KARPATHOS

Even today, the women in their rich traditional costumes, colorful headscarves and topolalia, all knead together and bake the famous breads in traditional wood-fired ovens.

They still grind wheat and barley in mills to make handmade pasta. Like flour and water macaroni. The original pasta cord is cut into 3 cm long sections, which are pressed well in the center with the fingers to make a dent. After drying a little, they are boiled, burnt with butter and served with "tsikomeno" (roasted onion). Baked macaroons are served in the same way. Bites of stale bread boiled until soft (2-3 minutes) in salted water.

Rarely on an island the size of Karpathos can one come across such a wide variety of breads, of all kinds and flavors: spicy, onion fried, crispy nut rolls with mastic, cumin and white sesame. Extra large size with cumin, nutmeg and black sesame. Christopsoma, leavened breads, which contain cinnamon, mastic, cloves and are sprinkled with sesame, are a necessary complement to Christmas.

They are usually in the shape of a cross and housewives bake them on the eve of the celebration. At Easter, even today, women all gather to knead the Christokouloures, the characteristic "poulos", that is, thin salty "balls" in the shape of an "Eight" with a red egg on one end. 

TRADITIONAL RECIPES OF THE CARPATHS 

Spicy Onion Buns: Crispy delicious with plenty of spices and lots of onions. Perhaps one of the tastiest pretzels you've ever tasted.

Sesame pretzels, crispy with a thin shape, sprinkled with plenty of black sesame. We also meet them in neighboring Kasos.

Pretzels: (once wedding pretzels) These are big round pretzels. Inside them, twelve pasta strips are placed, vertically and horizontally, so that they cross forming small squares between them. Before they are baked, they are sprinkled with sesame seeds. The most popular pies are Cabbage pies, Onion pies and zimbilia, a Christmas dessert with raisin filling.

After the grapes are harvested, a quantity of grapes is not immediately consumed, it is not made into wine. With this, they make the raisins, which, when ground, are the main ingredient of the filling of the "Zibilia", a sweet pitta, which, together with nutmeg, are wrapped in the sheet of dough they make at that moment dipped in a mixture of white and black sesame seeds and baked in the wood-fired ovens. Samples of the taste and patience of the Carpathian housewife, Moschopougia, crescent-shaped stuffed sweets, very common throughout the Dodecanese. With variations in the filling, which mainly contains walnuts, almonds and sesame, sprinkled with powdered sugar.

The Carpathian baklava with plain dough that is opened with a stick, fried in oil and then covered with almonds, walnuts and many leaves of crust that give it great height is also a sweet delight. Wood cakes are made very thin, fried and served with honey. "Sesame honey" (with honey and sesame) is offered at weddings to give strength to the groom, but also to the guests. Great skill from the housewife is required for the shortbread offered in breadcrumbs with sugar syrup. Try quince, fig, grape, sour cherry spoon sweets.

Takakia: Fried sweet, which is made into small pieces and covered in syrup.

Easter sweets, the Cakes, made with risen dough filled with soft sweet myzithra and flavored dill.

Famous in Byzantium, lamb or goat stuffed with herbs and rice is simmered in a covered clay pot, an Easter treat.

Anderizia: Stuffed intestines which, after being thoroughly washed, are stuffed with rice, pieces of meat and lots of spices that have been fried in a pan first. Then they sew them up and place them in a pot of boiling water to cook. To finish, they are fried in a little oil to become crispy rolled pieces of pork that boil in the pot together with pieces of "milda" pork fat. The meat is eaten plain as a meze or flavored various dishes with pulses or omelettes. The best pieces are usually fried or roasted with sesame seeds on Christmas day and baked on the eve together with Christmas bread.

Thicket: However, pork is the Christmas dish par excellence. It is a mixture consisting of pieces of meat and broth that comes from boiling the cleaned and "roasted" (so that the hairs are burned) pig's head. Inside harmoniously coexist abundant spices (bay laurel, pepper, cumin) and of course lemon juice.

Wedding food Chondros, i.e. coarsely chopped wheat with meat and tomato. It can be cooked with milk as a cream or even plain in water and before serving it is sprinkled with fried onion, serve also during the island's festivals.

There is plenty of fish and seafood, mainly a type of squid - the wild one, like the thrapsalo - crabs, sea urchins, patellides, while the menula fish which resembles a sardine is salted. The culinary identity of Karpathos is also supported by the skaros fish, the which is abundant only in the Carpathian Sea. It is worth trying fried or roasted with plenty of lemon oil.

Tradition on the island is a living reality. The Carpathian feast, which gives the opportunity to bring to life the folk songs of Karpathos, but also presents the poetic talent of the Carpathians with the mandinades of the moment, expressing pain and joy, depending on the occasion.

Such feasts are witnessed in festivals with traditional foods and local musical instruments with traditional hospitality. All visitors are welcome, while the island is flooded with smells of sourdough bread, dried bread, stew, macaroons, etc.

The Wine Festival in Losto gathers a crowd of people who taste Adam's wine, as they call the wine they themselves make in the presses (traditional wineries) and get drunk by the magical echo of the lyre, the lute and the tsambouna.

The festivals are many, the biggest are two, one on the fifteenth of August, which is worth going to in Olympus (but it is also celebrated in three other villages), Menetidi, in Pyles. The second big festival is on the 4th of September, the eve of Larniotissa.

The festival of the Dormition of the Virgin, in Olympus of Karpathos, is one of the most nocturnal. Here in Olympus they are deeply connected with the mourning that characterizes this time for Christianity and the highlight of the traditional celebration is the dance that takes place in the small square in front of the church of the Virgin Mary with the instrumentalists playing the Kato Horos, slow and serious . The men seated at the tables, with basil in their lapels, sing and drink to the accompaniment of the lute and lyre. As darkness falls, the dancing begins, and the women in their traditional costumes slowly enter.

Contact with Karpathos is a true revelation for all tastes, especially in the summer months.