Ancient History

Well, ancient might be exaggerating a little but as the story begins nearly 200 years ago, history it definitely is.

Back in 1830 an ancestor of one Ioannis Papadopoulous (I'll refer to him as John P from now on as John is the English equivalent of Ioannis and it's much easier to type!) began to sell tahini* and halvas commercially to the citizens of Symi. Jump forward to 1904 and the company name of S. Papadopoulous and Sons was established. Rushing swiftly forward again to 1987 and said John P decided to branch out from his family's original business and created the supermarket known as Tahas (or Taxas as it is spelt in Greek) - which is where I work.

To be honest, until today, the history of the place I spend 60 hours of my week in, has never really interested me, although I did wonder why the shop is called Tahas when my boss's name is Papadopoulous. Then today my boss's father paid is usual daily visit and brought with him photocopies of the old labels from the tahini tins and a very old photo of some of them stacked up on the harbourside. I asked his permission to take a couple of snaps, knowing that however bad they were, one of them would form the basis of today's Blip.

Leaning against the wall opposite the shop is a millstone which Sostice (John P's father) explained to me is the one the family used to grind the sesames to make the tahini and it is 330 odd years old. If I can find a way to make it an interesting image, I may Blip the millstone in the future.

My favourite thing about the product label is that it shows the telephone number as 1 - meaning that it was the very first telephone line in Symi and I now know that the name 'Tahas' comes from the word tahini.

* Tahini is a paste of creamed or ground sesame seeds which can be used as an ingredient of various things including houmous (see what I did there Gaz?) and halvas is very sweet confection made with tahini and other stuff which is mainly eaten during Lent (I think).

That's far too much writing for me in one day so expect a Blip with just a title tomorrow to make up for it!