Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I enter through the back door of Spathis Bakery with a notebook in hand and a camera around my neck. Ilyess Saidan, one of the bakers who later serves as my personal translator, is the first to greet me: “Our boss told us you might come, welcome to our office… Would you like a frappé?” Surprised by the lively energy that flows through the room, considering the time of day, I accept the ice-cold coffee beverage. The four bakers laugh and joke with one another in Greek as the bread piles up and the coffee kicks in. Even though the jokes might be about me, I just smile and laugh along.
 

The largest bakery in Kefaloniá, Spathis is famous throughout the island and produces approximately 5,500 pounds of bread per day for the local community. Greeks have been making bread for approximately 3,000 years, and are credited for turning the baking process into an art form. “You’ll never see a Greek eating a meal without bread on the side,” says Ilyess. “This is not America; there is no Wonder bread here. It must be fresh and made the right way.” Spathis offers 72 varieties of bread, including double-baked breakfast bread, Rusk, and a special Easter bread with two dyed hardboiled eggs in the center. During busy holidays like Easter, bakers work 14-hour shifts, starting at 10 p.m. and finishing at noon the following day.
 

Petros Tumasatos begins the bread-making process with a starter dough called prozimi, described as “the mother” of the bread. It is made in a nearby village and transported daily to the bakery in large buckets to produce its “offspring.” Petros seems austere at first glance, but later I realize he is the most eccentric baker at Spathis.
 

Petros has been working at Spathis Bakery for six years. He says that despite the difficult working hours, he loves his job and earns enough money to support his family of four. Throughout the course of the day, I often catch him gazing at me sternly, only to suddenly burst out laughing and start hugging me. I guess eccentricity is par for the course after six years of sleep deprivation!

Petros and the other bakers relieve their stress and fatigue by taking regular cigarette breaks. Greece has the highest smoking rate amongst European nations: 38 percent of adults indulge in the habit. In October 2002 a law was passed prohibiting smoking in public areas, but it is not highly enforced. I have yet to find a restaurant, café, or social location that forbids smoking.
 

Each baker’s shift is extremely sporadic: One moment he is running around shouting orders to the others and the next minute he is taking a cigarette break or text-messaging his friends and family. “I’m just messaging my wife to make sure my child has gone to school today,” says Petros.
 

After 10 minutes in the mixer, the prozimi dough is ready for the next step, and Petros hands it off to 19-year-old Petar Atanasov. Petar recently moved to Argostóli from his home country of Bulgaria, where he had studied the art of baking. After a year in the field, he is unsure whether he wants to pursue it as a lifelong career. “I want to save money through my job at Spathis so I can visit America, where there is more money to be made,” he says. I ask him what profession he would prefer and he laughs as he replies, “Nothing, I don’t like working!”

Ilyess covers the prozimi dough with plastic bags and leaves it for one hour to rise. Originally from Tunisia, Ilyess studied economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Unable to complete his degree because of lack of funding and “too much partying,” he moved to Argostóli three years ago with his Kefalonian wife. “It’s good money at the bakery but we do not get paid by the hour like in America,” he tells me. “I can work a 14-hour day or a five-hour day, but the pay is still the same.”

Gino Stefani, a 25-year-old from Albania, removes the settled dough from the containers and lets it fall to the table in a large clump to be kneaded and shaped. Having only worked at the bakery for three months, Gino’s lack of experience has made him the subject of lighthearted mockery throughout the bakery. He has earned himself the nickname “the metropolis of stupidity,” which he graciously accepts and appears to find amusing himself.
 

Once the dough is laid out, the bakers form an assembly line to save time. Ilyses breaks apart the mound of dough and weighs each piece on the scale to ensure every loaf is of equal size. As he swiftly cuts through the dough he tells me, “We don’t cheat anyone here at Spathis. Everyone gets what they pay for.”

Gino places the dough in long wooden beds; Ilyess then transfers them to the traditional wood-fire oven. Time is of essence: Ilyess has only 20 minutes to place all 120 loaves of bread in the oven before the temperature drops too low. When the bread is fully cooked, which takes about an hour, Ilyess removes it from the oven using a large wooden spatula. After three years of working in the bakery, he is unfazed by the heat. He uses a hand-held lamp to help him see the dark corners of the oven. “You see?” he says. “It’s not as easy as it looks!”

After hours of preparation the bread is finally brought to the front of the bakery where the loaves are stacked and ready to be sold. By lunchtime, the shelves are already empty. “We are all friends here, it is what keeps us alive through these long nights,” says Ilyess Saidan as he removes his apron. It’s time to head home.