Category: Greece

οίνος / OY-nos / wine
κρασί / kra-SEE / wine

Seemed appropriate to do something romantic for Valentine’s Day so I was thinking about last year when we here and got a jug of oinomelo gifted to us by the taverna we had spent three hours in. I went to Google Translate to ask it how to spell the Greek word for wine and it said …

KRASI

Both are technically the Greek word for wine. Oinos is the ancient Greek word for wine, and while it is still used, it mostly just turns up as parts of words, like oinomelo (honeyed wine) and oinopoios (winemaker). It’s also the root word of both the Latin vin / vino and the English word wine. Meanwhile, krasi is the modern word for wine, and it has its roots in an old Greek word that meant “mixed” because it was common for Greeks to mix their wine with water to dilute it.

Anyways, it’s Friday, gonna put my head on my pillow and dream about the krasì I’m gonna consume this weekend. (The non-diluted kind.)

μαστίχα / mass-TEEK-uh / mastic liqueur

It’s almost the weekend and I woke up this morning thinking of the smashed crispy potatoes we had LAST weekend at this little taverna near the northern edge of Plaka.

(I blame Russ, because late last night while I was trying to entertain myself with Youtube videos, I saw a Brian Lagerstrom video about potato techniques that foremostly featured pavé, so I of course had to watch it, and then later in the video he boiled some little Yukon gold baby potatoes and then smashed them and panfried them, and that was pretty close to the potatoes from last weekend, oh god I’m just gonna go get them now.)

ANYWAYS.

We had found this taverna early on this year but had just kinda wandered through it in our first weekend walking through Plaka, and decided to try it out when we were looking for a late dinner last Saturday. We got bekri meze and some grilled pork … part? (I don’t know what it was, the English menu said “pancetta” I think? and it could have been? whatever pancetta is made from? pork belly? oh yeah it could have been pork belly) and obviously some wine and we ate and laughed and got more wine and at the end of the night, the waiter brought out a couple of pieces of cake and a couple of shot glasses of a clear liquid which I expected was going to be ouzo but ended up being mastika.

Mastika is another of these traditional Greek digestive liqueurs, very VERY sweet, with an almost floral underlying flavor. Definitely not licorice-y like ouzo or sambuca, which makes it more enjoyable for me at least!

Greeks are about as serious about their coffee as the Italians are. It’s a culture with a weird combination of Turkish / Balkan coffee and espresso, and third-wave coffee roasters and coffee shops are right around the corner from old-school coffee roasters with giant vats set up right out on the sidewalk.

We figured out freddo espresso last year when I saw someone order one in a shop of Lefkada (and then watched the barista make it). Basically what happens is the barista pulls a shot of espresso into a cup with a little sugar, adds a couple ice cubes, then puts the cup onto a milkshake blender. The blender froths up the espresso, the ice cubes melt and dilute it a little bit, and then the result is poured over more ice.

Definitely a delicious milk-free coffee option, especially in cafes or coffee chains that don’t always have cold brew available, especially in the winter.

(and the best part is, it usually only costs about two bucks)

συγνώμη / sig-NO-mee / excuse me

I learned this one out of necessity. Greek pedestrians have two nasty habits: One, if you are walking towards them head-on, they will move to their left to try and walk around you, so when you move to your right, you end up bumping into them. Two, if there is a choice between a wide open space on one side of you and the tiniest gap between you and a wall on the other side, they will prefer to squeeze awkwardly through that gap. (Greeks love a good gap.) Signomi is the “excuse me for bumping into you” kind of excuse me.

It also works if you want to get someone’s attention, like the waiter at the taverna.

Also I had to check the spelling on that five times. I gotta do a block about Η vs Ε and Υ vs Ι and Ο vs Ω because I am not sure if there are differences / what situations those differences arise in!

γεία σας / YAH-sahs / hello, goodbye, cheers

Ah yes, the Greek aloha! Yassas starts every conversation in a shop or restaurant, is the greeting you hear between people in the streets, what you say to start drinking, it probably also is a derogatory football term and what you say at a bar mitzvah for all I know. It’s the buenas dias, the bonjour, the ohayoo …

… the aloha.

μπείκον / BAY-kin / bacon

Yes, the Greek word for bacon is bacon. But I thought the how of it was interesting, and it was one of the first words I learned in Greek, so it has a special place in my heart.

(In Lefkada, in the first week or so, we were trying to find some restaurant that was one, open in the winter and two, served something that was easy enough for non-speakers to obtain. We were driving around the downtown area — think, like, a third the size of downtown COS — and it felt like the low-hanging fruit places were all closed — pizza, bakeries, whatever. We finally came around a corner and thought about giving up and going to the grocery store when we found a little pizza-slash-bakery that sold peinirli which will get its own entry some day, but for the moment, all you need to know is that they had flavors, and as I started trying to parse out the words in the menu, I sounded out μπείον and then sheepishly realized it was the English word bacon.)

(Bacon peinirli are pretty good btw.)

What’s silly about it is that Greek has no ‘B’ sound. Sure, they have a Β/β, but it sounds like a ‘V.’ Yes, beta is really veta. So when they started adding words from other languages, they made a digraph of letters they already had that I GUESS sounds closest to a ‘B’ sound, and thus bacon became mpacon.

There are a couple of others. The one I know second best after MP=B is NT=D — Greek delta Δ/δ is a hard TH like … well, like the Nordic Ð more than anything. So when they imported words with an English D, they represent it with NT (ντ). That makes for some funny translation stuff — there was a place on Lefkada called “Valedine’s” because someone had changed the “NT” to a “D.”

ποτατασoúπε / poe-tah-tah-soop / potato soup

I know this isn’t the kind of content that will tempt you to visit Greece, but I was watching Youtube videos yesterday and one of the local Greek ads was for a video (?) of a TV chef cooking potato soup with bacon and I realized that I’m starting to more quickly parse the letters, and so when this guy is cooking ποτατασoúπη βελουτέ (velouté!) μετ μπεικον (with bacon!) not only am I amazed that I can read what the video is going to cook but I can quickly confirm that I am right by looking at the thumbnail and seeing the tasty-looking potato soup with bacon!

(We gonna talk about that μπ part of the bacon later.)

ΠΑΡΑΚΑΛΌ παρακαλό / pah-rah-kah-LOW / please and also you’re welcome

I got to use this one today! Sure I was ordering gyros in English and just put that at the end of the sentence but I think they appreciated it. I like that they “double-duty” it by making it also work as “you’re welcome.” It’s also used as a way to answer the phone, although I still prefer “go for Dave.”

ΕΥΧΑΡΙΣΤΌ ευχαριστό  /  eff-(ch)ar-eess-TOE  /  thank you

OK back to the Greek lessons. I retained basically none of the Greek words I learned besides this and kalimera/kalispera so we starting fresh!

Oh and portokalo.

Oh and maybe kotopoulo.

Hello, please, and thank you are the base phrases I feel like you should learn for any new destination. Even if you then are going to try and rely on others to speak English to get bare essentials, at least meet them at the front door of their own language. So I’ll start with those since they aren’t quiet as commonplace (in my mind) as the Spanish or French words for those things.

Evidently the stress on the last syllable is important — if you stress the second (eff-CHAR-eestoe) or the third (effchar-EESS-toe) are the adjective (thankful) and adverb (thankfully) forms. Language is neet.

Oh and pentakosio. If I need five hundred chickens or oranges I’m set.