kafeneia serving the traditional Greek coffee, with a few old men sitting quietly at one of the tables. Hardly any were speaking, not even to each other. They looked lonely; the kafeneio was a way to see people coming and going all day long. They might have seen some acquaintances passing by, and would greet them as if they were visitors in their own house.

"Antonis, hronia polla, did you have a good time at the village?"... "Emeis, kala persame, isiha pragmata... we're fine, everybody's well, ... hairetismata to your family, bye for now."

They could sit in the Agora all day long until it closed at 3pm. Maybe they'd go home a little earlier for lunch, take a siesta, and then go to their afternoon haunt, like Georgia's uncles, who each supported a different kafeneio in their village in the morning, and a different one in the afternoon, meeting up only for lunch.

The cheesemaker recognised her as one of his regular customers. "Kalimera madam," he greeted her smilingly, in that special way that all Greek shop owners greet their regulars.

Georgia thought it appropriate to use the seasonal greeting of 'Hronia Polla', one of those generic greetings that you can say almost any time (except at a wedding or funeral). "Some tiromalama, please," she asked him, adding "is it fresh?" although she knew it was.

The shop owner turned to his young assistant. "Fere ena fresko malaka."

"Mama, why did he say he was going to bring a malaka?" asked Emmanuel. The shop owner laughed with Georgia.

"Etsi to lene, call malaka by its name," he answered to the little boy.

"What?" asked Emmanuel. Confusion reigned.

After paying for the cheese, the trio took to one of the other sides of the cross and came across a modern cafe with a wide variety of pastries on display: kalitsounia, crepes, spanakopita, bougatsa, cheese pie, donuts, egg pastry avgokalamara, and the largest xerotigana (E1.20 each) Georgia had ever seen. She pointed to them: "Shall we sit here? You can have anything you like from the display." She stood in front of the donuts so they could only see the healthier snacks.

The children were glad to have a seat after all the walking around. "Can I have a xerotigano?" Ifigeneia could not be fooled when it came to food. She seemed to prefer only local cuisine, even though Georgia cooked everything from Indian curry to Kiwi kai. Despite her pre-school age, she had a very refined definition of what good food meant. Emmanuel was happy with a hamburger - as long as it contained no tomato, pickle or mustard. Ifigeneia knew a good pastry when she saw one, and those xerotigana looked perfect: tightly-packed rounds of thinly-spread pastry, fried and dipped in honey syrup. Georgia wasn't surprised when Emmanuel said he'd have what Ifigeneia was having.

A busty chubby peroxide blonde, her tight pink lycra crossover top hiding very little of her cleavage, was clearing one of the tables. She smiled softly at them. Her bra wasn't her size; either that, or she was purposely wearing it extra-tight. One boob was sitting higher up than the other. A piece of thick denim just covering her buttocks was wrapped tightly round her midriff, flabby tummy hanging exposed over it. Her thick footless lime green tights and high-heeled brown mules made her look more like someone who'd just come from Minoos St. The colours of her clothes suited the spring season well; if anyone would look just at her face and not the clown's clothing she was wearing, they would have said she was beautiful, but it wouldn't have been easy not to gape at her from the neck down. She looked a scream.

A man was at the till. "Stella!" he bellowed, and the blonde turned to look at him. "Bring some water to the children." His voice was gruff, unpleasant. He was wearing a black shirt, hanging over his trousers. It was probably more comfortable than trying to smooth it over his huge stomach and tucking it into his trousers.

"Can I have a cup of coffee with that please?" No response. Georgia repeated herself.

"What KIND of coffee dja want?" Under normal circumstances, Georgia would have upped and gone elsewhere, but after living in Hania for so long, she knew that she would get the same kind of treatment at another place, maybe worse. In Hania, shop owners open and close their shops as they please. Like lambs to the slaughter, customers return to the same shops, simply because they were recommended by an acquaintance, while the store owners obviously profit enough to be able to enjoy more relaxed opening hours. They don't need to change their attitude towards customers; the store owner is always right.

So she gaped at his face, as if she was staring right through his head, and replied in a low timid voice: "Cappuccino, please," knowing that he wouldn't hear her, and hoping to grate on his nerves until he finally took the time (there were no other customers) to listen to her in the interested way Georgia had been brought up to expect from a shop owner, the way she used to show interest in the customers' orders in her parents' fish and chip shop in Wellington. After repeating her order two times, the shop owner decided she was British and that's why she spoke so softly; so he forgave her and cocked his head to one side to hear her better. No matter how Greek her face looked, her accent always gave her foreign-ness away.

Some tourists were approaching the cafe; they were Dutch: a middle-aged man, a slightly younger woman, and two spotty pale-faced teenage boys, wearing Hawaiian floral bermudas and T-shirts. The was man carrying a guide book as if it were a bible (with GRIEKENLAND on the cover) , a chunky camera dangling off his neck. They were looking at the pastry display, pointing mostly at the xerotigana with a perplexed look. They stole glances at the children eating theirs, who seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. Georgia smiled at them.

She decided to speak to them. "That's a traditional Cretan wedding dessert." It took them a few seconds to realise that she was talking to them. "We always have it at weddings. It's a pastry dipped in syrup."

The couple looked surprised with her offer of information, although she wasn't sure if they had understood her. They smiled and thanked her in that way that Northern Europeans have of saying 'thank you', as if someone had just offered them a service free of charge, and should be rewarded in some way. In any case, their confused looks had gone. They decided to take a seat. As they passed her table, Georgia almost fell off her chair. One of the boys was wearing a black t-shirt with a bullet-ridden ZONIANA signpost. She wondered whether they supported the abolition of the law stating that marijuana was a Class A drug. They were well versed in Cretan current affairs.

While the children ate their xerotigana, she sipped on her coffee slowly, as a cousin had once instructed her to do when she first arrived in Greece ("if you drink it too quickly, what are you going to do the rest of the time we're sitting here?" she had explained to her), letting it go tepid and undrinkable, while she watched the tourists walk up and down the main aisles of the Agora.

The Dutch family ordered xerotigana and ice-cream. "Stella!" roared the man at the till again. Stella produced the ubiquitous glasses of water, as if they were a sign that the shop owner was not the grouchy ruffian that he pretended to be. Georgia watched them breaking off bits of pastry; no sooner had they nipped a bit off and eaten it than another bit was broken off, until they had got to the tightest part of the pastry, which they ate more slowly.

"You speak very good English," the black-shirted shop owner broke into her daydream. "Are you Greek?" Georgia hated that question; it always carried a class distinction, a kind of segregation that she had slowly become accustomed to dealing with over the years.

"Yes, I am Greek," she replied, stressing the 'am' a little more than the other words, "but I was born έξω (= outside of Greece)." She could have told him where, but she knew that that would be the second question.

"Which country?" He still carried an inquisitive look.

"New Zealand."

"Hey, we're neighbours then. I was born in Australia, but my family left when I was very young. I don't remember hardly anything." Georgia couldn't explain to him that she remembered practically everything; she wouldn't know where to begin: the wooden houses, the wide streets, the dust-less environment, the green hills with their moving clouds of sheep...

His eyes took on a glassy haze, his voice softer than when he yelling to Stella. "I've always wanted to visit the house I was born in. I want to show it to my children. Don't you ever want to go back there?"

"To live there? No... My children were born here," she continued, "we live here now." The shop owner nodded in assent, showing recognition of the dilemma of being the tennis ball, batted between two countries, never gathering any moss, always wondering which side of the fence was greener.

"Kala einai ki'edo," he said, and Georgia smiled. It's just fine here, she thought to herself.

It was time to leave. Picking up the heavy bags of cheese, she got up to leave when the children had finished their dessert. "Now let's go to the park," Ifigeneia said. Georgia couldn't bear the thought of chasing children while carrying a block of malaka.

"Hey, shall we go to the supermarket instead?" Cries of protest came out of their mouths. "I'll buy you an ice-cream afterwards," she said, knowing that what she said was stupid - they'd just had a sweet pastry. "And we can eat it at the park near our house," she added as an afterthought.

"Yaaaaaaaaaaay!" they both cried.

The traffic on the road out of town was horrific. The queue stretched from the town centre out to the Nea Hora junction. It took Georgia half an hour to drive those four kilometres. The trip to the supermarket was to be a quick one: orzo pasta rice ('make sure it's Misko') and lavender-scented chlorine bleach ('in a white bottle') for her bedridden sudoku-solving mother-in-law. The last time she had bought her some orzo rice, she'd bought another brand. "It's not the one I wanted," scowled the old lady, as if it was her last god-given right to be permitted to choose the brand of orzo rice of her preference, and Georgia was simply being inconsiderate towards the needs of senior citizens. So Georgia simply put the pasta in her bag and pretended to make away with it, promising she'll buy Misko the next day, prompting her mother-in-law to snap: "Well, where are you going with it? I may as well have some to use, now that you've bought it!" When she returned the next day with a Misko packet, the old woman simply said: "Why did you bother to buy another packet? I'm not going to be eating kritharaki all this month!"

While the children were running up and down the aisles, bumping into other people's trolleys, and filling up her own one wit KINDER sweets, chocolate milk and coloured yoghurts, she looked for the lavender-scented chlorine bleach on the shelves, which contained every other fragrance but lavender. It became clear to Georgia that her mother-in-law must have seen it advertised on television, and the last bottle she bought could have been quite a while ago, when lavender-scented chlorine bleach was fragrance of the month, while this month, the 'in' fragrance was pine forest - the shelves were stacked with the stuff, outdoing even plain chlorine bleach. She wondered what fragrance was a hit 50 years ago when her mother-in-law had just moved from the manure-laid village paths to the town of Hania as a newly-wed - knowing that it was highly unlikely that fragrant chlorine bleach actually existed back then.

The shopping done, they all climbed back into the car. "Pagoto?" the children asked together. She stopped at a corner store to buy them an ice-cream. They chose whatever gleamed to their eye - shiny smartie candies in a plastic tube with what looked like a toilet roll made of speckled ice-cream stuck onto it. Perfect, thought Georgia; they would stop at the local park to eat it, like an 'out-of-season' tourist', they wouldn't like it because it would be sickly sweet, they'd probably throw it away, they'd forget about the ice-cream while playing in the park, their appetite wouldn't be harmed, and they'll still lunch altogether with dad, as if nothing ever happened.

This post is dedicated to Dimitra, who would have liked to be sharing that coffee with Georgia. And if you want to see how xerotigana (which could loosely be translated as "dry fries"), the traditional Cretan wedding pastry dessert, also handed out at baptisms and other occasions of a celebratory nature, are made, come back to this page in about 20 years time...

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