Going to the Great Pita Pie Festival in Lia, Greece

 One of my very first blog posts, back in August of 2009, was this one about the Great Pita Pie Festival in Lia, Greece, started by the first woman mayor of  Nick's native village.  It's still going strong eight years later,  scheduled for August 17 this year. Our family will be there for all the delicious fun.  (And the villagers mentioned below will all be there too!)

Last week, when we drove up the winding mountain road in northern Greece and arrived at Nick’s native village of Lia, just below the Albanian border, we were thrilled to learn that the famous “Yiorti tis Pitas”—or “Festival of Pita Pies” was happening the very next day—Saturday Aug. 22.

The Greek calendar is full of religious holidays—like the August 15 festival of the Virgin Mary, which is second only to Easter in importance—but each village also has its own Saint’s Day (Lia celebrates July 21—the feast day of the Prophet Elias.)

But we had never been lucky enough to be present at the “Festival of Pita Pies” which, as far as I know, is unique to Lia.

Our neighbor in the village—Dina Petsis –was elected Lia’s first female president in 2006 and she brought to the village the Festival of Pita Pies—a kind of harvest festival—now in its third year. Pita pies are the traditional delicacy of this area of northern Greece. The pitas are not desserts, but savory pies with all manner of good things baked between layers of phyllo dough. (But Dina also cooked a sweet apple and cinnamon pita as well—because I asked for it.)

In 2002—when daughter Eleni spent a year living in Lia, rebuilding the ruined family home and writing her travel memoir “North of Ithaka”, Dina introduced her to the secrets of pita making,including a pita made with 13 kinds of wild greens including nettles, and another cheese-y pie called “dish rag pie”. Eleni even learned to make a sweet cake that a single girl can bake and take to church, which she called in her book “Get a Man” pie.

Last Saturday, Dina, who is not only village president but also the finest cook in Lia, let Eleni help her make 5 different kinds of pitas. All the village women from miles around were cooking their specialities. Dina’s contributions included a pita full of various greens, a quiche-like pita featuring zucchini (everything from her garden, of course) another pita with macaroni and cheese in it, and my personal favorite—a pita filled with chicken and rice. (The secret ingredients, Eleni told me, were mint and grated carrots.)

Dina had been so busy getting ready for the Pita Festival that she cheated this time and used store-bought phyllo dough for her pitas, although most of the village women proudly make their own homemade phyllo dough, which is rolled out on a board with a stick that resembles a broom handle.

A large, level area in the village, shaded by plane trees and called the Goura, was strung with lights and Greek flags. The ladies contributing pitas came early. There were 76 pitas in all, cooked by more than 30 women. Notis, who runs the one village store and coffee shop in Lia with his wife Stella, had been roasting lambs on spits all day for those who were not satisfied with pita alone. He and his helpers also sold beer and local wines. Notis would hack meat off the lambs with his cleaver, fill a plate and weigh it to know what to charge.

But the pitas were free. Daughter Eleni and Dina and her helpers cut the pitas into squares and brought each table a plate filled with a variety. There were no prizes—for no one could taste every pita and decide which was the winner. (Our table, however, unofficially awarded first prize to Dina’s Cotopita—the chicken pie.)

Then Dina, in her role as president, gave a speech of welcome and the orchestra began to play. The clarinet player, as usual, was the star, assisted by a fiddler, a bouzouki player, a singer and a young boy on the tamborine.

Our village priest, Father Procopi, along with Dina, started the dancing and the lady cantor from the church joined in. (In the photos Dina is wearing a black and white blouse and Eleni a turquoise dress.) Then, as the high spirits (kefi) increased, more pita-baking women and exuberant young people joined in the dance. The older men mostly watched and drank and devoured the 76 pitas donated by the expert cooks.

We went to bed around midnight, but Dina and her husband Andreas didn’t stop dancing until 2:30 in the morning.

We’ve already marked next year’s calendar for August 22-- the fourth annual Yiorti tis Pitas in Lia.

Traveling in Greece with Babies and Grandparents

Guest blogger today:  Daughter Eleni Gage Baltodano, who wrote this funny essay about part of our Greek odyssey in June, when she had a two-month-old son and a three-year-old daughter in tow (as well as husband Emilio, and Papou Nick and Yiayia Joanie ) and her breast milk pump had a melt down.  She wrote it for Pure Wander Magazine which is "Your Destination for Unique Family Vacations."

I'm posting here the first two paragraphs of her essay.  To read the whole thing, including what happened when the breast pump exploded, visit the Pure Wander site below. 

http://www.purewander.com/greece-for-the-ages-all-ages/

When I planned a family trip to Greece for June, the last month of my maternity leave, I thought it was a stroke of Mommy Genius. I envisioned my parents babysitting our almost-four-year-old daughter and our just-two-month-old son while my husband, Emilio, and I enjoyed long dinners at outdoor cafés on the romantic cobblestoned streets of Corfu Town.

People told me I was crazy to travel with an infant, but I missed my cousins in Greece and wanted to visit while I was still on leave, so I wouldn’t use up my precious vacation time. With my parents along for the ride, I’d have plenty of help. And this wasn’t my first rodeo; I knew what I was doing. I got the baby’s two-month vaccines and made sure his passport arrived in time for the flights we’d purchased; with all that done, I figured I was in the running for Mother of the Year.

It wasn’t until we arrived on Corfu that I realized I had left the essential funnel/cone components of my electric breast pump at home in New York...

Eleni N. Gage is an avid travel writer and author of Ladies of Managua. Find out more about her global family travel adventures and beyond on her website.

Amalia visits Papou’s Greek Village of Lia

The second chapter of Amalia’s Greek odyssey, after Mykonos, was a visit to the Greek village of Lia on the Albanian border, where her grandfather, Nicholas Gage, was born.  As he wrote in the book “Eleni”, the village was occupied by Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war, and in June of 1948, when the guerrillas prepared to collect the children and send them behind the Iron Curtain to re-education camps, Nick’s mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, organized the escape of her 8-year-old son and three of his four sisters, in the hope that they could eventually join their father in Worcester, MA.

After the escape, Eleni Gatzoyiannis was arrested, imprisoned in the basement of her own house along with 30 other prisoners, tortured and eventually executed by a firing squad.  Many prisoners were buried in the yard of the house, which the guerrillas had taken over for their headquarters. After the war ended and the Communists were driven back over the border, the empty house fell into ruin.  In 2002 Eleni Gage, Nick’s daughter, spent a year in the village rebuilding her grandmother’s house, a saga she recorded in her travel memoir “North of Ithaka.”

The photos above show three generations: Nick, daughter Eleni Gage Baltodano,  and granddaughter Amalia Baltodano, posing on the terrace of the Eleni Gatzoyiannis house, which has been decorated and furnished just as it was during Amalia’s great grandmother’s lifetime, including traditional clothes of the period. 

The plaque over the door lists three dates: 1856 when the original two-room house was built by an ancestor of Nick’s father, Christos Gatzoyiannis, (a coin with that date was buried under the cornerstone), 1924, when Christos expanded the house by adding on a large room and hallway, and 2002, when Eleni Gage rebuilt her grandmother’s house with the help of Albanian workers, using the same stones that had fallen into the foundation. 

Inside the house, over one fireplace, is a photograph of Nick’s mother and father, when they were first married in 1926.  In this main room there are also an iron bed, a wooden cradle and a carved and painted casella  (dowry chest).  

A guest book records the names and comments of people who have come from all over the world to see the place where Eleni lived and died.

On a low table called a soufra, Amalia found a giant spoon,

Which she discovered would also work as a hat.

After visiting the house, everyone went to see who was sitting in the square outside Lia’s Inn, where last summer Amalia had so much fun sailing flowers in the spring. 

last summer

She practiced walking on the ledge around the plane tree.

And she showed Vangeli, one of the elders of the village, how to play “Endless Alphabet” on her I-Pad.

Vangeli likes to call himself the “psychiatrist of the sidewalk” because he’s usually sitting in the square watching the world go by, but he was not experienced in the use of the I-pad that Amalia was carrying. 

He caught on fast to “Endless Alphabet.”

Dinner at the house of next-door neighbors Dina and Andreas Petsis is always the highlight of a visit to the village, because Dina is a world-class cook, incorporating into her dishes wild greens including nettles, seasonal treats from her garden like stuffed squash blossoms, and her own chickens and eggs.

This is just part of Dina and Andreas’s collection of antique hammered copper and brass, the traditional craft of this area of Epiros.

Amalia used some of it to make a tea party for herself and their little dog Rudy.

When it was time to leave the village and move on to Corfu, Amalia stopped by the courtyard of the Inn to tell everyone good-bye and to promise that she’d be back next summer.

Amalia Discovers Her Greek Village with Fountains, a Manhunt and Ice Cream

On July 19, Amalia went with her Mommy, her Yiayia Joanie, her Papou Nick and her honorary Yiayia, Eleni Nikolaides, to the village of Lia in Northern Greece, which her grandfather Nick Gage wrote about in the book and film  "Eleni" and her Mommy wrote about in the travel memoir "North of Ithaka."

This is the house where Nick was born and, after his mother was imprisoned and then murdered by Communist guerrillas, it fell into ruins and Nick's daughter, Eleni Gage, (now Baltodano) returned to the village for a year in 2002 to oversee the rebuilding of the house, just as her grandmother Eleni had known it.

Nick introduces granddaughter Amalia to the house.

Amalia was more interested in the outdoor fountain.

Where she played with her sand toys.

That night everyone gathered at the Church of the Holy Trinity for the beginning of the annual festival of the Prophet Elias--the village saint.

Papou Nick, Mommy Eleni and Amalia waited outside the church.

After the church service, the icon of the Prophet Elias was paraded through the village, with people joining the parade as it passed their houses. Father Prokopi carried the Bible.

That night everyone gathered in the open space called the Goura to eat lamb and dance and sing. The clarinetist and singer and the rest of the live orchestra came from Albania but sang in Greek--Epirote music.

The next day Papou Nick introduced Amalia to the courtyard of the Inn of Lia.

The courtyard was abuzz with news: two Albanian convicts, who had broken out of a Greek jail months ago, and were presumed to be heading toward Albania where they could not be extradited, had encountered the Greek police at 4:30 this morning in a gun battle in the small town of Vrosina, just at the foot of the mountain road that leads to Lia, (where we stopped yesterday to get provisions)  and one of the two was killed, while wounding a soldier, but the other one escaped.  Now our village was crawling with police, stopping every car to look for the fugitive.  The road over the Kalamas River that divided our mountains from the rest of Greece was being periodically closed and opened.

Amalia distracted herself from the excitement by discovering the spring in the Inn's courtyard.

Where she spent the afternoon floating flower "boats" over the edge into the deep blue sea, with the help of "Yiayia Eleni".

 Nick chose to keep calm and carry on by playing tavli.

While Yiayia Joanie and Amalia put on our sunglasses and drew pictures on the tablecloth.

Later, when Mommy Eleni took Amalia to the nearby playground, it was full of police holding rifles and stopping every car up the road into the village.

As of today, there's no news of the last escaped Albanian, who may be hiding in the famous hollow tree below our village which has sheltered fugitives in the past, including a saint, but while the village waits with bated breath and is both terrified and thrilled to be featured in every news broadcast, Amalia has much more earth-shaking news:  here at the Inn she discovered the Ice Cream Cone.

P.S. If you want to read a much funnier version of these events, check out daughter Eleni's latest blog post at http://www.elenigage.com/lockdown-in-lia-larger-than-life-days-in-our-tiny-village/

A Mother Kvelling About A Daughter’s Novel

Valentine’s Day was the launch of daughter Eleni’s second book, first novel, “Other Waters”, published, like her first book, “North of Ithaka",  a travel memoir, by St. Martins Press.  Despite having surgery a week before, she’s thrown herself into publicizing the book with book signings and presentations in Coral Gables, Florida (at Books & Books) , and tonight in Manhattan at the Barnes & Noble on 86^th and Lexington.  (Tomorrow she’ll be speaking at the Library in her hometown of Worcester MA, and then  on to Boston, Denver and who knows where else.  With a six-month-old baby.  Who’s still breastfeeding.)  To find out exactly where and when, check out her website:  http://www.elenigage.com/

I’m amazed at how many more ways there are to promote a book than there were back in the 1970’s and '80’s when my husband and I were doing it.  Today many of those roads for making your book known involve the internet—a subject I’m going to write about later, when I’ve seen all the ways Eleni’s using them and how effective they are.

“Other Waters” has already had excellent reviews from the likes of Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews (which is traditionally hard to please).  Kirkus called it “A lovely read” in a review that began  “Can goddesses walk among us?  Can an entire family really be cursed?”

But today I just want to kvell—a more picturesque way of saying “brag”-- because today I saw the review of Eleni’s novel, “Other Waters” in the  March 5 issue of People Magazine—the one with “Elizabeth Smart’s Dream Wedding” on the cover.

The review starts with a photo of the book cover and a small headshot of Eleni and People gives it four (out of a possible four) stars.  The review is by Caroline Leavitt and just In case you don’t have a copy of People handy, I’ll quote it for you here: 

“A Jane Austen-ish plot gets a delicious Indian accent in this effervescent novel by former People editor Gage.  Maya Das, a psychiatric resident torn between her parents’ traditional values and her bustling New York City life, finds her world upended when her grandmother’s death ostensibly unleashes a curse.  Maya’s boyfriend dumps her and she’s faced with a malpractice suit, so she heads back to India to remove the curse, save her family and reboot her life.  But in this exotic, mysterious setting cultures collide, love grows more complicated and Maya finally discovers just whom—and where—she is really meant to be.”

Jane Austen-ish!  A family curse! Exotic, mysterious India!  Doesn’t this review make you want to rush out and buy “Other Waters”?  Well, do it now.  You can even buy and download a Kindle version of it.

Musing on Apple Pie

I am not a good cook.  My mother Martha was not a good cook either. (If it was Thursday, you could be sure we were eating Tuna Casserole with crushed potato chips on top.) My first job, back in 1964, was as a writer in Ladies’ Home Journal’s food department.  “I can’t believe you’re telling seven million women how to cook!” my mother would often exclaim.  (Of course I wasn’t writing recipes—the ladies in the test kitchen were doing that.  It was my job to write the text that went with the recipes, with a heavy reliance on words like “crunchy” , “delectable”, “golden brown”, “rib-sticking”, “taste tempting”, etc.)

But my mother and (later) I always knocked ourselves out at Thanksgiving—it was part of our Scandinavian/American heritage. When I was a child, we would often drive the forty miles to Aunt Olive and Uncle Clarence’s house in Princeton, Minnesota, at Thanksgiving, where our grandmother and aunts would be laboring over a vat of boiling oil, making those three-dimensional cookies called “Rosettes”. (You need a decorative iron mold on a long metal rod, coat it with thin dough, then plunge it into the boiling oil.)  I remember we’d all eat until we were sick—cleansing the palate with sherbets between courses so we could eat more—and then the men would loosen their belts and fall asleep while watching football on television and the women would retreat to the kitchen to clean up and gossip.

Ever since I got married forty-one years ago, I’ve made a big production out of Thanksgiving – even in the years when we were living with our three children in Greece, where the traditional ingredients were never available. (Daughter Eleni, in her travel memoir “North of Ithaka” describes a particularly hilarious Thanksgiving when I cooked turkey in the very primitive conditions of my husband’s mountaintop childhood village while Dina, the acknowledged cooking queen of Lia, endeavored to out-cook me, ending up with a charred Turkey that everyone preferred to my golden-brown one.)

So for 41 years I’ve been doing Thanksgiving—streamlining the procedure drastically every year because I’m lazy, and my Greek relatives still don’t realize that my special cornbread stuffing comes out of a package (slightly doctored up.)  They spend days making their Greek stuffing, which includes chestnuts, hamburger and a lot of other things.  Of course everyone prefers the Greek stuffing, but I still make my cornbread stuffing, because it’s “tradition.”  

But because I like to bake, I generally make four pies or three pies and a cake.  This year I made three of the pies on Monday night—a “reduced calorie” pecan pie with maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and a “chocolate-kahlua” pie which somehow became a Thanksgiving tradition many years ago when I tried out the recipe.  Now I could leave out the turkey and no one would complain, but they sure would miss the Chocolate Kahlua pie.  The pumpkin pie I’m making today.

But to get to Apple Pie.  Some people (like author Joyce Maynard, who often writes about her famous apple pies) are born with a pie-making gene that’s usually inherited from their mother.  There was no apple-pie gene in my family.  So every Thanksgiving I try a different apple pie recipe, in the hopes of finding the prize winning Apple Pie that will bring tears (of joy, not sorrow)  to my family’s eyes.

I haven’t hit on the perfect recipe yet, but this year, on Monday night, I baked a pie based on a recipe I tore out of the New York Post.  The article seems to be about what wives of NY Jets football players cook at Thanksgiving.  Now, I know even less about football than I do about cooking, but I noticed the apple pie recipe with the title “Apple Pie Made Woody Marry Her!” Woody is Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets, it seems, and the recipe looked very simple, so I figured why not?  If it landed this lady a “mogul husband” I’d giving it a try—even though I landed my mogul husband forty some years ago by learning to make Greek Coffee.

Among other things, the recipe calls for “Five large peeled apples, chopped.”    When I went to my supermarket on Monday before my pie-making marathon, I reflected that I love Thanksgiving because (1.)  It’s non-denominational—everyone can enjoy it except maybe the Native Americans—and (2.)  Only at this time of year do you see the market jammed with crazed shoppers trying to find some exotic recipe ingredient (dried cherries, fresh ginger, craisins ) that they never buy at any other time of the year.  

I finally found the last package of chocolate wafers--needed for the crust of the Kahlua pie, but it was way at the back of the top shelf so I convinced a leggy blonde shopper pushing a baby nearby to climb up on the bottom shelf and reach it for me. 

(Food shopping at Thanksgiving can be hazardous to one’s health, as I reflected yesterday when, visiting the newly opened Wegman’s in Northboro to get some of their adorably frosted Turkey cookies to use as place cards, I passed by a woman who was being wheeled on a gurney out the door to a waiting ambulance, escorted by about a dozen EMTs and trailed by Wegman’s employees looking worried.  As I stood aside to let the gurney pass,  I heard the injured woman say “I didn’t even see her coming and then there she was, right in front of me!”)

During my pie-shopping market visit on Monday, I went to the produce department and asked an employee who was stacking fruit, a young man about 18 years old, “What’s the best kind of apple for making pie?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” he stammered, then asked another 18-year old near-by who also shrugged.  Then he yelled at an older man, who was spraying brightly colored  peppers, “Hey Tom!  What’s the best kind of apple….”

Tom didn’t even blink. “You need a combination,” he said.  “Pink Lady for the flavor, Comstock for the crunch and also Granny Smith.”  He chose for me one Pink Lady, two bright red Comstocks, and two green Granny Smith’s. 

That’s the kind of information and friendly interaction with one’s neighbors that is inspired by Thanksgiving.  People helping people.  As opposed to Christmas shopping, when it’s the law of the jungle to get the last Tickle-Me-Elmo.  That’s another reason I love Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the pie that made Woody Johnson marry his wife Suzanne.  It’s keeping cold on the porch.  On Thursday we’ll find out if I’ve finally hit on The Ultimate Apple Pie—good enough to become a Thanksgiving Tradition, like Chocolate Kahlua.  I’ll let you know.

A House in a Greek Village

                       

(This watercolor of the restored Eleni Gatzoyiannis house was done by visiting British artist, Bill Peake.)

On Saturday, my husband, Nicholas Gage, and I returned, as we do every summer, to his small Greek village of Lia near the top of a mountain in Epiros, Greece, just a kilometer below the border with Albania.

As the sun began to set, we joined the villagers sitting at tables in the courtyard outside the inn under the plane trees.  Soon some visitors to the region came over, one by one, to introduce themselves.

This happens every time Nick returns to the village. The visitors have come up this twisting, vertiginous mountain road into the Mourgana mountain range because they want to see the places that figure in Nick’s 1983 book “Eleni” about the life and death of his mother Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who never left this village. 

In 1948 she was executed, at the age of 41, by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas because she had managed to get four of her five children led out of the village and down through mine fields to freedom under cover of night.  Eleni organized this escape after she learned that the children in the guerrilla-occupied village were to be taken away to camps behind the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Greek Civil War. (28,000 children were taken from Greece in what is called the “pedomasoma”, or “gathering of children”). On the last day before the escape, she was forced to stay behind with one of her daughters to work for the guerrillas in the threshing fields.

Since the book “Eleni” was published in 1983, it’s been translated into 32 languages. People from around the world come regularly to Lia to see where Nick’s mother lived and died. A week ago, Nick showed his village and his childhood home to 14 students from John Jay College in New York and their professor, and on August 2, he will welcome 30 students from Northeastern University, who read the book in their Greek History class.

Once the weather turns good in the spring, nearly every day brings a foreign visitor or two on this pilgrimage, although they find that some Greeks, even in this village where so many were executed, still harbor pro-Communist sentiments, and may be unhelpful in answering their questions—even to denying that Eleni Gatzoyiannis ever lived there. 

Last Wednesday night, the two couples who were astonished to find themselves sitting in the Inn’s courtyard with the author of the book included David from Wales and his Greek companion Effie, and a couple who had come from Austria, Hannelore and Claus. 

                                                                Effie & David with Nick

The next day Nick led them on a tour of the spots that are significant to the story, including the ancient church of Saint Demitrios where Eleni worshipped every day and where her bones were kept in the ossuary after being recovered from the ravine where the guerrillas threw the thirteen civilians they executed on August 28, 1948. 

  Nick looking at a relative's recent grave.  His mother's remains have been moved to Hope Cemetery in   Worcester, MA and buried next to his father.

The guerrillas had taken over Eleni’s home for their headquarters and they kept her and 30 other prisoners confined in the basement where the animals had been stabled, while the prisoners were questioned and tortured.  (It always brings a gasp from visitors when they step into the cave-like basement and realize that the prisoners were packed in so tightly that they couldn’t even lie down.) Now the basement contains display cases showing artifacts discovered during the reconstruction, including a hand grenade, a rifle, plates and cups, even part of the wrought-iron bed that Nick’s father had brought up the mountain to the village, where most people slept on pallets on the floor.

Some 37 bodies had already been buried in the yard around the house when Eleni Gatzoyianis was taken prisoner.  There was no room for more, so on August 28, 1948, the guerrillas marched their last group of 13 condemned prisoners to a distant plateau where their bodies would be thrown into a nearby ravine.

In  2002 our daughter Eleni, her grandmother’s namesake, spent a year living in Lia, rebuilding the family home, which had been allowed to fall into its foundations.  She spent nine months restoring the house as it had been in her grandmother’s life. She was moved to find that the elderly villagers who remembered the terrible events of the war helped her and donated their own belongings, including a painted wooden cradle and many embroidered textiles, to keep the house authentic to its period.  In 2005, "North of Ithaka",  Eleni's travel memoir describing that year and her experiences living in he ancestors' village, was published by St. Martin's Press. 

During the rebuilding, the stonemasons found a coin under the original cornerstone which showed that the house was first built in 1856. A new keystone over the door of the gate to the courtyard indicates that Nick’s father added on to the house in1924, and that Eleni rebuilt it in 2002.

A local carpenter carved two panels of the exterior gate, one showing the eagle of Epiros and the other representing Epirote mothers.

Here is the fireplace in the restored “great room” with a photograph of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her husband Christos at the time of their wedding.  She dreamed that Christos would bring her and the children that followed to live with him in Worcester, MA where he was a produce seller, but her dream was blocked by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Nick took his visitors to see the spot where he got his last glimpse of his mother, as she turned and waved before being led around a bend toward the threshing fields. After we returned to the Inn and the nearby church of St. Paraskevi, and Nick pointed out the route the escaping children took down the mountain, our visitors left, amid tears and hugs all around.

(Here is part of a group of 11—two families from Omaha, Neb.-- who departed today, after spending two nights in the inn and touring the Eleni Gatzoyiannis sites.  Notice the mud swallow who has built a nest in the light fixture over their heads in the reception area.)

Like the hundreds of strangers who had come before them, these visitors left their names inscribed in the guest book in Eleni’s house, a tribute to a Greek peasant woman who sacrificed her life in her remote Greek village to save her children so that they could live her dream of America.