Mesta's Web

There was a period, between 1975 and 1992, when the Greek Ministry of Tourism targeted a number of traditional towns for preservation.  The idea was not to create massive development, but to bring a small amount of tourism to these towns in order to help sustain them without damaging what was already there. It sounds a lot like slow cities.  Mesta was one of the towns the government targeted.  But somehow, the effort ended nearly 20 years ago, and only vestiges remain.  Although you see a handful of tourists when you walk through the town, most are day trippers who come for an hour or two, maybe a meal.  Hardly anyone stays here.

This has its problems and its benefits.  On the down side, the people who rent out their apartments do not have a good sense of what travelers need.  It took us days to figure out how to get our laundry done, for example.  Our kitchen lacks a coffee maker, a cutting board, a sharp knife (we bought a knife weeks ago and have been traveling from place to place with it).

But on the positive side, the village has not turned into Disneyland, as so many cute, small villages have.  It is a real working village.  Most of the people here have always lived here—their homes and land have been passed down for generations.  And there are not enough of us—tourists—to ruin the place for them.  As a result, we feel welcomed.  Having spent a week here now, we already feel ourselves becoming a part of the web of relationships that is Mesta. 

Our neighbor across the street brought us a cucumber from her garden one day, and told us to pick the herbs growing in pots on her steps whenever we wanted.  The woman who lives diagonally from us, Maria, runs the little market near the town square; she lent us her grill.  Lemoinya, who lives right next door to us, poked her head in our door on the first day.  I sat and “talked” to her for awhile out on the bench in front (I speak no Greek and she speaks no English). The next day she brought over a paper towel filled with freshly shelled almonds.  I brought her a copy of the picture of the two of us, below—she had been so delighted to see it on the screen of my camera—and she invited me in for coffee and cookies.  I sat with her in her immaculate room, a kitchen along one wall and a couch along another, with a table in the center.  Then she insisted on bringing a cup to Alec; he sat out on our stoop and drank it with Socrates, her husband.  Yesterday, we stopped at the market for cold drinks on our way to the beach, and Panayotis, the man who had taken C.C. and Milo fishing, happened to come in.  He motioned for us to wait there, and took off on his scooter.  When he returned, he had two gorgeous shells for the kids—from the smell of them, the shells had been recently inhabited.  We boiled them when we got home, and now have to figure out how to get them back to Brooklyn.

Having spent time in eight different countries in the past year, it’s easy to be tempted into making overly simplistic comparisons that could cross the line into stereotyping.  And yet it is interesting to note just which cultures one feels most drawn to.  I am attracted to the warmth of the Greeks we have met, and this is perhaps most in evidence in the way they deal with our children.  The Greeks we have met, both here in Chios and in the Peloponnese, have been very physical with the kids. Everyone tousles their hair, squeezes their shoulders.  C.C. and Milo are often kissed and hugged by near strangers.  Having spent the year in Spain, they are somewhat accustomed to the physicality, but it’s so clear that it is not what they come from.  Waiters, shopkeepers, and neighbors do not routinely embrace our children in Brooklyn.  So I’ll miss this little town, which has wrapped us up like a warm blanket.

Photos of the Day

Mastic in Mesta

Perhaps the thing that Chios is most famous for is mastic, an aromatic resin harvested from the mastic bush.  Mesta is one of three mastic villages on Chios, the other two being Olympi and Pyrgi. Although these bushes grow across the Aegean, Chios is the only place that grows it commercially.  Apparently, it is only here that the trees produce the valuable resin.  For centuries, mastic has been used in paints, cosmetics and in cooking.  People also like to chew on it, and an interruption in its production in the early 19^th century caused a brutal revolt in Istanbul.  At one time, a kilo of mastic resin cost the same as a kilo of silver.

I had read about mastic before we got here and then, coincidentally, heard a spot about it on The Splendid Table podcast sometime during the spring. “That’s where I’m going!” I thought.  The woman interviewed for the spot talked about mastic’s indescribably unique taste, its suitability for both savory and sweet foods.  I had never heard of it before we planned this trip, and I was eager to try it.  Indeed, it seems to be used in just about everything here—chewing gum, juice, seltzer water, liquor, ice cream, soap, and body lotion.  You can also get little pills that are supposed to be good for a stomach ache.

On our first night in Emporios Bay, we ordered a bottle of mastic flavored sparkling water.  Alec took a sip and slid the bottle over to me.  I couldn’t read his expression.  I took a swig—indescribable is right.  It tasted like someone had bottled “musty basement.”  I was sorely disappointed.  We tried some of the gum, which is a bit better, although weirdly textured.  I have no desire to load up on mastic face cream or shampoo, but I would like to taste it in a sauce or a sweet. 

Yesterday evening, Vasilio gave a “mastic tour”.  Much to Milo’s dismay, we all decided to go.  “I don’t want to go on any mastic tour!” Milo declared.  We started in the town square, where Vasilio told us about the pirates who came to the village hundreds of years ago and left with women, children, and mastic.  We walked out of the village through the locals’ gardens, and C.C. and Milo picked eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumbers from Vasilio’s plot.

Then we crossed the road, entered another field, and came upon what looked like an enormous shrub, about 15 feet tall and 15 yards wide.  A break in one end allowed us to enter into it and discover that it was actually about 30 mastic bushes, planted in four neat rows.  It is harvest time in mastic land, and Vasilio demonstrated how the resin is gathered.  First the farmers scrape and sweep away the leaves from a wide circle around the trunk.  C.C. and Milo were happy to demonstrate—city kids for whom farming tasks are still fun.  Next, a layer of calcium carbonate—a very fine, white powder—is thrown under the tree to cover the clean circle.  This allows the resin to drop without sticking to the dirt.  By now the kids looked as though they had been dipped in flour sacks.  The farmer then makes a series of small cuts—a couple of inches long—into the trunk and branches of the tree.  When you do this, and we did, you can see the clear resin begin to come to the surface.  The farmer makes 10 or 15 a day throughout the harvest period, and the resin drops to the ground.   We discovered the hard way that it is extremely sticky until it’s completely dry.  Once dry, the farmers scoop it into sieves, which help to separate out the dirt.  Then they throw what’s left into buckets of water; the leaves and pieces of bark rise to the top, and the resin sinks.  They scoop the resin out and remove any dirt.  All of this for 80 euros a kilo—a pretty labor-intensive practice for something that tastes like musty basement.

I haven’t given up, though.  I plan to buy a little container of the powdered stuff and experiment with it when I get home.

Vasilio had set up a table in the middle of the mastic grove laid with a range of tasty local treats—amazing bread baked in a wood-fired oven, the tomatoes and cucumber we had picked, salty cheese, almond-stuffed figs, olives, and a pickled green that comes on many of the salads here, all washed down with a raisiny local wine.  We chatted with our tour buddies—a man from France, a young couple, and then walked home as the sun began to set.  “That mastic tour was really cool,” Milo declared, having completely forgotten his earlier protest.

Photos of the Day

Fish

On our first morning in Mesta, Friday, we were awakened by the sound of someone shouting through a bullhorn.  This is a VERY quiet town, so the effect was quite dramatic.  Alec pulled on his shorts and went outside to find out what was going on.  It turns out that a man was driving a little white truck down the street—the interior of the back was set up as a fish stand, complete with crushed ice.  Alec told the guy that if he got a big fish—he only had small, fishy fish that day—we’d buy it.  Sure enough, on Saturday he had a medium-sized fish, big enough for Alec and I to share for dinner.  Alec borrowed our neighbor’s grill (she owns the local mini mart) and cooked it up for dinner.  It was delicious.

Our children do not get very excited about eating fish.  C.C., who has been asking to go fishing since the day we left Barcelona, maintains that she will eat the fish she catches.  You would think, with all of the beaches we’ve been near, it would have been easy to find someone to take us out on a boat.  And we have tried or, I should say, Alec has tried.  But finally, Vasilio found a guy for us in Mesta Port who would take us out for three hours on Sunday.   Vasilio, sensing the urgency of the situation, gave the guy strict instructions to make sure the kids caught fish.

C.C. caught her first fish with my dad, at the age of two.  She came back from the excursion with him clutching the little fish tightly in her fist, grinning from ear to ear.  Milo, although he has been fishing before, had never caught a fish. Until yesterday.  I opted to stay home—I needed a little time and space more than I needed a fishing trip.

When they found me in the town square upon their return, the kids had huge smiles on their faces; Alec looked a little weary.  Milo had caught his first fish.  It didn’t matter to him that it was tiny.  He was ecstatic. 

They really wanted us to cook up their fish for dinner.  Alec said the fisherman who had taken them out seemed surprised when Alec asked him for the fish to take home.  I think he would have used them for bait.  Our neighbor advised Alec to make a soup with them.  Let me just say that fish soup is about the last thing my kids would eat.  So we convinced them that the best thing would be to give them away to a neighbor, and to let us find them a fish they might actually enjoy eating.

Photos of the Day

Stargazing

We let Friday be lazy.  I met our next door neighbor, an ancient woman who is drying a whole lot of tomatoes out on her roof.  She doesn’t speak any English, but we smile at each other a lot, and she likes to tousle the kids’ hair as they walk by.  Speaking of hair, Milo’s Dubrovnik haircut is growing in kind of crazy.  It was cut so short that it lay flat when he first got it, but now it looks like there are two horns growing out of the top of his head.  Meanwhile, it’s been months since C.C. had a haircut, and her bangs are now long enough to obscure her eyes.  We’ve starting clipping them aside so that she doesn’t bump into things.

We have been trying to do our part as parents to prevent the “summer slide”—the educational regression that happens when kids don’t spend any time in the summer reading and reviewing what they learned during the school year.  Milo’s teacher sent home a packet of worksheets and activities with him, along with a stack of books at his level on the last day of school, and we’ve been picking through them as we travel from place to place.  C.C. reads and writes a ton, so we subscribed to a math website so that she could keep up her math.  The problem is, she hates it.  It’s a worse struggle than homework, and she cannot believe the injustice that is forcing her to do “homework” on summer vacation!  Despite our attempts to incentivize her participation, we might be on a sinking ship.

So we went through that fiasco on Friday, connecting to the internet in the town square.  It’s a lively place with a few coffee shops and restaurants, and seems to be a good mix of tourists and locals—not the kind of place that has been completely overtaken.   Most of the villagers here work the land, whereas many villages of this type that we’ve visited shifted from an agricultural based economy to a tourism-based economy long ago.

We spent the middle chunk of Saturday at a secluded beach, and snorkeled around a small offshore island with the kids.  I am hugely impressed by what good snorkelers they have become.  We paired off, and I was Milo’s snorkel buddy—he was terrific.  There isn’t a whole lot to see here—a few fish here and there—but they are in good shape for an open water snorkel now.

Vasilio had arranged a nighttime stargazing activity, and we all wanted to go, so we imposed a mandatory rest time when we got back from the beach.  All of us slept except for Alec.  Milo had a tough time settling down.  He flipped and flopped despite all attempts to rub his back and settle him down.  “I’m just too hyper-accurate!” he shouted.  I put on the Winnie-the-Pooh audiobook to calm him down.  That, and lying on Alec’s chest, did the trick.

The stargazing started at 10 pm.  Vasilio led several cars up, up, up a windy road to the top of a dark hill, where we met three astronomers from the island of Lesbos who had already set up their two enormous telescopes.  It was beautiful.  We saw Saturn, some other galaxies and—a personal favorite of the kids—the eagle nebula.  They had seen it on the Star Walk app on my iPad and were so excited to see the real thing?  For me, Saturn was the highlight.  It was cool enough for me to go back to the car and get a fleece blanket to wrap up in.  I lay down on a bench and just watched the meteor shower playing out overhead—much better than any telescope.