Fourth episode: Feasting and fasting
From Farmers’ markets to kite-flying picnics. Athenians love their weekly street markets and chef and food writer Carolina Doriti takes Sofka around one to discuss Athenian culinary habits. Seasonal cooking, the monastery tradition and a recent return to traditions. Author and cookery writer Diana Farr Louis picks wild greens in a park. Why are horta the popular basis of the Mediterranean diet, while also provoking collective memories of hunger? The Greek calendar is filled with fasting days, but the first day of Lent has become a joyful opportunity to have a picnic feast and fly a kite. Sofka tries to ‘bottle’ Athens as a perfume. From ‘high notes’ of herbs and bitter orange blossom, there’s Frankincense and a plume of traffic fumes.