This morning I run out of my usual coffee,so I decided to boil a cup of Turkish coffee..while I was stirring the coffee I smiled thinking oh my God, imagine asking for Turkish coffee in Greece!
it simply doesn't exist!it's Greek coffee of course! In Cyprus it's called Cypriot Coffee....
coming from Northern Greece I feel culturally deprived of the history of the place I was born and the place I spent a significant part of my life...like someone stole arbitrarily the history of both places...Kavala and Thessaloniki...Mehmet Ali, the progressive Albanian pasha of Egypt was born in Kavala.Used to play in the beautiful old Turkish neighborhood, the one we call Panagia now.
His Imaret became one of the fanciest hotels in Europe and his house, a luxurious restaurant....the grave of his mother in the middle of the central square of Kavala was demolished during the Junta...the "patriots" wanted a pure ethnic city., nothing to remind the past...still though even nowadays people use Turkish names for some parts of the city.....a city full of refugees from Turkey like my grand grandparents..where still two neighborhoods are called 500 and 1.000...from the 500 and 1.000 houses built for the Greek refugees....
Thessaloniki, my other love....a City of Ghosts as Mazower says in his book....Jewish, Muslims, Christians....all together...in this crossroad of civilisations, between West and East, the bottom of Balkans, a cosmopolitan city full of Anatolian aroma....
where the food and the drink is so important that you spend hours around a table with friends, losing the sense of time....
You think you are over with some places, I always connect situations and people with places...these two cities though are self contained...you go back not because of the situations or the people....you go back for the city itself...........
2 comments:
Surely you mean Bosnian Coffee?!?
I think the whole Balkans lays claim to this beverage;)
Despite the "name claims", it is good to know that we are sharing this amazing coffee experience, a burnt taste, a strong smell, an aesthetic size and a calming spirit...let's enjoy:)
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