The Nation — October 30, 2017

24 The Nation. October 30, 2017

THE

FUTURE

OF

FOOD

A

s i weaved through the alleys of ritsona, a refu-

gee camp set up on an abandoned Greek Air Force base

on a mountain north of Athens, I let my nose guide

me. The air was filled with the scent of roasting meat.

Smoke wafted through the rows of white, single-room

container homes. At last I reached the source: a make-

ear smile, “didn’t cry a peep the whole way.” By March of

2016, they’d joined the 5 million Syrians—a quarter of the

population—who were now living outside Syria’s borders.

Abu Shadi rattled off the cities of origin for the oth-

ers seated around the plastic dining table: Abu and Umm

Ibrahim from Idlib in the northwest, near the Turkish

border; Abu and Umm Farouk from Latakia, a coastal

province. From a Kurdish family in the region of Al

Hasakah, on the northeast border with Iraq, came Alan

Mohammad, who uses a wheelchair due to muscular dys-

trophy; Salah and Linda hailed from a Kurdish town in

Aleppo province. There were also Abu and Umm Raed,

from Daraa, the city known for sparking the revolution,

and a group of single men in their teens and early 20s

from a Palestinian-refugee camp in Damascus.

These families would never have crossed paths in

Syria. It wasn’t just geography that separated them, but

also their educational, ethnic, and socioeconomic back-

grounds. Generally speaking, Kurds and Arabs wouldn’t

share a meal back home. But as the refugees gathered

around the dining table at Ritsona, passing platters of

shish taouk and fatteh—a sort of casserole of fried pita

bread topped with chickpeas and a garlic-tahini-yogurt

sauce—a familial bond grew between them. Abu Farouk

tore pieces of chicken and fed them to Alan, whose own

fingers were stiff from dystrophy and the November cold.

“In Syria, most people would treat each other with preju-

dice,” Abu Shadi admitted. “Here, we’re family.”

T

he residents of ritsona had arrived in

Greece eight months earlier, expecting the

stopover to be a minor one on their journeys

farther north. But they crossed the Aegean

Sea from Turkey in March 2016, just as

Europe sealed its borders. What many anticipated would

be a one-week detour stretched on into a months-long

RECIPE

HOME?

At a refugee camp in Greece, displaced Syrians form unlikely bonds in the kitchen.

BY DALIA MORTADA

“In Syria,

most people

would

treat each

other with

prejudice.

Here, we’re

family.”

— Abu Shadi

Dalia Mortada is a

Syrian-American

journalist based in

Istanbul. This story

is part of her proj-

ect Savoring Syria

and was supported

by a grant from

the International

Women’s Media

Foundation.

shift grill pit at the end of an alley, surrounded by men

squatting to tend the fire.

“We’re making shish taouk,” explained the Syrian man

I came to know as Abu Shadi. “Or at least our version of

it.” (In Syria, as in much of the Middle East, people go by

a moniker beginning with “Abu” or “Umm”—“father of”

and “mother of,” respectively—followed by the name of

their first-born son or son-to-be. Most of the people in

this story will be referred to by those monikers.)

Shish taouk, a popular Levantine dish of cubed chicken

marinated in yogurt, garlic, lemon, and an assortment

of spices that differs depending on the region, is usually

skewered like a kebab and grilled over an open flame. “We

don’t have skewers or all the spices we need for it, but we

make do,” Abu Shadi said. They didn’t have a grill, tongs,

or spatulas, either, so they used a fork or darted their bare

hands into the flames to flip the chicken over, quickly

dropping each piece onto a flat grill grate raised on bricks.

Abu Shadi and his wife, Umm Shadi, lived on the out-

skirts of Damascus until 2012, when the fighting forced

them out; they joined 6 million other Syrians who’d been

internally displaced by the civil war. They eventually

made it to Abu Shadi’s home village of Quneitra, near the

Israeli border in Syria’s southwest, before finally fleeing

Syria altogether with their children in 2016. It took 45

days to cross Syria by land; the family walked through the

desert and spent thousands of dollars on smugglers to get

them to Turkey and, eventually, to Greece. “This little

one,” Abu Shadi said, pointing to his feisty toddler, Jana,

who has her father’s olive skin and her mother’s ear-to-

PHOTOGRAPHED BY SIMA DIAB

IS THE

FOR

WHAT