From Farmers’ markets to kite-flying picnics, this episode looks at food, tastes and smells in Athens.
The Valsamo on Athenas Street, where a vast range of herbs and spices are sold.
Athenians love their weekly street markets and chef and food writer Carolina Doriti takes Sofka around her local to discuss Athenian culinary habits: seasonal cooking, the monastery tradition and a recent return to traditions.
Author and cookery writer Diana Farr Louis picks wild greens in a park. Why are horta the popular basis of the Mediterranean diet, while also provoking collective memories of hunger?
The sculpture ‘Mother of the Occupation’ in the First Cemetery reminds us of the starvation that affected thousands of Athenians during the Nazi occupation of World War II, when wild greens was sometimes the only available food.
The Greek calendar is filled with fasting days, but Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, has become a joyful opportunity to have a picnic and fly a kite.
The picnic for Clean Monday is more like a feast although it is made up of ‘fasting foods’.
Sofka tries to ‘bottle’ Athens as a perfume. From ‘high notes’ of herbs, lemon leaves and blossom, there’s Frankincense and a plume of traffic fumes.