Culinary tourism is a growing trend as cuisine embraces the geography and traditions of a land so that the adage “you are what you eat” takes on a broader meaning. Food and travel combine wonderfully as what better way to learn about a land than by experiencing its customs. Diana Farr Louis explores the world where that distinctive ingredient, Chios mastic, is grown.
I can’t thank you enough,” says the woman from Belgium. “My husband and I have been coming to Chios for years and this is the most interesting thing we’ve ever done here.”
She might as well be speaking for all five of us visitors to Greece’s fifth-largest island. We’ve just come from a two-hour stroll outside the medieval village of Mesta and inside a mastic grove, where we had a hands-on lesson in mastic production given by Vassilis Ballas, who with his wife runs the island’s only ecotourism agency from a barrelvaulted basement on the village’s main square.
Mesta is one of twenty-odd mastihohoria or mastic villages that were created in the fourteenth century by a Genoese maona or megacorporation intent on protecting the crop from pirates and other rivals. In those days–and indeed since antiquity–Chios mastic fetched high prices because of its therapeutic uses in medicine and cosmetics and in cooking. Moreover, in the days before Listerine and toothpaste, chewing the hardened resin crystals made the breath sweet and the mouth healthy. As such, it was never out of fashion.
It’s hard to imagine going to war over chewing gum, but the peculiar qualities that make the resin from the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus var Chia), aromatic, beneficial, chewable, and commerciallyviable can only be found in southern Chios. Vassilis has been telling us about the soil, climate, history and hard work that have transformed the ordinary lentisk, a ubiquitous pest elsewhere in the Mediterranean, into a money tree, even more valued than its cousin the pistachio.
The intricate relationship between the island and the crop sets Chios apart from other Greek islands. It does not have to live off tourism, and though beautiful beaches are not lacking, its visitors are likely to want more than sun, sea and sand.
Byzantine mosaics, a Genoese castle, several museums, Homer’s (alleged) birthplace, a spectacular deserted hillside village all attract sightseers, but sooner or later everyone makes a pilgrimage to the mastic district. It’s the perfect place for an ecotourist experience. You can read all you want to about mastic, take photos of the trees, eat a mastic-flavored sweet or even chew the gum, but stepping into mastic grove and being initiated into the rites of its production give you enormous respect for this ancient spice and the people who work with it.
Vassilis could also be close to being the perfect ecotourist guide, because he’s been both a mastic farmer and an inquisitive tourist. Five years ago, though, he and his wife, Roula Bouras, were “techies” with high-paying IT jobs in Athens. Everything changed in 2006, when a perfect storm stranded them on Chios after the Carnival weekend.
“My grandparents were from Mesta,” Vassilis tells me. “And we used to come here occasionally for weekends or vacations. But something happened when we were marooned. The wind howled for days, ships stayed in port, and we got to thinking. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to move out of Athens and get closer to nature and to ‘real life’? Funnily enough, both of us had the same idea at the same time. And so on the spur of the moment we decided to come to my family’s village, buy a mastic field and go back to the earth.”
Both 36, neither Vassilis nor Roula look like farmers. He has a wavy chestnut pony tail, dreamy hazel eyes and fits his lanky body into simple T-shirts and jeans. She is trim, a natural blonde with braids and obviously smart as a whip. I can see them both hunched over computers, traveling the world on a motorbike or even as indignados (definitely not hoodies) protesting in Syntagma Square. But I can’t envisage Roula as the owner of a 32,000-sqm field with 400 mastic trees.
Nevertheless, that’s what she is. When they moved to Chios, Roula applied for and received a European Union subsidy of 18,000 euros from a fund intended to help young people under forty starting out in agriculture. For a year they set about learning the tricks of the mastic grower, but soon realized caring for the trees was both too difficult and too monotonous to be a full time occupation.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to master things that look so simple,” Vassilis tells me. “In the spring, you have to prepare the area around each tree where the resin drips like tears, in July and August you slash the trees every five or six days to get them weeping. After that, you’re collecting crystals until the first rains at the end of September. Each step has a long learning curve. Once you get the knack it’s kind of fun. Then after a few hours, it’s mind-bogglingly boring. Never mind cleaning the crystals later, which takes all fall. But our trees are in Roula’s name so I was officially unemployed and after a year, we decided to set up the ecotourism office. Our koumbaros, who also left Athens to work here, tends our trees for us for a big share of the proceeds.”
He continues: “By then I’d realized how much effort and tradition are involved in cultivating mastic, and I wanted to share my new insights with visitors. I kept remembering our own trips to exotic places, how much I wanted to get inside, say, the Bedouin tents in Syria, or the spice markets in Zanzibar. But there didn’t seem to be anything between the Disneyland version and the totally genuine and off-limits. Here, we try to bridge the genuine without being too ‘real’. Not too many tourists on holiday are going to want to get up at 6 am to follow my koumbaros into the mastic fields while he tends to a couple of hundred trees before eleven. I thought I could come up with the right recipe, to make it easy for visitors to experience the life and rhythms of mastic culture, without the aches and pains.”
As someone who spent the morning in those sun-baked mastic fields before joining Vassilis’s “Mastic Mystique tour”, I can say he has definitely succeeded.
I met up with his group, the Belgian couple and a Greek couple from Alexandroupoli, near the main gate of the walled village. A heritage site protected by strict building regulations, Mesta’s warren of dark tunnel-like alleys have kept their medieval character without becoming twee or (too) desecrated by TV antennas and a/c units. As Vassilis tells us, it’s the island’s “flagship for sustainable tourism through the arts, culture and nature.”
We walk past a honey-colored bastion and some pretty houses before arriving at a vegetable patch. Vassilis has given us a few small baskets and
now tells us to pick whatever we fancy. These are his tomatoes, peppers, melons and curious ridged cucumbers. We follow his orders and walk on past some loaded grapevines and into his mastic grove.
The trees, taller here than the ones I saw in the morning, have woven a lattice roof with their branches, so we step into a cool, dappled setting, so neat and tidy it could be a Zen garden. Most of the trees rise from an immaculate white circle. In the middle of the grove–which locals call a field–sits a table where Vassilis quickly arranges plates, glasses and bowls and our collection from the vegetable patch.
We’ll have a picnic but we’ll have to work for it. He takes us back to one of the few trees still lacking a white ring and picks up a sharp, flatedged hoe. He shows us how and we take turns scraping miniscule weeds, and then brush dry leaves away with a whisk broom. Next we’re sent to fetch buckets of calcium carbonate, which Vassilis tells us to throw at and around the tree. Like talcum powder, this white coating prevents the resin tears from any contact with the earth, which would discolor the crystals and render them worthless.
Now comes the hardest step, slashing the tree. We each try our hand at making quick stabs in the soft bark with a special tool like a double ice pick. Reluctantly, hesitantly, for we don’t want to hurt the tree. The wound starts “sweating” instantly, and the ooze will soon coagulate into drips that resemble tiny icicles. Vassilis tells us that the resin contains an antiseptic, which heals the wound. Trees can be cut dozens of times during the summer without suffering damage. And their productive life is at least seventy years.
We examine the resin-streaked bark, which glistens in the setting sunlight, as Vassilis displays a sieve where the tears shine amongst a mess of leaves, twigs and pebbles. The next steps in the process–the six-week harvest, followed by months of sorting, cleaning, washing are the most tedious of all. Traditionally, the villagers (mostly women) do them together, to ease the monotony, and they are all done by hand, just as they were hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
I find something very moving about the symbiosis between the tree and the people who live off it, the way they have “cared” for each other for countless generations, their fortunes intertwined.
Nowadays at least, the growers can actually make a living from their crop. In the past, when the Genoese and then the Sultan demanded the lion’s
share, they were virtual slaves to those rulers. At today’s prices, with the best mastic crystals fetching 80 euros a kilo (and the average tree accounting for 200 grams), they won’t get rich but the profit is theirs. Most of the harvest is sold to the Chios Mastic Gum Growers Association, which handles further cleaning, gum manufacturing and distribution to domestic factories–for sweets, liqueurs, baked goods, etc – and markets abroad, notably the Middle East.
But these are serious matters that soon fade into our subconscious as we gather around the rewards Vassilis has prepared for us. Besides the fruits from his garden, which he peels and slices like an experienced chef, he has materialized all sorts of local treats from a hidden cool box. We taste and comment, oohs and ahs about the fresh white cheese, the wrinkled olives, the figs roasted with sesame seeds and walnuts, the pickled samphire (kritamo), and the thick, sweetish Chios wine–which might have inspired Homer’s wine dark sea.
Late summer is a good time for this feast, which Vassilis lays out for all his visitors. “I always try to have my groups pick some of their picnic, there’s always something growing.”
It’s twilight as we drag ourselves away, satisfied and content–socially, intellectually and physically. Back at the entrance to Mesta, Vassilis steers us into the 11th-century church of the Archangels, where we try to examine an intricately carved iconostasis by candlelight, before heading back to Roula and the office.
After the others leave, I stay on. Roula and Vassilis tell me about their other activities–“eleven, for all, for every day of the week”, as their tiny blue booklet advertises. Besides Mastic Mystique, there are cooking lessons at the Mastihashop in town, guided visits to the main museums and Genoese castle, sailing trips, scuba diving, hikes to “mountain monasteries, the Ottoman route, and agricultural routes around Mesta,” a visit to a winery and wine tasting, a boat trip to the untouristed island of Psara, walks by moonlight to music by local guitar and violin players, star gazing “guided” by members of the North Aegean Astronomical Society, and a cycling tour of Kambos–a district of Genoeseera mansions built in amber stone amidst acres and acres of citrus groves.
If you managed to fit them all in, you’d know Chios better than most natives. Something for everyone indeed. But Vassilis and Roula are exploring activities for winter too. Here, one of their best potential markets is just 8 nautical miles away. Since the lifting of visa requirements, Turks have been pouring into Chios from Cesme in droves, and because Islamic holidays rarely coincide with Christian/Western ones, they come off-season. I was struck by the fact that since my last visit a decade ago, the third language in all the brochures is Turkish rather than French, German or Italian
as it was back then.
Roula and Vassilis also involve school groups in masticulture events. They have invented a kind of paintball game when it’s time to throw the calcium carbonate powder around the trees. Kids come to help out and emerge as white as workers at a flourmill.
I asked Roula how she found living in a village with 400 inhabitants after being at home in a city of four million-plus. “No regrets,” she says. “There I
worked all hours for 11 months a year. Here I work all hours, but only for four–which we’re trying to expand. Of course, we’ve had to adjust to the loss of privacy and anonymity, but we like to think that we’re giving back just a little to the island which has been so good to us. Sustainable tourism, support for local farmers and traditions, and above all making a bridge between holiday makers, Greek or foreign, and daily life in a completely different culture.”