ΔΙΕΘΝΕΣ

 

Once a year, just before Christmastime, we would make an annual pilgrimage to the Lonsdale Street. After stopping at Salapatas to buy a record, my father would take us to Diethnes International Cakes in order to eat a «πάστα» which had nothing to do with pasta per se but everything to do with the height of epicurean ecstasy. Not being in the habit of eating cakes regularly, we would envision the exact form of the πάστα for weeks before, while its taste would linger on the tongue months later, coming and going in moments unsuspect, in a litany of craving and longing.

To view Diethnes’ display counter, featuring a vast array of confections in a multitude of shapes and sizes was a transfixing experience, one that four decades later still evoked astonishment. Here touloumbes co-existed with galaktoboureka, abiding in harmony with bougatsa and baklava, at total peace with the kok, also known as the yo-yo, the ubiquitious cake of choice to be offered when visiting friends and relatives. The sweet smell of sugar was overwhelming. It invaded the olfactory nerves and flooded the synapses almost to the point of swooning.

In those days, Mr Vasilis Batzoyiannis, one of the proprietors told me during my last visit, people would think nothing of making orders of sixty or seventy baklavadakia, to be served at nameday parties. “You couldn’t do that now of course,” he reflected. “Firstly, the cost alone is prohibitive. Secondly, no one celebrates namedays any more. We are not the people we used to be.”

And yet my contention was always that as long as Diethnes occupied its end of Lonsdale Street when all the other Greek shops of the precinct had been consigned to oblivion, that we are the people we have always been. In my student days, many were the NUGAS meetings that were held at a packed Diethnes, which could host up to four or five parallel meetings of committees of other community organisations contemporaneously, many are the plots that were hatched within its walls to depose community leaders, and many  were the partnerships that were forged around its tables, business and personal.

Diethnes was my daily lunch destination when I graduated and started working in the city. For starters, it was the only place where I could get a decent Greek coffee, not being a fan of the cappuccino, the latte not yet having become popular. No matter what the weather, you could guarantee that you would always run into someone you knew either in the shop, or just leaving it and it was the daily conversations and interaction with Diethnes’ patrons that made me appreciate just how complex and diverse our community was. From Diethnes’ shop front, you could almost time the comings and goings of the constituent parts of that community. In five minutes, GOCMV president George Fountas would stride past, peering through the window to see who was about and affording a cursory nod of recognition. In the other direction, Laiki Bank employees strutting confidently up the footpath in search of the next deal. From the RMIT Greek Centre, Mimis Sophocleous would emerge, smiling, as he offered a well-considered thought and a suggestion for further reading. Immersed as you were in the centre of the circulatory system of the Greeks of Melbourne, you didn’t realise until you felt a heavy hand on your shoulder and a gruff voice stating; «κερασμένα» that Christos Tsirkas had entered the shop and had picked up your bill.

This was a place in which everyone had a place and to which everyone belonged. It was also a place where you could run into visiting politicians, singers or artists from Greece for before Oakleigh, Diethnes was an obvious choice to make the statement that we so often seek to impart to our visiting Helladic brethren: that we are just as Greek as they and what is more, we have the confections to prove it. Friends visiting from interstate would also be taken to Diethnes where they too would marvel at our communal Hellenicity and lament the paucity of similar establishments in their own locale, while scoffing a chocolate waffle.

Every year in the cold Sunday of July that the Cyprus demonstration would be held, Diethnes would provide warmth and sustenance to the mostly elderly demonstrators packed within. As with the Antipodes Festival, one entered to try to locate a friend at one’s own peril, for the loss of at least one of one’s dimensions, was a real risk.

Mr Vasilis Batzoyiannis, in highlighting that his was a family establishment, jokes that single Greeks would take their coffee at Medallion but once attached, would frequent Diethnes and I nod in agreement. Over a year-long succession of coffees at Diethnes, I painstakingly convinced my wife that I was an acceptable prospect for a spouse. The location was her choice, for unlike other options, Diethnes was clean and smoke-free.

My own children were introduced to Diethnes quite early as well. Every Saturday, after dropping off the eldest at Greek school, I would invariably gravitate to Diethnes where I would procure for my youngest two, bowls of the creamiest rizogalo. They have climbed onto its benches, spilled sugar upon its tables and enjoyed more hot chocolates than I will ever admit to their mother. They have also basked in the broad smiles of the establishment’s proprietors. After each of them in turn, commenced Greek school, I still persisted in frequenting Diethnes, Neos Kosmos in tow, relishing the opportunity to ruminate over community affairs with friends. A good many Diatribes have been written from its tables, and yet I noted that even though on such Saturdays, when the city would be filled by Greek parents, most of them recently arrived, taking their children to Greek school, very few would deign to patronise Diethnes. There was something about its aesthetic that was inimical to the establishment of a connection, whether this was the Christmas decorations perennially left upon its walls or its famous men’s toilet door with a chunk cut out of it so that it could open past the toilet bowl. It was almost as if this place was too old, too full of history to belong to anyone other than the ghosts of the past and yet it was a great favourite with the broader community, with online sales of cakes skyrocketing after the advent of the socially levelling Coronavirus.

 

On my purported last visit to Diethnes, I brought with me the same book of Cavafy’s poems that I used to annotate in the same shop a quarter of a century ago. I sat on the same seat I always prefer and stroked the faux marble table top as if trying to absorb its memory with my fingers. My coffee arrived without me having to order it: they know what I like and how I like it and I sat with the proprietors reminiscing about all those people that have come and gone for so many years. “In the beginning,” Mr Vasilis mused, “all we could think of was how to make this a success. And we worked so hard. It is only later that you look back and start considering that all this means, what effect it had on our community.”

In the beginning…. you don’t generally think about the end. You live, you experience, you strive, and you try to delude yourself that the work of your hands will defy oblivion, that they will achieve some permanency. We are no longer at the beginning. When Diethnes closes its doors at the end of the month, I will no longer feel that I have a place in the heart of Melbourne that I belong to and which belongs to me. A whole way of life, an intricate web of connections, a beating heart will cease to exist. In the beginning, you don’t think about loss. That comes later. When things disappear and you live half within a world where the places you belong to no longer exist and half within a world of ghost and memory. Then, when you have ample time to look past success, you begin to contemplate life as a shade.

A few hours later, having collected my children from Greek school I returned to Diethnes and ordered them a rizogalo each. There were none available and they settled for a hot chocolate, accompanied by some freshly baked biscuits, complements of the open-hearted Mr Vasilis. “I want you to remember this place,” I told my children. “I want you to remember how we used to come here and eat rizogalo when you were younger. And I want you to remember this day, because the next time we are here, this cake shop will no longer be here.”

They slurped upon their beverages and looked at me puzzled. They cannot comprehend endings because they are still at their beginning, nor can they yet appreciate my own topography of loss, the ever-growing map of lost or missing buildings that occupies my own internal orientation. I squeezed the vinyl on my seat and took one last look around. Then we set off for home, walking past Rekaris’ old shoe shop which is now being re-modelled into something else. We did not look back.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 September 2024