Zambolis apartments

Zambolis apartments
For your holidays in Chania

Sunday 17 November 2013

All things pass (Όλα περνάνε)

While clearing out my desk recently, I came across a paper issue of locavores.gr, a local food site. The May 2013 issue contained a poem by Pavlos Polychronakis, entitled The crisis has its good moments, which reads as follows (scroll down for the translation):



During the occupation, thousands died of hunger,
for under those past circumstances, times were much much harder.
Though many goods we did produce, like every other place,
to carry it from A to B, we did not have the ways.
and due to lack of vitamins, as one more reason maybe.
But now that goods reach all of us in this world as we know it
in such short time and they are cheap, with more than enough of it,
a damned one as this crisis is, but no one here should fear it
despite the fact it threatens us, no matter how we feel it.
To put it simply, once again, our belts we all will tighten,
and from our body we will drop the excess weight that fattened.
The Cretan diet's where we turn, as we will all remember
in terms of health and money that it's good for people's welfare.
We'll go towards the pulses, peas and mama's fasolada
and lentils, chickpeas and broad beans which kept fed all Ellada.
The fruits we'd turn up noses to will come back to the table
and for our sweets and medicine, it's grape must to the rescue!
Just one spoonful of olive oil from our own Cretan produce
will feel like ten steaks bon-fillet on our developed torsos.
We'll go back to our olives, greens, whatever we can forage,
our askrolimbous, onion bulbs and spinach pies we savoured, 
dakos, xinohondro and pasta which all were home- and hand-made.
Towards fried snails with rosemary, a hint of vinegar,
and to the sweet and fiery taste of onion from Mesogeia.
With all this and some home-cured olives, cucumber and tomato
mizithra, rocket, cardamon, and lettuce and potato, 
And barley rusk made in Sfakia, we will get through with bliss
without so much as one hint of the hunger in crisis.
And when God feels like ending it, the crisis comes to pass,
but may that pseudo good life scram
and Crete's nutrition last.

All crises pass; in the more connected world that we live in, they pass more quickly.

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