6:38
The Turks ruled Greece for centuries. But they gave this area, the Mani, a wide berth. I'm not taking my eyes off this infernal road. I can't stand heights. Down there somewhere at the bottom is one of the most important places in Greek mythology. It's the entrance to Hades, the gateway to hell. I'm traveling with Rupert Smith, a classical scholar and one of those Englishmen who relish morsels of Greek history like a cormorant with a shoal of sprats.
I'm pretty glad this is a paved road, I must say, cuz I'm not a great what lover of hairy roads like this, but It's a good view from this side, I can tell you. Oh, I bet. Sorry. But I'm enjoying being the other side. God, that is so special. Pretty good, isn't it? So, this is somewhere not many tourists get to. It's a village It's called Mundanistica. The people of Mani mainly fought either between villages Yeah. the various clan chieftains fighting each other or within villages, hence um each house having its own tower. So, like these are two neighbors. Yeah. They would be shooting at each other.
be, yeah, if they were having a feud, a vendetta. The towers, pretty as they may be, are an indication of what a vicious environment place this was to live. You know, they were permanently fighting each other for this barren land. You can see over here. Yeah, you just Why is it worth fighting for, though? Cuz all that was all they had, you know, they didn't have any lush meadows, and they just had these hillsides, which they had to chop up into tiny terraces to you know, just to support themselves. And um that's how life went on. They'd stop occasionally. They would have a truce or a treva in uh using the Italian word for some reason.
Um when they needed to go and bring in the harvest or if there was a funeral or a baptism or a marriage, you know, life had to go on in that respect. They had to feed themselves and had to marry each other and what have you. In fact, there was one extraordinary case where um two families were fighting. They were actually from different villages. It was one family um from the north fighting another in the south. Shooting each other across a very narrow area. And one of the attackers saw a woman who was going back and forth um or young woman going back and forth between the uh in and out of the tower where the defenders were, and he thought, "Cor, I like her." And he
said, "Right, stop. I want to have a truce. I want to marry that girl." And Don't believe it. That he They stopped. They called the priest. And they were married right there, bang, in the middle of the battle. And then they uh went back shooting each other. I've never been to a place like it. It's like a ghost village. Just looking into one of these houses. Will it be a kitchen? I don't know. But there are all the clues. Mostly to the drudgery that was the women's work, harvesting the grains, crushing the olives, making the bread. The men would be keeping lookout and having the odd potshot from tower to tower.
Life, like the landscape, was as hard as it gets. Why don't they pack up and go to Messolonghi or go to Athens or something? I think they would say freedom is the answer. They could live the way they wanted to live. Um and you know, not bothered by the whoever was in charge, mainly the Ottomans. When the Greek War of Independence came along, they had their own rallying cry separate from the rest of Greece. The rest of Greece had the rallying cry, "Freedom or death." Whereas the people of Mani, cuz they felt they were already free, talked about "Victory or death." So, you know, that was their view. They were free, the rest of Greece was in chains. funny
It doesn't look like it, but in a way I sort of think of Cornwall now, really, because in a way Cornwall is like a peninsula off the end of the rest of Britain. And there's a certain sense of independence and individuality about it. topographically extremely similar. If you carpet this in sort of green and flowers, you would have Cornwall. Yeah. Shall Trelawny live? Shall Trelawny die? There's 40,000 Cornishmen will know the reason why. Victory or death. We spent a long time up in that almost deserted village. And we met one of the only inhabitants who gave us some superb wild mountain oregano to take home with us.
They say the generosity of the Maniotes is second to none. I've often found that the harder the landscape, the more generous the people are. I honestly had no idea this beautiful place is here. But for me, it cried out like a siren from the Odyssey. "Come to me. I've got fresh sardines waiting for you." This is how I think of Greece. Look at those little darlings straight from the grill. A carafe of cold retsina and the inevitable Greek salad, which I eat every day with great delight.
I was looking at what we call the call sheet, which is what you have every day to see what's happening. It says, "Travel through the Mani with Rupert." Talking about the village with the towers in it, which was really interesting. But then you just said, "Actually, I had some very nice sardines at this place called Quail Bay." Quail Bay? Port of the Quails, yeah. And as soon as I heard fresh sardines, I thought, "Mhm." History's one thing. Fresh sardines is something totally different. East nearly meets West. Monemvasia, the Gibraltar of the East.
I came here in my early 20s with my brother John. This rock marked the end of our travels. If I remember rightly, very few people lived here then. There was a bit of building work going on, but I recall some of the locals being rather skeptical about actually living here. They said, "It's full of ruins. Leave it to the rats and spiders." There's only one way into this place, an archway, too narrow for a car, nice for a donkey. Monemvasia actually means one way in. And this tunnel has a kink in it. I think it's to stop invading armies in their tracks and give them a bit of surprise when they turn the corner. And then you actually turn the corner. And I'm in Clavelli.
No, I'm only joking. 40 years on, I hardly recognize the place. It was a ghost town. It's been restored, I think, with great love for the old Byzantine ways and traditions. I just wouldn't fancy lugging my suitcase to the very top. I'm quite enjoying the wandering around Monemvasia because when I came here before, it was virtually derelict and apparently just filled with snakes and rats. So, this is quite a recent bit of building. But obviously this here is probably 2,000 years old, Greek or Roman. And you sort of think, "How could they have done that?" Right? They would have found this bit of marble somewhere and just stuck it up there as a lintel. But the chickens are upside down.
Couldn't they just have seen the chickens would be upside down forevermore? No, builders. This is where the famous Malmsey wine, much loved in England in the 15th century, came from. And it was exported in great big barrels called butts. And that immortalized, of course, in Shakespeare's Richard III, where the Duke of Clarence is drowned in a butt of Malmsey. And possibly the best bit of dramatic irony ever, he asks what he thinks is the jailer in the Tower of London for a cup of wine, but in fact it's one of the assassins. And the assassin says, "Thou shalt have wine enough, my lord." Anon.
Barrels of Malmsey wine were shipped from here by Venetian and Genoese traders to eventually end up in England. But when Constantinople fell to the Turks 500 years ago, everything changed. Port and Madeira wine eventually took over in popularity from Malmsey. I remember my favorite wine merchant in the world, Bill Baker, who sadly no longer with us, telling me the story of Malmsey. He said it was the tipple of all the well-to-do people in England. It had a taste of honey and dried fruits, and it was exotic, delicious, and expensive.
Maybe these vineyards near Monemvasia supplied the grapes for the original Malmsey. But their owner, Yorgos Zimbidis and his wife Ellie, have made it a lifetime dream to bring it back to the place where it began, which I think is quite amazing after 500 years. Hello. Ellie? Ellie, very nice to meet you here. Welcome, welcome. And Yorgos. Yorgos doesn't speak any English, but wine has a way of making people understand each other anyway. It really does. I wonder why. I often find myself in a situation like this and we get on like a house on fire. Oh, it's nice and cool. Good lord, it's very nice actually. It's sort of working cellar. I mean, so many times in France they look like they're
there for visitors, but I love this. Thank you. That's really nice. I wish my friend Bill could have been here to try this. It's like tasting history because no other wine was more famous during the Middle Ages than Malmsey. It was called Malvasia by the Venetians, but it will always be Malmsey to me. Oh. That's so good. It's full of warm sunshine. It's It's unctuous. It's lovely and sweet. It's got lots of fruit in it. I just want to carry on drinking it. But tell me why he felt so passionate about reintroducing Malmsey or Malvasia again. He recreate again this wine because it was lost for many, many years and he want to make this all as present
to his country and the people of here. And this wine is for all the world from our little place. The fact he's brought it back, I think it's fabulous. I first came here in the '70s and I'd heard about Malmsey in Monemvasia and I thought, "Oh, it'd be so good to get some." But of course, there wasn't It wasn't. And I just when I heard that you were producing it again, I thought, "Great." there was a great deal of winemaking in this region, Anatolia, and wine was enjoyed by both Christians and Muslims. But in the 1920s came partition. The Greek families who lived in this part of Turkey were told to pack their bags and go back to Greece.
Similarly for the Muslims who lived in Greece, the same story. The trouble here was that it was generally the Christians who made the wine and tended the vineyards. So, the vineyards became overgrown, then useless, and finally lost. We talked about grape, but we never tasted it. Would you like to taste? I would. So sweet. Absolutely bursting with flavor. The grape should be tasty and delicious to make good wine. But I thought I heard somewhere that it didn't matter with wine grapes. They don't taste like table grapes do.
They are very different and I believe they are more tasty. If it is not tasty, you can never make a good wine. You make the wine in the vineyard, not in the winery. So, every time I taste your wine in the future, I'll be back here. You are always welcome. Now, the best wine is the wine that you enjoy. I you will like it. I'm thinking deep, dark velvet, tobacco, licorice, all that sort of thing. How am I doing? Excellent. Now, tell me what I should be saying. The most important thing is if the wine is good or bad. Good. Thank you. Very nice to hear that.
Cheers again. I got the feeling that Jan keeps pretty much an open house here at the vineyard. There were women cooking really good stuff flatbreads for the wine buyers and the visitors. I just watched those two ladies make these gozleme, they're called, and I've actually watched them about five times because it's just so mesmerizing watching them do it. While I was watching them, I was thinking like when you're a child and you watch your mother making maybe just some shortcrust pastry, it has that same sort of effect. There's something incredibly comforting and reassuring about people, particularly women, I think, making something like these. It just
I think that's where my love of cooking came from originally. It was just watching my mom cooking cuz that's the same feeling I get watching them. And this I've watched them make save savory ones, but this one with some tahini and some sugar. Now, I just want a little glass of tea. This is a food journey, but I had to come to the exquisite ancient city of Ephesus. Well, everybody does, it seems. Lovely sweet figs here, perfect for a hot day. And I like old ruins, especially if I can find any distant reference to food.
This was a rich, comfortable place to live. It was Greek, but then the Romans turned it into one of the most prosperous ports in the Aegean. My mom sent me a postcard from Ephesus when I was away at boarding school. A big postcard, I remember. I think it was one of the amphitheaters and I thought, "Oh, I've got to go there sometime." But the thing that interests me is over there, there's that plane, there's the cars in the distance, the trees, and all of that was sea a thousand years ago and gradually it silted up. Now, in Padstow, cuz I have to put this on a human scale, we have a dredger going up and down the
estuary every day trying to keep it clear and succeeding for small boats. But imagine if you were here and this was one of the biggest ports in the Mediterranean in Roman times and gradually seeing it all go, all fade. How awful would that be? Fate, inexorable fate, would be taking its toll of your life. Before the sea went away, people would have lived very well. Many would have been rich and the food would have been exotic. They had cookery books, I suppose to be more accurate, cookery scrolls. How to cook lamb stew with garum or roasted flamingo in aspic for your mates after a day at the Colosseum?
Look at that. A pomegranate tree with ripe fruit. Isn't that beautiful? What could be more splendid than that? And they would have had pomegranates a plenty, oranges, lemons, grapes, olives, herbs, lovely green vegetables from Anatolia, fish, goats, lamb. They would have done all right.
