Greek hospitality

The Greeks have two words to describe the state of hospitality. One is philoxenia, which translates as being a friend to strangers. The other, philotimia, means a friend of honour. As anyone familiar with Homer knows, Odysseus’ son and wife, Telemachus and Penelope, found their home overrun by hungry demanding strangers due to their philoxenia but their philotimia would not let them turn these guests away unfed. 

My honourable employers would never have considered leaving me alone to fend for myself in the first few weeks and I was certainly not left unfed. At weekends Pavlos took me to his house in the countryside where his kind wife, Anthoula, plied with me creamy minced beef and aubergine moussaka and dishes of grape must pudding. When classes had finished for the day we would go for bowls of candied ice cream and glasses of cognac in a local pastry shop and philosophize about Life. 

Vasso would take me to a hillside taverna for breezy lunches beneath silver green trees. Passionate about art and living life to the full, she would hammer out her dreams and frustrations over pork chops, grilled with garlic and oregano and shiny with freshly squeezed lemon, sharp carrot and cabbage salad and chilled glasses of pale, resinated wine. 

Despina, pleased I think to have an excuse to leave the house and school after work, treated me to rolls of warm pitta bread wrapped around roast meat, yoghurt, raw onion and mustard, washed down with cold lager and eaten at rickety tables in Freedom Square. Half her mind would be on chatting to me, the other half would be on outside whose flat her cheating husband had parked his car that night. If we had spotted it as we wandered down the hill towards the square, she would bite aggressively into her pitta and warn me not to get married without a lot of serious consideration and preferably not at all. The amazing thing was that she could do that and still not get mustard all down her front. Some people are like that, aren’t they? 

And then there were the other teachers at the schools, the young Greek women who knew a lot more about what they were doing than I did, would keep to the lesson plans and the homework rules and have quiet, ordered classes. They would include me in their plans for the evening and invite me along with their friends to cafes, tavernas and discos. 

Lamia was a wonderfully accessible place to socialize in. On every side of Freedom Square were cafes. Plush inside with sofas, armchairs and coffee tables they were almost as smart outside with tubs of flowers and tables and chairs sprawling over the pavements and into the marble paved square. As night fell over the town, the square would light up with people taking their evening ‘volta’. Volta translates as a walk or a stroll, but the meaning of it stretches to include going out, meeting friends, chatting, having fun. And the Greeks are really good at this.

All these years later, I still have never learnt how to stroll as slowly as a Greek on a volta. A combination of having grown up in relatively cold and positively drizzly England, years of my dad praising me for being able to keep up with his stride and my long legs mean that I always, however hard I try to put my brakes on, end up charging along pavements and then having to stop while everyone dawdles along to join me. I do try and I did try very hard in that first year as I realized that I looked like a maniac compared to everyone else sauntering along, taking their time and enjoying gazing in shop windows and meeting friends on the way. 

So, Anna or Katerina or another of the Greek teachers would come by my little flat after work and we would set off for the evening’s volta, me hurtling off and them politely trying to rush along with me until they would get puffed out and call me to heel. We’d start off with a stroll around the square and then decide, after long conversations with everyone in the group of friends they would have collected, to go to one of the cafes. The cafes were places to see and be seen. And on one evening, I saw Thanasis and he saw me.