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to a past that never existed .
In contrast , the houses inhabited by the locals , mostly elderly people with little or no resources , are shabby . Especially towards the coastal hamlet of Limeni , there ’ s plenty of new reinforced concrete and stone-clad towers that imitate the traditional ones . The central street is full of restaurants and cocktail bars and , unthinkable until a few years ago , from sunset to late night you cannot walk for how dense the crowd is . However , in all this welter some enclaves of stubborn typicality remain . No rhetoric about resisting presidia and , for god ’ s sake , forget resilience , they simply exist
because that is how they want to be .
A nice little restaurant with a courtyard in the back serves the most hardcore traditional dishes , a greengrocer ' s shop is stuck in the post-war era , as surreal as the owner who seems teleported from Woodstock , a rustic bakery has great bread but no kindness , not even for a fee . And then there is the pastry shop of master Nikos Giannakis , furnishings in steel and plastic from the Seventies , neon lights and sweets that are worthy of Zeus .
“ I ' ve worked all over the world , on cruise ships , even in hotels in Italy : it was good money , but here it ' s better ,” he lets us taste his creations , and proudly lets himself be photographed with his tender wife .
The Maniots are no longer at each other ' s throats , and the Ottomans are relegated to history books . Today , the enemy you must fight is the soulless tourism that brings fake stone houses , the embalmed rhetoric of once-upon-a-time-villages and UNESCO stamps . No matter , as Maniots know how to face every attack with honour . AF & AR
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