It’s Tsiknopempti!
This is “Smoke Thursday” or “Meat Thursday” in the Greek Orthodox calendar, one of the last few days Orthodox Christians can eat meat leading up to the fast of Lent. So they do what you expect and take a day to eat as much meat as possible. The “smoke” name is because usually businesses and restaurants will set up grills with tons of meat skewers and grill all day.
Last year we accidentally learned about the holiday because as we drove in to Lefkada, it looked like a forest fire was taking over. We kept passing houses on the outskirts with guys just handing out around giant grills, and all the restaurants on the main walkplatz of town also had setups. We went in and got some sticks and a beer before work. It’s a great holiday.
So we figured this year we’d be in Athens, we’d be in the heart of some big celebrations, right? The website says there’s a performance by the Philharmonic, traditional dancing, all up by the big meat market (which is close to the apartment), and so we set an alarm, if you can believe that, and were out the door around 10. Philharmonic started at 11, after all.
We set up at Mokka, a coffee shop on one of the main avenues through the market, and got some coffee and a tyropita and waited for the performance to start. Or the parade, there was also possibly a parade? Eleven came and went and we saw a couple guys wandering around in fancy dress, but no musical sounds to be heard.
The Philharmonic (I’m assuming, they were dressed like a marching band) finally started playing around 11:30. We paid our tab and hustled over and got to watch some of the performance, and just as they were wrapping up, a traditional dance troupe wandered in and started dancing, and kept dancing while a … traditional Greek slash rock band? … kept playing. It got my spirits up, for sure, it looked like a lot of fun.
There was a stage set up behind the band where some guys were likely going to eventually start grilling some sticks of meat, but it wasn’t kicking off immediately, and there must have been two hundred people waiting in line by this time, so we figured we’d try and see who else was out grilling. We wandered down Athinas towards Monastiraki Square and found …
… nothing?
Nope, no one was out grilling. At least, not quite in the same way that Lefkada was doing it. There was no sign of any meat on sticks being in our future.
I suggested we wander past O Thanàsis, a taverna right off the Square that is on the map and supposedly does good traditional Greek fare, to see if anything was happening there, and if nothing sparked us, we could continue on around towards Ermou to see if anything was going on.
O Thanàsis is cute (and also the 49th most legendary restaurant in the world, according to the sign!) so we checked out the menu and ultimately took a table. H got a single chicken skewer (very good, she said, would eat again) and I got the “Thanasis pita” which was 4 skewers of ground lamb and 4 roasted tomatoes on a pita. On one pita! It was all good, the bottle of wine was like five euros, it was a little pricey comparatively because of the proximity to the tourist areas, but we’ll go back again.
It got closer to work time and, since we’re both still a little sick, we took the short way back to the apartment, stopping to say hello to the Hadrian cats and stop at the grocery store for soda.
It still felt like something must be going on, though, so at lunch we put our shoes back on and went out to see if we just expected it to start earlier than it actually did, but no, nothing. Nothing at the tavernas nearby, nothing around the corner, nothing on Ermou, nothing at Monastiraki Square. Total bust.
We had done all our normal “fast food” options in the last two days and I didn’t feel like cooking, so I suggested Wagamama, which is right next to our apartment. It was good but not great. (We can get better Asian food at Streetwok honestly.)
Hopefully early to bed tonight.