When I first moved to Greece, there was a butcher's shop I went to often. Not because I had chosen it over any other — it was simply the nearest one, and in those first months, leaving the house to buy something was a small daily achievement in itself.
The man who worked behind the counter was somewhere near seventy. Grey, unhurried, the kind of man who wipes his hands on a cloth before he speaks to you. It was a long time before I learned that his name was Stathis.
The bag
After a few visits, things started arriving in my bag that I had not asked for.
A souvlaki. A sausage. Once, I think, something he simply had closest to hand. Nothing was ever announced. He did not look up, or wait for thanks, or make the small ceremony that a person makes when they want a gesture noticed. He wrapped what I had bought, added something, and handed the whole thing over as if the arithmetic had always been that way.
I assumed, at first, that this was the shop. Some places give you a sweet with the bill; perhaps this one gave you a sausage. I found it charming and thought no more about it.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to look properly at the queue. The woman ahead of me got what she paid for. The man behind me did too.
It was only me.
Asking, badly
My Greek at that point was three months old and built almost entirely out of nouns. Asking a question that began with why felt like a considerable undertaking.
But I wanted to know, and one afternoon I asked him. It came out clumsily, in the wrong order, with a verb that I am fairly sure was in the wrong tense.
He understood me perfectly.
And his answer arrived without a pause, the way answers do when a person has known something for weeks and has simply been waiting to be asked.
«Because you are from Serbia.»
He had heard me on the telephone
That was all it had taken. At some point, standing at that counter, I had been on the phone to my mother, speaking Serbian without any thought at all about who might be listening.
Stathis had recognised the language.
Why Serbia?
So I asked that too, because by then the conversation had started and my Greek had nothing left to lose.
Years earlier, he said, a Serbian family had lived in his flat. Not visitors, not a night or a fortnight — they had their home there, under his roof, for a whole year.
He had never worked in Serbia. He had never, as far as I could tell, spent any great amount of time there at all. His entire relationship with the country was that family, in those rooms, for those twelve months.
They moved on to Athens eventually, the way people do. And he and they stayed in touch long after the practical reason for knowing each other had disappeared.
That was the whole explanation. No grand history, no politics, no speeches about Orthodox brotherhood or shared wars. One family, one year, one flat — and the fact that they had left him with a good memory.
And that memory had done what good memories do when they are left alone long enough: it had widened. It stopped being about those particular people and became an affection for a country he barely knew, for a language he did not speak, and — as it turned out — for a woman who came into the shop where he worked and happened to be using that language on the telephone.
What it was
I want to be plain about it, because a story like this invites a knowing look that it does not deserve. There was nothing in it beyond what it appeared to be: a man of seventy being kind to someone from a country he had reason to be fond of.
Greek has a word for this. Φιλοξενία — from φίλος, friend, and ξένος, stranger. Friend to the stranger. It is usually rendered as "hospitality", which is accurate and far too small. Hospitality is something a host offers a guest in their home. Φιλοξενία happens in shops, on buses, between people who will never learn each other's surnames.
There is a second word you will meet constantly: κέρασμα, from κερνάω, to treat someone. The sweet that arrives beside a coffee nobody ordered. The plate of fruit at the end of a meal. Από το μαγαζί — from the shop, on the house.
The one mistake foreigners make
Refusing it.
The instinct — particularly if you come from somewhere that teaches you not to accept things from strangers — is to say no, or insist on paying, or perform a small protest. That is the single reaction that lands badly, because it hands the gift back.
The correct response is very short. Take it. Look at the person. Thank them properly. Then come back to the shop, which is the important half.
What I actually learned in that shop
Notice which language did which job.
The Serbian is what he heard. It was not aimed at him, it was not performed for anyone, it was simply my mother tongue used carelessly in a public place — and it is the reason a stranger decided to be kind to me for months.
The Greek is what let me find out. Bad Greek. Three months of it, wrong tense and all. Without those broken sentences, Stathis would have stayed a kind man behind a counter who inexplicably gave me sausages, and I would never have known about the family who stayed a year, or the reason any of it was happening.
Between them, those two languages turned a transaction into the thing I am still telling people about, years later.
That is the argument for learning properly rather than getting by. The shopping works fine in English. The gestures do not translate, and most of them will pass you by entirely until you can say something back — badly, in the wrong tense, in a shop that smells of sawdust.