You go to buy fruit and vegetables, herbs, honey, fish and dairy products. You might leave with clothes, a rug or something you hadn’t necessarily intended to buy. But you don’t go there just to shop.You go to meet people.
For us, it’s a weekly fixture. A meeting place for people, products, stories and places. It’s a part of everyday life that repeats itself every week, and through this repetition, it becomes part of a place’s culture.
In Kassandria, every Tuesday, the farmers’ market is there.
You go to buy fruit and vegetables, herbs, honey, fish and dairy products. You might leave with clothes, a rug or something you hadn’t necessarily intended to buy. But you don’t go there just to shop.
You go to meet people.
Local producers, but also people who travel from different parts of Greece to gather, every week, in the same small villages and at the same markets. To meet the locals who have also made this weekly rendezvous a part of their lives.
People who have made this journey part of their lives.
In Kassandria, every Tuesday, the street market… has basically been there for as long as I can remember.
Those Tuesday mornings when I was on my way to school and noticed the traffic jams it caused. On those freezing winter days when we’d walk between the tarpaulins covering the stalls and somehow feel sheltered from the cold outside them. In the summers when we’d buy fruit and head straight to the sea with our haul.
On Christmas Eve, with sleet and very few stallholders (partly because of the time of year), buying the last few items for the festive table. The fact that every Tuesday we knew we’d be eating fish because it had been bought fresh that very morning.
And perhaps that is what makes the farmers’ market so special.
It is a journey that begins with the land and the produce and ends at our table. From the person who cultivated, harvested, made or reared something, to the person who will take it home.
The producer themselves is there, behind their stall.
You can ask them where the produce comes from. Find out when it was harvested. Have a taste. Hear a story. See the same person again the following week.
To a visitor, it might just seem like ‘the market’.
For us, however, the word ‘laiki’ carries a different weight.
Because it doesn’t just describe a place where you buy things. It describes a way of life. A place where production meets consumption, the city meets the countryside, and people meet one another.
It is the land that becomes a product.
The product that becomes food.
And the food that becomes an occasion for a gathering.
The farmers’ market is a slice of Greece that takes place every week.