FoodStuff: Flavours of Vamos
John Lethlean
John Lethlean, culinary critic
Time acts as a very fine filter on the memory, passing everything good, holding back most of the unsavoury for discard. A bit like making chicken stock.
A month ago, my dim recollections of a week in Crete in 1982 consisted of the beauty of the very old Chania waterfront, driving to the island’s south in a funny, open-topped thing called a Citroen Pony with a bunch of friends from Melbourne, sleeping rough at Paleochora after eating sublime baby souvlaki with the local firewater (raki), visiting Minoan ruins. Metaxa brandy, beer and one of my mates’ very attractive cousins, who had somehow joined our little Aussie caravan. Playing Zorba on the beach.
My recollection was of a harsh, rugged and largely unspoiled interior landscape, lots of olive trees and plenty of goats and sheep. Most of that hasn’t changed.
Ask me today, however, after a few days on Greece’s biggest island recently, and the scales have fallen a little. Heraklion – the capital – is now a sprawling seaport metropolis with a fashionable core but far less appealing bulk; and Chania’s Venetian-built waterfront has succumbed to the inevitability of becoming a tourist trap. Times change.
But perhaps more profound is the omnipresent eyesore of trash – the modern era of packaging seemingly finding modern Greece well and truly off guard and indifferent to its ecological and aesthetic consequences – and the blight of unfinished concrete structures on the landsacape. Apparently buildings aren’t taxed until they’re finished or occupied and so, as a consequence, much of Crete (and mainland Greece generally) seems to be an ugly work in progress, for the sake of the authorities.
It is not unusual to find a prime foreshore site dominated by a mass of concrete slabs and pillars, steel reinforcement rods poking through the roof for future upward construction, goats and sheep using the would-be hotel for their own 4-star accommodation and an assortment of litter and trashed cars nearby. This, sadly, is an undeniable reality of modern Crete and several parts of the mainland I visited.
Sorry if you’ve just booked a holiday.
The other shame is that in the pursuit of pragmatism, you now have to look very hard to find old villages, buildings and landscape structures. There hasn’t bee a lot of sentimentality when it comes to modernisation, and heritage has been the loser.
Which is why you should look for an inland village named Vamos if you happen to be visiting Crete. Half way between Chania and Rethymno, in the province of Apocoronou and off the tourist-beaten main track, it is not the proverbial village time forgot. Rather, it is the village time might have taken with it if a group of 10 enlightened former teachers, builders and others hadn’t gotten together 11 years ago to form a co-operative business venture that has preserved much of the village’s old quarter (a census by the island’s Venetian occupiers in the 16th century recorded Vamos as having 271 residents, although myth has it the village was there in the ninth century.)
The idea, says founder George Hadjidakis, was to preserve a slice of authentic Crete, which extends from architecture to food. Unlike a lot of villages, says the much-travelled former teacher, Vamos still had much to preserve because so many traditional residents had emigrated during the fifties, abandoning their properties. As tourism increasingly made an impact on Crete, away from the water, Vamos didn’t appear to have much to offer the new wave of invaders. Those who went for a better life in American, Australia and Canada left some original stoned streets and a lot of antiquated stone buildings, many of which are still crumbling. However Hadjidakis’ company has now bought and restored 25, which are used as accommodation for tourists not interested in beer-swilling package holidays by the coast. They have a café, a produce store for Cretan foodstuffs and handicrafts and an exhibition space (currently un-used) that was once home to an original donkey-driven stone olive oil press until well into the 20th century.
The cottages are beautiful, the streetscapes idyllic and the surrounding rugged landscape classic Crete: stone fences, olive groves, hard, rocky territory ideal for walking, breathing fresh air and taking in that extraordinary light you get in the Greek Mediterranean.
And their restaurant, or mezedopoleio – Sterna tou Bloumosifis – does its best to preserve the ethos of Slow Food by concentrating on traditional Cretan dishes using local produce: goat, sheep, rabbits, wild greens, olives and olive oil, honey, cheeses such as feta, mizithra, graviera and the sublime sheeps milk yoghurt of Greece. They even use a wood oven as well as a charcoal grill, something very special in a country where it can often seem deep frying has taken over.And it all happens in a charming old building.
Sadly, unlike the piles of rubbish littering the island, this is no longer something you’ll stumble on. And in another 24 years, I hope the picture and flavours of Vamos have passed through the cheesecloth of my memory, leaving the mess behind, and that more Greeks have begun to think like the guys from the little village we all like to believe is still there.
From a collection of John’s food writing 2005-2008.
Follow John Lethlean and Necia Wilden on Twitter as they eat and drink their way around Australia
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