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The beauty of Greek food is its simplicity > grains (bread, pasta, rice), fruit and vegetables, legumes and nuts, dairy products (cheese and yogurt), fish (preferred over poultry and eggs) and olives (including olive oil).

These basic goodies will be among those offered during the 32nd annual Greek Festival, Friday through Sunday at St. Andrew Greek Orthodox Church, 52455 N. Ironwood Road, South Bend.

This year, the festival will feature an outside Kafenio (coffee shop). In Greece, a coffee shop would provide tables out in the sun where men would spend time munching, playing backgammon and discussing politics. The festival’s Kafenio will be available to the entire family, with backgammon boards set up on each table and an appetizer plate including Greek olives, feta cheese, skordalia (garlic sauce), taramosalata (Greek caviar) and Greek bread.

The festival takes place from 4 to 10 p.m. Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. For information, call (574) 277-4688.

A Pita Bread Empire > the Michaelides family, Kyriakos, Giannis, Despo, Stelios and Andreas. Giannis Michaelides arrived in Christchurch, NZ, in 1966 as a 19-year-old fleeing the troubles of Greek Cyprus. He can feel justly proud of his Lahmajou Company.

From a minor disaster, a new business can grow. Find what happened next after the toppings were one day left off the lahmajoun. Business is about people. The outside world simply sees a building, a product, a logo. All the public knows is that money goes in and stuff comes out. But inside every business there is a rich tale of joys, fears and frustrations. A soap opera if only you could peek behind the walls.

Take the Lahmajou Company, a pita bread bakery which has sprung up alongside a central Christchurch flyover during the past year. Painted bright Mediterranean white and fronted by two-storey Doric columns, the architecture has certainly excited a bit of comment. But you would be pushed to credit the story this “typical” small business has to tell.

On a sunny Friday morning, the dignitaries have turned out in force to snip the ribbon on a new pita chip packaging machine, among them small-business Minister Lianne Dalziel, the top nob from a supermarket chain, and local poet and broadcaster Gary McCormick. Hoisting his glass of bubbly, McCormick describes how his friend Giannis Michaelides arrived in Christchurch in 1966 as a 19-year-old fleeing the troubles of Greek Cyprus.

He had nothing but two shirts and a spare pair of underpants in his case, or was it two pants and one shirt? Later we walk up marble stairs to Michaelides’ office. The foyer is decorated with a mural of a Greek hillside village. All the touches of home. At 60, Michaelides agrees he has it made. And his is a story about the immigrant, family, hard work, everything you might expect. But also about ingenuity, scaling, productivity, and even that good old mainstay of business, a good dash of luck.

Michaelides trained as a print typesetter and book-binder. Arriving in Christchurch he hooked up with his uncles in the fishing industry, first running fish and chip shops and restaurants, then later helping them with the business that became United Fisheries. In 1991, with his wife, Despo, Michaelides opened up his own small business, a baker’s shop. His thinking was that no matter how hard times get, people always have to eat. So stick to something to do with food.

He specialised in lahmajoun, a small Middle Eastern pizza. It was a struggle. Of course, everyone loved cheerful Michaelides with his broken English and tasty lahmajoun. But where was the business going to go? Lahmajoun have to be eaten fresh. Flattening out dough and making toppings is a labour-intensive chore. The business had no scale. However, Michaelides was never going to get rich. And with three growing sons, he wanted something more. “You could make a good living, but that’s all you could make out of it,” he says.

Then one day Michaelides had one of those business accidents. A tray of lahmajoun went into the oven without toppings. An oven breakdown had caused a bit of confusion. Out came a tray of pita breads. Of course, the dough mix was the same. Michaelides realised that all along he had the recipe for something more mass market. Quickly he was into the pita bread industry. There are at least 16 manufacturers in New Zealand, most of them big bakeries doing flat breads as a sideline. But Michaelides was going for authenticity and quality.

Giannis brand pita bread did so well that within 18 months he had to change premises three times. The growth was good news but also dangerous. His pita bread was still hand-baked. Someone had to mix the dough, bang it out flat, load the ovens. To cope with the demand he had to keep taking on more staff. Pretty soon he was up to 30. There was never enough room even as he moved bakeries, and always a lot of spoilage. It was all quite inefficient really.

Like many small Kiwi firms, Michaelides was discovering that recruiting more people to increase production was not really paying off. The crunch came one Monday morning at his second factory when, as often happened, the oven broke down. “From 9 o’clock to 12 o’clock, we were fixing it. Everybody else was sitting around, making nothing. Then we finished fixing and now everyone says they want to go off to lunch,” says an exasperated Michaelides.

At that point he decided that if he was to keep growing the company, he would have to automate. Getting finance is part of every small business drama. When Michaelides wanted to make his first move out of his lahmajoun bakery, his original bank would not even extend his overdraft by $10,000. So he called in the branch manager and business manager of another bank, the BNZ, for a coffee and luckily got a different response. Michaelides told them he really needed $200,000 and he could offer no security on the loan. “I didn’t know them before. But I said what you see is what you get. And one thing I can say is I would have to be dead to let you down. That is all the guarantee I can give.”

He left them sitting with their cup of coffee as he unloaded a batch of pitas. When he returned, they simply told him he had a deal. And they have continued to back him ever since. But Michaelides admits that when he went for a third factory, with industrial dough mixers, he nearly overdid it. “At one stage I thought I might go bust. I over-spent. I went to Europe and bought machinery that cost me half a million. But I thought I couldn’t buy one thing and then later another thing. I just had to go for it and buy it all at once. I took a chance.”

Like many small businesses, Lahmajoun was by that time a proper family firm, with the sons growing up and becoming involved, helping out at the shop or delivering pita bread after school. But Michaelides was luckier than most. Andreas, his oldest, had qualified as an electrical engineer, while Kyriakos was studying commerce, and his youngest, Stelios, was becoming an accountant. Michaelides says he could not have planned it better, a trio of talents exactly right to take the business on to the next generation.

At this point in the story, yet another proud small business characteristic comes to the fore, the No. 8 fencing wire mentality. Michaelides might be Greek Cypriot, but he and his son Andreas turn out to have this quality in spades. With welding torch and angle grinder, they set about creating their own automated production line. They did have to buy mixing machines and a few other big ticket items. But the conveyor belts, the ovens, and much else they designed and built from scratch. It was all coming together. Yet now their third premises was out of space. So a year ago they had their fourth factory, by the flyover, purpose built for them.

Now they had the room and the systems to be the biggest pita bread producer in the country. And automation meant that instead of a 100 or more staff, the whole place can be run by a dozen people. But Michaelides and Andreas were already wondering what next? Pita bread can be wrapped and even frozen. It has no fancy toppings to complicate production and the business will quite naturally scale to cover a whole country. However what they wanted was a business that could scale to take on the world. And so they invented pita chips.

Back when there was a lot of wastage in the bakery from over-cooked or wrongly mixed batches, the results were bagged up and sold as dry crackers. But why not make crunchy mini-pitas as a healthy snack option? Andreas, the engineering son, could now really come into his own. The new product depended on entirely new machinery.

Andreas runs a hand over a few rough welds and apologises that a few of the metal covers over the oven look rather askew. He was in at the weekend giving things another bash about. They have spent a bit to get this factory, but also saved a fortune. Andreas even designed the smart red and white foil packaging for their Giannis pita bread chips. “Why would we hire someone when we can do it ourselves?” he says with some bemusement.

Lahmajoun is poised to go global. Well, fingers crossed, the chips will be a hit in New Zealand supermarkets. Then they can have a crack at Asia and the US. Anyway, you can see why Dalziel and others have flown down to cut the ribbon on their new pita chip production line. Dalziel says the story of Lahmajoun encapsulates so many of the issues that face all small businesses. The country urgently needs to automate to boost its productivity levels. We need to innovate and find products that can scale. Then there is the growing problem of business succession. Dalziel says with the retirement of the baby boom generation, it is scary to think how many small businesses lack the right people to take them on to the next generation.

Dalziel says Lahmajoun even says a lot about the role of serendipity in business. Things always happen in life. But it takes a clever business owner to spot the opportunities that fate is casting his or her way. Above all, Dalziel says, it is just refreshing to see that business is still all about people.

Lahmajou Company Ltd, Corner 26 Sandyford & Durham Streets, Sydenham Canterbury 8002, Christchurch, New Zealand, tel 033791027.

Source and Copyright > Article by John McCrone of Stuff New Zealand

The Greek Orthodox Church of Resurrection in Brookville, Long Island, NY, invites you at its 3 day festival celebration.

Special features include > Greek and American food, desserts, and a café featuring pastries and Greek coffee; live Greek music and dancing; an extensive vendor shopping bazaar with many quality items, including hand-made crafts and jewelry; Greek grocery and general store; Church tours; amusements, inflatables and games for children. A new addition this year will be a grand raffle for a 2007 Chrysler 300 automobile, or hotel stays in Crete or Mykonos.

Spend an evening of dinner, dancing and so much more, or stop in for a meal. There is ample covered seating on the grounds. The traditional Greek foods include souvlakia, gyros, tyropita and spanakopita, Greek salad, pastitsio and moussaka. Take-home foods are available. Frozen tyropita and spanakopita can also be purchased.

For the convenience of the guests, the parish has arranged for free parking at CW Post College, and will be providing shuttle bus service between Postʼs parking lot and the Church. Come! Bring friends and family for a special evening!

1400 Cedar Swamp Rd., Brookville, New York 11545, Corner of 25A and Rt. 107 (Northern Blvd. and Cedar Swamp Rd.) For additional information call the Church (516) 671-5200.

Related Links > www.resurrectiongoc.org

The Greek translation of Harry Potter’s Deathly Hallows will hit stores in Greece on November 3rd.

Greek book publisher Psichogios states on their official site that the Greek translation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is slated for a November 3, 2007 release.

Note that the Swedish translation will hit shelves November 21, and the German one on October 27. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released July 21 in the United States and United Kingdom.

Related Links > http://harrypotter.psichogios.gr/new/newbook.asp

Soloist Dimitris Sgouros will play works by Tchaikovsky at a gala concert in aid of Elpida at the Herod Atticus Theater on June 6 with the Philharmonic Orchestra of St Petersburg

The golden era of the Herod Atticus Theater began with the Athens Festival founded by Georgios Rallis, who in 1955 held the post of Minister to the Prime Minister’s office. Since then the biggest stars of opera and dance such as Callas, Fonteyn and Nureyev, great orchestras, famous conductors including Von Karajan, soloists Bachauer and Rostropovic have played there.

The theater closes in August because of the heat and Athens empties for the summer holidays. Till then there is plenty worth seeing. The season starts on June 7 with a gala concert of music by Tchaikovsky played by the Philharmonic Orchestra of St Petersburg conducted by Yuri Temirkanov and with soloist Dimitris Sgouros.

The concert is in aid of Elpida, and the proceeds will go toward the new cancer hospital at Goudi. At a press conference Thursday at the King George Hotel, Elpida’s President Marianna Vardinoyianni thanked Sgouros for his participation, as well as the Athens Festival and Giorgos Loukas, President of the umbrella organization Hellenic Festival SA, for supporting Elpida’s work, along with the National Bank, which sponsored the concert, “for their sensitivity to our cause.”

Don Jose, played by Richard Crawley in jeans, and Carmen, played by Denyce Graves in a red polo-neck top, will bring the timeless love story of Bizet’s music into the present day.

The set of the costly production, sponsored by the National Bank of Greece, extends the stage up to the fourth row of seats, and includes the frame of a convertible. In September 1984 at the Herod Atticus Theater, Agnes Baltsa, the nightingale of Lefkada, sang the title role with the Zurich Opera, with Jose Carreras as Don Jose. The theater was packed, and the applause overwhelming, an unforgettable ‘Carmen.’

 The last performances of ‘Carmen’ are Sunday and Tuesday.

Brass Band event starts Friday > A brass band festival in Central Kentucky lists a Greek trumpeter among its fans.

Gerassimos Ioannidis, a trumpeter with the Greek National Opera in Athens for 25 years before recently retiring, is in Danville helping musicians prepare for the annual Great American Brass Band Festival, which begins Friday.

Ioannidis has been teaching at Colleges and Universities this spring. He has been in Danville for about a month, working with students at Centre College and other nearby schools. “I’m now free from the orchestra and will teach more,” Ioannidis said.

Vince DiMartino, a music instructor at Centre who is hosting Ioannidis, praises his work as a trumpeter and teacher. “Gerassimos is the best teacher in Greece,” DiMartino said.

For Ioannidis, the Central Kentucky festival is a reminder of home. Most cities and towns in Greece have town bands, DiMartino said. The bands meet once or twice a week to practice or perform.

Ioannidis said the festivals in his native country are much smaller than Danville’s Brass Band Festival. They rotate annually from town to town performing mostly for local people.

Ioannidis won’t just be teaching the musicians playing in this year’s festival. He’ll be among them, and he’s looking forward to it, he said.