Mediterranean Spirit

The Mediterranean. This wonderful, almost magical word. This deep, wonderful sea. Even if it is just a drop in the global ocean. It embraces the Greek seas in the east with heat and saltiness. Of course, we only think of it as ours. The whole of it. We pronounce it heavily and we think we have it all. But it does not have any owners, only lovers who dive into its waters and find some of the freedom they lack. Mediterranean. This wonderful, almost magical climate. Which, however much our human intervention has altered it, remains friendly. That too is ours. Like the sea. That is how we think of it. Even if we have made it suffer so much. Don’t we make our own suffer the most as if they will always be here unchanged? Hot summers that smell of soil. They smell of trees and fruits. In our sea-bordering places that are surrounded by our mountains, summer is our favourite season. It stretches from May to November and pushes our mood to the light. In the afternoons we stretch nonchalantly and we sing songs by Savopoulos under our breath: “with half-closed shutters in the afternoon, reflections of summer and a sea trebling on the ceiling and plaster walls in the afternoon…” In the summers in Messinia our trees and fruits blossom. Smells blossom, they stretch our senses. They stretch our olive tree branches, which stand thirsty, waiting for sweet November to start harvesting. The olives and oil grow in Messinia. Between the intensity of the summer and the sweetness of our mild winter. Among our vibrant childhood afternoons and our cool adult strolls. Among the shadows of our mountains and the breeze of the salt of our homeland. Our olive oil, extra virgin, encompasses in its texture the whole magic of the beautiful Messinian land. Blessed. It assembles all the purity of our childhood summers in its properties and seals it in our flavors, so that we never lose it, not even in the winter.