This is Monastiraki Square, and you can probably smell it before you've taken it in. Pork turning on vertical spits, onions, pita charring on a grill, all of it coming off the row of souvlaki shops where Mitropoleos Street runs into the square. Find that corner. It's where this story ends up.
Souvlaki feels like the oldest food in Greece, and in one sense it is. Homer has his heroes threading meat onto spits over a fire. But the souvlaki being wrapped on that corner right now has a much more specific beginning, and it starts with a man who had to change his name.
He was born Misak Anispikian, an Armenian from the city of Adana, in what is now southern Turkey. Adana takes its grilled meat on skewers about as seriously as Athens takes its gods. In the years around the First World War, the Armenians of Anatolia were massacred and driven from their homes, and Misak got out alive. He went south to Egypt as a refugee. From Egypt he made his way to Greece.
He arrived in a country that was
overflowing. In nineteen twenty-two, the war with Turkey ended in disaster, and more than a million refugees poured across the Aegean into Greece, a country of about five million. Athens roughly doubled in a couple of years. The newcomers built their own towns of shacks on the edges of the city and named them after the places they had lost. One of them, down by the port, they called Nikaia, after
