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Greece Is in the World’s Top Fifteen Destinations and Attracts 15 Million People a Year
 
Research and Markets has announced the addition of Travel & Tourism International - Profile of Greece to their offering.

In terms of tourism arrivals, Greece consistently ranks among the top fifteen destinations in the world, attracting some 15 million international travellers annually. While, the travel industry is increasingly facing stiff competition from other sun, sea and sand destinations in the region, especially Turkey, Athens has become a hot new destination (especially for city breaks), largely because of its greatly improved infrastructure, the upgrading of hotels and the expansion of the Metro.

The largest number of international travellers to Greece come from the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, accounting for over 6 million arrivals annually. The majority of Greeks holiday within their own country. In 2002, almost 4 million Greeks took a holiday at home, compared to the 400,000 or so travellers who took a holiday abroad.

This country profile report is part of the Travel and Tourism International subscription. This series provides quarterly tourism profiles of destination countries. Each quarterly issue features six profiles, all providing a cross-section of countries either established or emerging as tourism destinations.

Vital to industry professionals who must accurately evaluate a country’s tourism prospects and capacity, each report pools together the most relevant market-based information and analysis.

The reports are compiled by a global network of industry analysts who provide market-based information as well as detailed, insightful and localised interpretation of facts and figures. Covering 24 individual tourism destinations over a 12 month period, each report provides an overview of a country’s: (more…)

Food In The Ancient World
ANDREW CRUMEY
John Wilkins and Shaun Hill
Blackwell, £17.99

What would the food have been like at an ancient Greek banquet? Moussaka would certainly have been off the menu - there were no aubergines or tomatoes back then. In fact, many of the items we now take for granted as being part of the Mediterranean diet were quite unknown in ancient times. Plato never ate an orange or squeezed a lemon; the knobbly citron was the nearest thing on offer. There were, however, other foodstuffs available which have since fallen out of use, such as silphium: a herb that tasted of “sulphur mixed with garlic”. Add in some liquorice-flavoured lamb, thistles soaked in honey and lots of wine, and you begin to get an idea of what Wilkins and Hill consider to have been one of the world’s great cuisines. Greco-Roman cookery, they claim, was on a par with Indian or Chinese.

The soy sauce or mango chutney of the Roman dining table was garum, a sauce made from fermented fish. It was probably much like the Thai condiment nam pla: “quite delicate, not the stinker that the idea of rotting fish conjures up at all”. So if you want to try some ancient-style cookery, this is the first thing to get hold of.

After that, though, it all gets trickier. Cookery books were highly popular in ancient times (one poet complained that they outsold Homer), but manuals which take you step-by-step through food preparation are a fairly recent invention. The ‘aspirational’ food book - tempting you with mouthwatering descriptions and illustrations evoking posh dinner parties or rustic foreigners - are actually the more traditional kind, and this is what the Greeks and Romans had. The reason is simple: cooks were illiterate slaves who learned their skills through apprenticeship, and cookery books were aimed at rich diners wanting to know how best to impress their guests.

Consequently, Wilkins and Hill have to piece together a picture built largely from literary quotations and archaeological remains. It amounts to an enormous pile of evidence, but the missing factor is what it all really tasted like. That is the first problem with this book - it provides, in an appendix, only three very basic recipes, and readers expecting to learn how to cook authentic Greco-Roman food will be left disappointed.

The other problem is the writing. This is an absolutely fascinating subject, but it is presented in a singularly unappetising way. Wilkins, a professor of Greek, writes the main chapters, while Hill, a chef, contributes brief introductions to each. Wilkins’ tone is meticulously scholarly, but the frequent repetitions suggest a work pulled together from lecture notes and conference papers. I lost track of the number of times I read that apricots were introduced in the first century BC, but by the fourth or fifth time I was sick of apricots.

This book is best treated as a kind of mezze, dipped into at random. Every page offers something interesting, even if the whole thing taken together results in a bad case of indigestion. While it cannot enlighten us on exactly what a Greek or Roman meal was like, it does raise intriguing questions about the way we regard food, and why we eat the things we do.

For example, the Roman physician Galen described a village that suffered a particularly hard winter. First the people slaughtered all the pigs and ate them. Then they dug up the acorns stored as pig food, and ate those too. The acorns, Galen noted, were nutritionally superior to the peasants’ usual diet, but they never normally ate them because of their low status as animal food. Our diet is a statement about where we see ourselves in nature’s pecking order.

In one ancient Greek play, a woman illustrates her poverty by saying she has eaten a cicada. Insects are a potentially rich source of protein, but Greeks and Romans ate cicadas only in desperation (though they tolerated locusts). They turned up their noses at camel meat but happily tucked into puppy, hedgehog and fox (the latter fattened with grapes).

We tend to forget the link that has always existed between food and medicine. Plato distinguished between the doctor who prescribes food for health, and the cook who entertains the palate. Many familiar foodstuffs were initially eaten for medicinal reasons, then found attractive in their own right. Garlic and onions came into this category, as did the noxious silphium, which apparently became one of the classic flavours of ancient cooking. Puppy meat, too, was originally a medicine.

Some familiar images turn out to be true - the Greeks and Romans really did recline on sofas while dining, and dormice were a delicacy. But Wilkins and Hill say nothing about the legendary vomitoria of Roman orgies. In Greece, men and women dined separately - and nothing at all is known about what the women ate. For the men, meat was the most prized food, with athletes being the biggest eaters. One supposedly got through an entire bull, having carried it on his shoulders first.

For the Greek hoi polloi, the staple meal was mazza, a barley porridge flavoured with olive oil and vinegar. On this, the authors take a tone reminiscent of Samuel Johnson. “Porridge has a deeply unappealing image. Made from oats, it forms the traditional breakfast in Scotland, where it is considered part of the country’s heritage, but is little eaten by choice elsewhere.” Maybe Wilkins and Hill should be force-fed thistles by way of punishment for this slur, but in any case they reckon mazza was more like polenta, used as a base for a variety of dishes.

The other great factor of food that we have largely lost is its religious dimension. Sacrifices were part of daily eating - the slaughtered animals were all consumed. Our choice of particular festive meals, such as Christmas turkey, is a last puny vestige of something that endures more strongly in Greece, where the lambs roasted on a spit and eaten at Easter time - along with delicious dishes made from the entrails, such as kokoretsi - are a direct link with the pre-Christian past. So too is kolyva, a boiled wheat dish still eaten at funerals, exactly as it has been for thousands of years.

As for the liquorice-flavoured lamb, the authors confess there is some ambiguity in the recipe preserved from ancient Greece. The word used could mean anise or dill, the latter giving a dish that would pass muster in any modern-day taverna. Maybe Greco-Roman food was not so weird after all.

Given the potential appeal of its subject matter, this book does feel rather like a missed opportunity. Academics will appreciate the level of detail and thoroughness, but with only a little more warmth and a lot less needless repetition, Food In The Ancient World could have been a must-read for adventurous gastronomes. As it is, this is an interesting curiosity to add to the shelf: good for a browse but leaving many questions tantalisingly unanswered.

Ready to frappé? Take instant coffee, sugar and add cold water. Now shake for Grecian gold.

In the annals of Greek civilization, the so-called frappé is something of an overnight sensation. The first one (that we know of anyway) was concocted from sugar, cold water and a spoonful of instant coffee granules at a trade show in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, a mere 47 years ago, the equivalent, in Greek years, of a week ago Thursday. Yet this month, while the events in Athens are on everyone’s lips, the lips of Athenians will be on the upper ends of bent straws buried in tall, icy cold glasses of frothy frappé.

The primordial joys of java are hardly new to the gregarious Greeks. The nation’s high volume of cafes, in terms of both number and noise, demonstrates widespread affection for the Arabica-imbued rendezvous. The utter darkness and density of traditional Greek coffee, brewed on stove tops to the consistency of sand, reflects an ancestral craving for caffeinated conversation.

Frappés deliver much of the potency Greeks love, only in a cold and wet format calibrated to their hot and dry summers. Better still, a tall glass lasts much longer than a demitasse.

“The frappé is a long break from everything,” notes Elena Votsi, the jewelry designer who created the medals for the 2004 Olympics. “It prolongs the opportunity to talk.”

A frappé is simply instant coffee, sugar and cold water shaken vigorously together to produce a thick foam, then poured into a tall, ice-filled glass. Add milk, or not, as you like. The frappé formula is mutable: Cafes offer three levels of sweetness, gliko for sweet, three teaspoons sugar to one teaspoon instant coffee, metrio for medium sweet, two teaspoons sugar and sketo for unsweetened. Then there’s the milk factor, with or without. Me gala “with milk” invariably indicates evaporated milk, which produces a richer frappé, though whole and nonfat milk produce satisfactory results. The Athens-based fashion designer Angelos Frentzos likes his frappés blended sketo and horis gala “without milk” and with a triple dose of instant coffee. “Otherwise, you cannot understand the coffee taste,” he explains.

But even one rounded teaspoon of the Greek Nescafé packs a punch, which explains why Greek Californians seek it out at Greek House Importing (7856 Firestone Blvd., Downey) and Papa Cristo’s (2771 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles) or log onto to www.GreekShops.com, a Santa Monica-based importer. Papa Cristo’s will mix up a frappé for you too. While American brands lack the bitter bite the Greeks covet, just about any instant coffee will trap air when shaken with water and produce the frothy effect.

Yet not every Greek is a fan of frappés and what they’ve, er, foamented. “Personally I hate it,” says Nikos Dimou, the social critic and author of “On the Misery of Being Greek.” “Frappé has been the main marketing theme of Nescafé in Greece for decades. All that brainwashing definitely has changed the cafe culture in Greece.”

Novelist Amanda Michalopoulou does not view the change unfavorably. She compares the map-like forms left by the frappé foam on the sides of a glass to those left by a near-empty cup of Greek coffee turned upside down according to fortune-telling tradition.

“I remember old men in the typical Greek kafeneion, on the islands, sipping their frappés, and the foam staying in the rim of the glass and creating some beautiful compositions. It was a little bit of magic.”

Frappé > Recipe > Total time: 2 minutes > Servings: 1

Note: Because they dissolve well in cold liquids, imported Nescafé instant coffees are best for this recipe. Although they are slightly different, both Nescafé Classic and Nescafé Clasico, imported from Mexico and available at shops.

1 rounded teaspoon instant coffee

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 cup or more cold water, divided

1/4 cup evaporated milk or regular milk

1. Place the coffee, sugar and one-fourth cup water in a shaker, jar or blender. Cover and shake well for 30 seconds, or blend for 10 seconds in the blender, to produce a thick foam.

2. Slowly pour the coffee mixture down the sides into a tall (14-ounce) glass half-filled with ice. Add the milk, pouring down the side of the glass (so as not to dispel the foam), and top off with about one-fourth to one-third cup cold water to fill the glass.

Each serving (using lowfat milk):
64 calories; 2 grams protein; 11 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 1 gram fat; 0 saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 33 mg. sodium.

Related Picture > Greek Cafe Scene > In Athens, diners choose frappe me gala (with milk), left, and horis gala (without milk), right.

See this picture (and more) at our Flickr Photo Gallery.

There are many variations of the Greek moussaka, which almost always includes layers of meat sauce, eggplant, and white sauce.

But Petros Markopoulos, a small, unassuming man with a big, easy smile, makes a mean version. His rich dish begins with a bed of potatoes.

When Markopoulos moved here from Greece 14 years ago, he wanted to perpetuate the culinary traditions he was raised on and ”duplicate the foods from home.” At his 8-year-old restaurant, Ithaki Mediterranean Cuisine, Markopoulos insists that authentic Greek dishes like moussaka, pastitsio, another casserole of pasta, meat sauce, and white sauce, and baked lamb remain true to their heritage. He might fiddle with other recipes, tweaking them to appeal to American tastes, cutting back on frying and excess oil, but he leaves the classics alone. Especially when he got his recipes from his mother.

In Greece, says the restaurateur, moussaka was once made only in the summer. That seems incredible when you consider how rich and layered the dish is, and what ideal hearty winter fare it makes. But summer is the season that produces fresh eggplant and ripe tomatoes, another common ingredient. Because these days the vegetables are available off-season in Greek cities, just as they are here, the dish is now made year-round. Markopoulos, too, offers moussaka in summer and winter, served in individual clay pots.

Markopoulos has two secret ingredients: dry sherry in the meat sauce, which, he says, adds a little sweetness and helps cut the richness of the meat, and Greek mizithra cheese in the white sauce, also called bechamel, its saltiness and dry texture offset the creamy mixture.

This many-layered dish has several components, so it’s time-consuming, but the various elements, even the entire dish, can be made in advance.

Ithaki Mediterranean Cuisine, 25 Hammatt St., Ipswich, 978-356-0099.

In her book, “The Glorious Foods of Greece” (Morrow, $40), Diane Kochilas writes that clay-baked chickpea soup from Sifnos “is one of the simplest, most delicious dishes in all of Greece.”

Chickpea Soup from Sifnos Island

Since Kochilas’ recipe calls for a covered earthenware pot, I adapted it to the more common Dutch oven. I have found this to be a wonderful method for cooking not only chickpeas, but virtually any dried beans. It is particularly successful with small white beans such as cannellinis. When the beans are fully cooked, simmer off some of the liquid to make a bean stew to serve over rice.

1 pound dried chickpeas, picked over and rinsed

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 medium onions, finely chopped

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 bay leaf

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Soak the beans overnight in ample water to which you have added the baking soda. (Alternately, heat the beans, baking soda and ample water in a large pot. When the water boils, turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let chickpeas soak for at least an hour.) Drain, rinse and drain again.

2. Place the chickpeas, onions, olive oil, bay leaf, salt and pepper in a large Dutch oven and cover everything by 3 1/2 inches of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer until the chickpeas have softened slightly, 45 to 50 minutes.

3. Transfer the Dutch oven to a 350-degree oven and bake, covered, until the chickpeas are tender, about 2 hours, depending on the age of the chickpeas. The chickpeas should remain whole and not distintegrate, but the soup should be thick. While the chickpeas are baking, check the water content occasionally and add more water, if necessary, to keep everything from sticking. Remove the bay leaf. Serve hot.

Makes 6 to 8 servings.

A Patras taverna owner has attempted to set a new world record by making a gyros souvlaki which will weigh some 1,850 kilos and will need 300 kilos of herbs and spices for added flavor.

Costas Dasios began setting up the structure to roast the meat. It involves a 1.73-meter stainless steel skewer surrounded by 72 grills and powered by a 4-horsepower motor. A 2-ton natural gas tank will provide the fuel for the effort, which should see Dasios enter the Guinness Book of World Records.

The current record was set in Cyprus by Lebanese restaurateur Sami Eid, who cooked an 1,814-kilo gyros souvlaki made from some 2,150 chickens.

Dasios has set up his structure in Patras harbor and started cooking the meat at 9 a.m. for around four hours. The souvlaki will be cut into portions weighing 100 grams.

GREEK SALAD

Serves 8

1 head leaf lettuce, iceberg or lettuce of choice

2 tomatoes, cut into wedges

1 cup Kalamata olives, pitted

1 cup thinly sliced red onion

1 cup thinly sliced cucumber

1 cup thinly sliced bell pepper

4-ounce package feta crumbles (tomato-basil preferred)

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

1 teaspoon dried oregano, crumbled

Wash, tear and pat lettuce leaves dry. Place in large bowl with tomatoes, olives, onion, cucumber, bell pepper and feta.

To make dressing, combine remaining ingredients in a smaller bowl and mix well. Pour over salad and toss well.

Nutritional analysis per serving: 329 calories, 32 grams fat, 9 grams carbohydrates, 4 grams protein, 13 milligrams cholesterol, 316 milligrams sodium, 3 grams dietary fiber, 85 percent of calories from fat.

DAD’S GREEK SALAD

Serves 8

1 head iceberg lettuce, washed, coarsely chopped and dried

1 large tomato, coarsely chopped

1 cucumber, peeled and chopped

1 red onion, coarsely chopped

1 cup finely chopped curly parsley

1/2 cup green salad olives

4-ounce package feta crumbles

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/4 cup white vinegar

1/2 cup mayonnaise

Salt and pepper to taste

1 to 2 teaspoons dried dillweed

Toss lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, parsley and olives in a large serving bowl.

In a smaller bowl, combine remaining ingredients, mixing well. Pour feta mixture on salad and toss well. Serve immediately.

Nutritional analysis per serving: 175 calories, 16 grams fat, 8 grams carbohydrates, 4 grams protein, 17 milligrams cholesterol, 324 milligrams sodium, 2 grams dietary fiber, 76 percent of calories from fat.