Fading Traditions

Posted by Kim Miller on Jul 4, 2011 | 0 comments

“You are only 1/3 of the way through.”

 

After stuffing our faces for over an hour, when the owner of the tavern where our group ate our meze spoke these words, every jaw around the table dropped. We had already been presented with a fantastic array of bread, cheese, vegetables, salads and dips. We’d barely gotten into the meat portion of our multi-coursed meal when the tavern-owner dropped this bomb on us. How could our stomachs possibly hold any more food? And yet we did.

The meze is the glue that held this project together. We’d been planning it for weeks, preparing ourselves for what we would eat by watching it being made and filming the process. We watched with eager eyes as a good-humored old woman kneaded bread with practiced ease, pinched our noses at the stench of sour milk as haloumi formed before us, drooled at the smell of freshly baked baklava and held our breath as a butcher deftly maneuvered pieces of kleftiko meat through a very sharp blade.

I also had the good fortune of getting a sneak peek at live snails we would later consume and the making of sheftalia (a popular Cypriot sausage wrapped in the stomach lining of livestock).

It amazed me the way all of this food was created. It took a combination of traditional preparation, family knowledge and the lackadaisical manner that comes with over-practice to produce a successful outcome. Many of the Cypriots who made this food had learned from their parents or other relatives who had passed on the knowledge to them at a young age. They had been helping out in their parents’ bakeries, butcheries and cheeseries since childhood and had picked up, what we learned was, a dying art.

The traditional ways of preparation are dying out as factories, supermarkets and outside influences wash over this culture. Thanks to those who have dedicated their lives to preserving these traditions, they still live on through them… But even they worry once they have retired, that their businesses will fall to apathy. Their children have grown up and gone on to university to study what their hearts desire, they have bigger dreams than what a small business in a tiny village can offer to them. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with that, as I have no desire to follow in the footsteps of either of my parents in their professions, but the tinge of sadness that each voice took when speaking about whether or not their offspring would continue on these traditions was heartbreaking.

I can’t speak for the future, but I hope that these people who strive so hard to keep their businesses afloat and preserve these traditions will find someone to carry on their work. Those who do value tradition, treasure it, and people don’t realize how much they will miss it until it’s gone.