TOMAS KEBAB: AS THE KOSMOS TURNS
Culinary Backstreets
Sept 5 2013
September 5, 2013, by Nicolas Nicolaides
Editor’s note: This guest review by Nicolas Nicolaides, an
Istanbul-born Greek and Ph.D. student in history who moved to Athens
as a child, explores a refugee community’s past and present and finds
one of Athens’ best kebabs.
“Despite the fact the Armenian quarter of Athens had been created
out of the rubbish heap there was more charm and character to this
little village than one usually finds in a modern city… In the
midst of the most terrible poverty and suffering there nevertheless
emanated a glow which was holy; the surprise of finding a cow or a
sheep in the same room with a mother and a child gave way instantly
to a feeling of reverence.”
This is Henry Miller’s description of Neos Kosmos in his 1941
travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi. Known then as Dourgouti, Neos
Kosmos (Greek for “New World”) was one of the shantytowns that had
sprung up near the center of Athens housing the thousands of Anatolian
Christians who had fled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish War
(1919-1922). The Armenians and Greeks who lived in these areas had
arrived with few personal possessions and lived in shacks of tin
and board. Families of four or five shared a single room. Instead
of proper plumbing, there were often open sewers running behind the
muddy alleys. But the refugees tried to keep their borough clean by
meticulously whitewashing walls and alleys and by planting geraniums
in tin flowerpots.
Around that time, the Greek government began constructing a housing
project in the area that continued after WWII until it concluded under
the military regime of 1967-1974, resulting in a range of architectural
styles. The four buildings of the first complex are fine examples of
Bauhaus architecture (they bear a striking resemblance to the iconic
structure in Dessau-Rosslau). The elderly eventually deserted the
apartments, and they are now inhabited by refugees from the Middle
East, and a few shops catering to the newcomers have sprung up around
the neighborhood.
On a Sunday morning I followed Miller’s footsteps through Neos Kosmos
in search of an Armenian kebapcı. Fifty-six-year-old Hampartsoum
Tomasian – known to all as Tomas – sat on the doorstep of his kebab
joint greeting passersby in Greek, Armenian and Arabic. His business
occupies the ground floor of one of the neighborhood’s oldest buildings
and belongs to a wider complex that includes the Armenian community’s
chapel and former school, which fell into disuse when the new school
was built in the 1970s. They are all property of the Armenian Catholic
Church.
Tomas is part of the second wave of migration: since the early 1990s,
a few thousand Armenians have emigrated from Armenia, Lebanon, Syria
and other Middle Eastern countries. He can trace his origins back to
Diyarbakır, a city in southeastern Turkey. His grandparents fled
to Syria, where Tomas was born, in order to escape the massacres;
later the family moved to Lebanon.
“Our family is scattered all over the world,” he told me. “We have
relatives in Iraq and the United States. An aunt of mine provided her
matchmaking services for me to get married to an Armenian-American
lady. I had never met the bride. All that I had was a picture that my
aunt had sent me. We came to Greece to get married and then move to the
states. The marriage never took place and she left for the U.S. As for
me, I stayed in Athens. Having no place to go and without knowing any
Greek, I was lucky enough to find a job at a leather factory owned by
an Istanbul Greek. My boss and I spoke in Turkish so there was no need
to learn Greek till I met my wife, who was one of the factory workers.”
The import of Chinese leather products overwhelmed the Greek leather
industry and soon Tomas found himself out of work. “Then I started
working for Savas, a souvlaki joint in Monastiraki Square. The owner
was an Armenian called Serop Ajemian who had Hellenized his name to
Savas.” Three years later, Tomas decided to strike out on his own in
Neos Kosmos. He quickly earned a following, and soon people from all
over Athens flocked to Neos Kosmos to taste one of the best kebabs
in town. Among Tomas’s most loyal customers are the personnel of the
Turkish embassy in Athens.
I asked Tomas what makes his kebabs so special. “There is no secret
ingredient,” he said. “I only add top-quality minced lamb and veal,
salt and chopped onion. I brought a machine from Syria that chops
onion to the size of a rice grain – that’s what makes my kebabs extra
moist.” He also makes icli köfte (fried bulgur-crusted meatballs),
falafel, baba ganoush, hummus, yogurtlu kebap (kebab with yogurt sauce)
and lahmacun (crisp, oven-baked flatbread covered with minced meat
and herbs).
I strolled down the streets of Neos Kosmos, chowing down on a kebab
garnished simply with onions and tomatoes, thankfully undiluted
by tzatziki or French fries, and relishing its silky texture and
deeply savory nature. As I contemplated, I began to feel that there
was something magical about this neighborhood. A world away from the
fashionable boulevards of central Athens, Neos Kosmos is an open-air
museum of modern Greek history. I thought about the holes in the wall
of a building that Tomas had pointed out to me, made by bullets from
guerilla fighting during Greece’s Nazi occupation. The shantytown
is long gone now but it has been immortalized in literature and in
cinema (as in Costas Ferris’s “Ta Matoklada Sou Lampoun,” or “Your
Eyelashes are Sparkling”). The Anatolian Greeks and Armenians have
now been well integrated into Greek society and have left Neos Kosmos
behind to settle in more upscale neighborhoods. The Middle Eastern
immigrants are bringing these decaying constructions back to life.
Tomas may be a newcomer, but he is part and parcel of this
neighborhood’s busy history. As we said goodbye he showed me a
black-and-white photo of the shantytown and shared with me tales
of the urban landscape – how it had evolved during the decades,
the socioeconomic changes that had taken place in the area and the
vanished memories of the old residents – as they had been described
to him by one of the borough’s oldest residents, an elderly Armenian
gentleman who was born in one of the tin-and-board shacks and still
lives in Neos Kosmos. Tomas is proud of a past that was never his own,
remembering what many Athenians either forget or ignore.
Address: Mitrou Sarkoudinou 43, Neos KosmosTelephone: +30 210 901 5981,
+30 210 901 9328Hours: noon to midnight
http://www.culinarybackstreets.com/athens/2013/tomas-kebab/