“Excuse me, do you know how to make royal pickled vegetables?” asks a client of the “Varna” shop in Athens. The mother of the owner Dimiter already started taking orders for Bulgarian Easter cakes for the following week. From the place of the event with a cup of Frape in her hand reports Marina Nikolova.
The Easter holidays are coming and usually around this time everybody who lives abroad is may be preparing to go home – where he or she is born and is waited for by the parents and old friends. Abroad one of the things which bind you to your home country is the taste of all the familiar meals which could take you even to your childhood just like a time machine. Some time ago people told me about a shop in Athens where they sell everything which one could find in a good well-supplied Bulgarian mini market.
For the first time I passed by this shop which everybody was advertising so excitedly with the purpose of buying boza for my little son. While I was walking and looking around one of the clients asked the boy at the cash register if they have from that minced meat for making sandwiches. I remember eating these kind of sandwiches with minced meat for the last time in the beginning of the 90s in the cafe on “Zdrave” street behind the maternity hospital “Maichin dom” in Sofia. Really this memory came very unexpected and showed up very life in front of my eyes.
The “Varna” shop is located in the center of Athens in a neighborhood where in the last few years a lot of Bulgarians have been developing their business. Very close by there is another Bulgarian super market, a Sunday school for learning the mother tongue, a hotel with Bulgarian owners, a coffee bar, a shop for installing satellite dishes with all the Bulgarian TV channels – in other words a small “Astoria” but inhabited only by Bulgarians.
The owner of the “Varna” shop Dimitar Dimitrov of course is originally from Varna. He lives in Greece from eight years now and the first six of them he worked as a driver. His family is also in Athens – his mother, his wife and their 12 years old son. They open the shop about two years ago and they hire three employees. The right hand of Dimitar is his wife, however the person he also trusts a great deal is Drago, with whom they have been friends ever since he is in Greece.
On Saturday morning the shop is full of clients who are wondering around the shelves. The atmosphere is like in the neighborhood store where the people know each other and the older ones are exchanging the last gossips about some neighbor and are telling each other what they will prepare for lunch. Actually the people here don’t know each other, but only the fact that they could talk in their mother language and order “banski starets”, yellow cheese and Bulgarian flat sausage is enough for them. Two women strangers are exchanging a recipe for making royal pickled vegetables, ordering Easter cake and wishing “have a good day” to the mother of Dimitar, who works at the cash register.
“In Athens there are about 6 or 7 more food stores from Bulgaria. We are doing very well. People from all over Athens are coming and shopping here. We do not need any advertising because people are sharing and spreading the word about our existence. And if 90% of our clients are Bulgarians then we have another 10% Greeks. There are a lot of Greeks coming who were students in Bulgaria. They like the Bulgarian yellow cheese a lot and also the wine and they also buy that” says the owner Dimitar. “There are people who are coming every day to buy bread and yogurt. Everything is fresh. We work with suppliers from Sofia, Plovdiv and Blagoevgrad and we stock once a week. However every day we have freshly prepared bread from Bulgaria.”
“Sometimes we carry out orders of our clients and we bring them things that otherwise we do not sell in our shop. For example couple of times a week people order pregnancy tests because they are very expensive here – 18 euro each, while we bring them from Bulgaria for 3 euro without taking a commission for the service” shares Dimitar.
“The client is always right. This is our motto and we try to satisfy the desires of every one of our clients” adds Drago who also works in the Mini market. He has also worked as a driver in Athens, however ever since his friend opened the shop he starts working with him. Drago is originally from Rousse and however he lives in Athens with his girlfriend. At a certain point of time however they plan to go back to Buglaria, but they don’t yet know when and how they will do that.
Dimitar has traveled before this once a week to Bulgaria, however now he goes back rarer. Actually the luck is on his side now and besides owning a food shop, Dimitar is also the proud owner of a coffee bar and car wash which he has opened in the last year. “In Greece I like the climate and the life style” he says at the end of our conversation. I finish my coffee and chat for a while with the colleagues of Dimitar. They are all busy unloading the new goods and accounting what would be necessary to purchase for the next supplying of the store in the next week – after all holidays are coming…
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