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Dizzy Gillespie on Ermou

I am writing this elegy to the Greece I love at a time when it is being carved up like a Christmas turkey by the forces of so-called "modernisation" that have already ravaged the USA and western Europe. I am sick at heart at what is being destroyed, and the people who are being reduced to poverty and desperation. What can I do? I am a storyteller, so I tell a story...

Dizzy Gillespie in Ermou.

Most visitors to Greece will know Ermou, the shopping street in the centre of Athens where the street performers are the pick of the music and drama departments of the university, and the shops rival those of Paris, Milan and New York. But there are many streets in Greece called after Hermes, the messenger of the Gods...

Mytilini in the 1980's had the sort of shabby, raffish, louche charm you sometimes find in seaport towns, and never find in tourist centres. Its architecture showed Venetian and Turkish features, alongside some fine Greek neo-classical buildings. You began to understand the down-at-heel look of everything when you saw the Hammer and Sickle flag flying proudly over the KKE headquarters on the quay-side. For a generation or more, central governments of leftish (Pasok) or rightish leanings (ND) had punished the red island, following the example of the fascist regime by starving it of development funds.

The very heart of Mytilini was the long street called Ermou, (in English Hermes Street). It curved around the core of the port, with one foot in the harbour, the other alongside the huge medieval castle. In the middle stood the old, abandoned Mosque, its minaret neatly amputated, with only the octagonal base remaining. The harbour end of Ermou, in the days before the Aegean was virtually fished out, was a double row of open-fronted fish and shellfish shops, piled high with blue-grey prawns and crayfish, bright red mullet, sleek, streamlined tunny and swordfish, and piles of small octopus, cuttlefish and squid.

Here we, newcomers, but already enchanted with Greece, learned our first few words. Miso-kilo, for half a kilo. Garithes for prawns, karavithes for crayfish. Barbounia for red mullet, and Gopes, for the small silvery anchovies.

Shortly afterwards I learned another key phrase, Min to kopsete, meaning don't fillet it. I also learned that you buy sausages, not by weight, but by number, "theka loukarnica, parakalo". A third of a lifetime later, alas, my Greek vocabulary still centres on food, gardening and d.i.y equipment.

Down the road from the fishmarket, we came to shops. Mostly dress shops, some with 1930's style, deeply recessed doorways and frontages in which the display window rose up over the fascia to continue the display area onto the first floor. The clothing tended towards cheap women's clothing in artificial fibres; lots of rather ugly two piece women's business suits with short, tight skirts. Men's clothing, again at the cheap end, with a lot of emphasis on work clothes and work boots. Alongside the clothing shops, other stores sold tools and cutlery, paints and decorating materials.

This tertiary shopping area stopped somewhere around the mosque, and then we came to what can only be called junk shops. This was a happy hunting ground for me, and I found boxes of old postcards, many from the period of Turkish occupation, showing portly old men in wide cummerbunds and fezzes lounging on the terrace of the mineral baths of Thermi, and pretty young women in traditional island costumes. As we returned again and again, we found a beautiful teapot in the traditional colours of Isnik, a turned, cylindrical boxwood case containing a perfume bottle, and an old pair of hand-painted enamel earrings showing birdsnests and eggs in lovely tiny miniatures.

The further you got from the harbour, the poorer the shops and the closer to the margin of profitability. The buildings showed more and more Turkish features. Upper stories of tongue-and- groove boards with peeling, faded paintwork began to overhang the streets and shade the lower floors. The street got narrower and dirtier, and the stench from the open drain down the middle of the street got more marked. Tertiary shopping street was turning into slum.

As we walked past the junk stalls towards the sea, passing the derelict women's hammam, with its cluster of small domes crusted with plants now drying out with the approach of summer, we heard music. Not the standard fare, rembetika, with the ululating voices rising above intricate, rapidly fingered bouzouki arpeggios, with perhaps a plaintive warbling clarinet or fiddle playing breaks between the lines. No! Not at all. This was the great 1947 Dizzy Gillespie Big Band playing Salt Peanuts.

I knew in that moment that God had blessed me with my own personal burning bush. A taverna that played superlative jazz in this shabby sidestreet. I grabbed my wife by the hand and dragged her across the road. By the time we had entered the taverna and taken our seats at a neatly laid table, Salt Peanuts had given way to Night in Tunisia and I was happily singing along to the arrangement I knew note for note. The owner of the taverna came out to greet us, just as the white panel van parked outside pulled away. The music vanished down the street, leaving not an echo behind.

We had a magnificent lunch; Courgette flowers stuffed with feta cheese, smoky, subtle aubergine salad, rabbit stifatho in a rich red sauce redolent of olive oil and garlic, and lots of the dense, heavy, delicious bread of Lesvos. Beer, for me was a choice of Amstel or Heineken, and for my wife, Jill, a tetato, a quarter-litre, of local, slightly medicinal rusty red wine.

The Ermis taverna became one of our favourites and we went there again and again. The food was always excellent, the sort of food that takes time and skill to produce -the sort that most tavernas cannot be bothered to cook nowadays. But never again did we sit on Ermou and listen to Dizzy Gillespie's agile, poetic trumpet or Chano Pozo's thrilling conga drums.

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