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Buttermilk Pancakes with Nutella and Seasonal Fruit
We went to Santorini when we were younger – my mum, my sister and I. We sat in the tub outside our suite and looked down the caldera: the glistening white domes and cruise ships. We talked. We browsed the small selection of stores and restaurants near our hotel. We talked. I ordered the same thing for breakfast each morning. We slept in the same bed.
Dark Chocolate and Banana Crepe
When we were older, and with my dad and brother, we stayed in Folegandros for three days. We met at the airport from three separate corners of the world.
After we pilgrimaged to the picturesque church sitting at the top of the highest hill on the island, at different paces and with different gaits, we took pictures with the sunset. We wandered into the main village, which sat like a pond of rainwater at the bottom of this hill.
The smell wafted from a creperie tucked into a busy corner, and for some reason I felt too shy to order. My brother waltzed in instead and messily ordered a crepe. We watched the chef stack sliced bananas into the batter.
“Wait. You don’t like bananas in crepes do you?” he asked. “Should I tell him to change it?”
Everyone insisted I change it and I felt like the youngest again. I told them that it’s okay.
We all ate it together on the drive back to the hotel anyway, tearing at it with our hands. The sight of our hotel – in isolation beside a clifftop, doused in tacky hot pink and neon blue lights – finally made us laugh.
Greek Salad
As I lay on my back in the Aegean Sea in Milos, the tepid water was the exact same temperature as my body, making it an extension of myself. I was in the sea, the sand, the rocks, the dissolved salt.
Dad had disapprovingly glanced at the topless woman sunbathing near our discarded towels. Beyond the shore, my siblings and I comically copied his expression, his raised eyebrows, the slight shake of his head. Mum went on to lament our ancestors, their dignified ways of dressing and behaving.
Their bones sat at the bottom of the Black Sea, which was not far from the Aegean. I closed my eyes and visualised the two seas, dotted with Greece, Turkey and the Caucasus. Millions of cells and minerals and thoughts and souls in the water and land, so very similar to mine. At dinner, my parents loved the food, which is so very similar to ours.
Chicken Souvlaki
A friend and I reunited on the steps at Milos. She was charging up and I was charging down. She looked tanner than before and her eyes were bluer.
“You look happier,” she said.
“So do you,” I replied.
Her and my ancestry DNA tests – initially taken out of boredom – highlight the same parts of the globe: the configuration of shapes that are nestled between Africa, Asia and Europe. When she reads my tarot cards in her sage-scented room, we talk about the Ottoman Empire and our displaced ancestors and how we’ve had many past lives together, and that’s why we are so close.
Her sister speaks in Greek to the waiter, who is in slight disbelief. Her lips shape the words and sounds of os os os. He responds in enthusiasm. After the interaction, she tells me he wants her to meet his son.
They lead me to their BnB, a white little cave with an in-built pool, and tell me about how Italy and France sucked and how they felt home here.
Feta Me Meli
My brother orders feta me meli every night in Greece. The sweetness of the honey grates against the savoury feta and pastry, at once tasting familiar and strange. The conversation goes where it usually does; Mum wonders when her only son will find a nice Circassian girl. A subconscious fear of further shrinking our puddle of DNA. Our weak knees and our stubbornness and our emotional coldness. But isn’t this feeling of peace enough?
In my second year of art school, I painted the hills of Sochi in red tones. I thought about what it would feel like to go there again, if some kind of revelation would come to me if I was where they were.
“Red,” asked my teacher, “because it symbolises death?”
She sounded unimpressed.
“Yes.”
Gyros
I’d like to think that the peace that we felt on the trip was because we were literally home. Did the microscopic skin cells of my ancestors bury themselves in that earth and water? So that they reattached to me? Was it that I walked along the same earth that they did? Or am I romanticising, to calm myself into feeling whole?
My brother and I take a selfie after spending the day at a beach constructed of swirling white cliffs, which act as a makeshift shoreline. He sends the picture to his girlfriend, bzamoh.*
Spanakorizo
At my friend’s place back in Sydney, I tried a dish her grandmother made. Lemony vine leaves, blended with rice. We rejoice about how it tastes exactly like a dish I grew up with – how we are all the same after all.
*Circassian word for outsider.
Photos by the author