Zorba's Taverna: The Trouble With Goats and Mayors, page 5
Nichos wasn’t born fussy. He was forged.
Long before his campaign to regulate mopeds, before he threatened to alphabetise the fig trees, Nichos was a child of contrast. He remembered the early days, when Telios was wilder – not dirty, not neglected, simply… untamed.
The square was a place where fishing nets dried across the paving stones, where cats lounged like little emperors in the sun, and where you could hear three different radios at once playing three different kinds of music. The air was full of oregano, laughter, and arguments that were always solved with coffee.
Cars were parked wherever they fit, under olive trees, half on the road, half off, as though placement was more suggestion than science. People sat on doorsteps, traded fish for wine, waved to strangers, and shouted greetings across the street just to check if they’d been heard.
Sheds turned into homes, homes into goat shelters, and nobody thought to stop it because it somehow worked. If a pergola appeared on your land by mistake, it stayed. It became part of the scenery, the way grapevines do, until one day you found yourself sitting under it, drinking retsina and calling it fate.
It was beautiful. It was unplanned. It was the kind of place where you could still see the stars at night, where the church bell told you the time better than any watch, and where nothing, absolutely nothing, was identical, symmetrical, or regulated.
And Nichos worried about it.
He didn’t see a living, breathing village; only a place one step away from disaster. He worried that charm was another word for risk, that the looseness everyone else loved might one day break.
So he studied bylaws. Learned building codes.
He dreamed of a Telios with smooth pavements and freshly painted curbs, where signs matched in a single approved font and where there was an official noticeboard instead of news being shouted over the bouzouki player.
He wanted safety. Predictability. Modernity.
In his mind’s eye, Telios could be something better, a model village, a shining example of European alignment. A place with tourist-friendly QR codes and colour-coded recycling bins, where visitors would marvel at the clean lines of its regulated seating areas and the uniformity of its signage.
What he never realised was that the very irregularity he wanted to smooth away was the village’s heartbeat.
Yes, the paths were uneven. But they led to kitchens that smelled of thyme and lemon. Yes, the balconies didn’t match. But they overflowed with geraniums and gossip. You couldn’t straighten one without flattening the other.
And the more the mayors tried to impose order, the more the village resisted, not out of stubbornness, but because it knew what it was.
“Nichos doesn’t understand,” Maria said, pencil poised over her gossip sheet as Claude refilled everyone’s tsipouro. “He thinks rules will make us happier.”
There was a long pause. Even the goat stopped chewing.
And now, Telios would have to decide: did it want to be orderly, or alive?
There was a long silence. One of those thick, thyme-scented silences that only occur in small villages when the future begins to smell faintly of disaster.
Someone coughed.
In the corner, Spiros stirred his coffee like a man contemplating revolution.
We needed a plan. Fast.
Or at the very least, someone with less enthusiasm for symmetrical hedge trimming.
“We need someone else,” I said.
“Someone who won’t change anything,” said Alex.
“Someone who understands the village,” said Claude.
“Someone who’s so deeply rooted here, he practically photosynthesises,” said Maria.
We all looked in the same direction… at Spiros.
The wine did a little tap dance in my brain.
Alex giggled. Mary smiled. Maria looked like she might protest but then paused.
“He doesn’t do anything,” she said.
“Exactly,” we all replied in unison.
Even Zorba’s notoriously stoic expression softened into a rare, almost imperceptible smile. In Zorba-speak, this meant tremendous approval.
At that moment, Spiros flicked some ash onto the ground, sipped his drink, and stared into the night as if he was considering the weight of the stars, or wondering if someone had stolen his lighter again.
“Spiro!” Alex called across the patio.
He grunted.
“Do you want to be the next mayor?”
There was a pause. A long one. Spiros blinked slowly.
“No,” he said.
“Perfect!” Maria clapped. “Any man who actually wants to be a politician should be banned for life anyway.”
***
And so, a decision was made. Quietly. With that specific Greek nod – the one that means yes, but never in writing.
Spiros was the one.
Not because he was capable. Or because he was inspiring. But because he was gloriously, stubbornly inert.
In a world of men who want to do too much, we found comfort in a man who wanted nothing at all.
We didn’t tell him.
This was important. We weren’t about to mention that his name would soon be halfway onto the mayoral ballot, ink still wet, paperwork “borrowed” from the municipal office, and Claude rehearsing a victory speech that involved a goat and a smoke machine.
We all went very still, as if silence could hide our collective guilt.
If Spiros had heard us, he’d have stubbed out his cigarette, given us that slow, withering look, and reminded us, in no uncertain terms, that democracy was overrated.
Instead, we called it Definitely Not A Campaign.
Step One: Rebrand the Ordinary
Maria began peppering his name into conversations with the subtlety of oregano in a salad:
“Spiros would never pave over history with concrete. He’s seen concrete. Didn’t like it.”
“Spiros understands the rhythm of the village. When to speak. When to sip. When to grunt meaningfully.”
“Spiros has no opinions about digital signage. That’s leadership.”
Step Two: Emotional Manipulation Via Baked Goods
Vassiliki began making biscuits shaped like tiny benches, with little icing cigarettes.
“They’re commemorative,” she said.
“But if you mention his name,” added Alex, “you get extra cinnamon.”
It became known as the Cinnamon Code.
Step Three: Infrastructure
Eleni, saint of stamped forms, quietly pre-filled the nomination papers “just in case he accidentally agreed”. When asked what would happen if he didn’t, she replied, “I’ll just leave them there. Or pretend Claude signed them, but in any case, it could have been signed by the goat with a hoof print. Nobody ever checks.”
Claude, who once accidentally declared himself a notary, raised no objection.
Then came The Soft Rally – a long communal lunch “just because”, which somehow included a banner that read, “Let the Silence Continue”.
The menu included dishes called “Policy-Free Lamb” and “Administrative Abstention Salad”.
No one said the word election.
But Spiros, arriving late, sniffed the mood and said, “Feels like treachery.” Then he ate two plates of fava and stayed anyway.
The real turning point, the moment things went from theoretical coup to full-blown conspiracy, was the Microphone Incident.
Technically, it was bingo night. But Claude “accidentally” set up a sound system. Maria “accidentally” read out a list of “essential traits of a good mayor”. And Dimitri, already three ouzos deep, shouted, “Let Spiros speak!”
A microphone was passed. Spiros waved it away like it had offered him decaffeinated coffee.
“Leave me alone,” he said.
Which, of course, was the most powerful thing he could’ve said.
The next morning, someone chalked a message on the taverna wall:
Spiros for Mayor: Because He Won’t Bother You
No one claimed credit. But the goat had chalk on her nose, and Claude smelled faintly of conspiracy.
And now? We’re almost at the deadline for mayoral nominations. The papers have just been filed (unbeknown to Spiros). The whispers are louder. Claude’s drawing campaign posters in charcoal. And Spiros? He still sits. Still smokes. Still complains about “people who wear lanyards like they invented democracy”. He has no idea. Which is exactly the point.
Because in Telios, the best leader is one who doesn’t move. One who holds the centre of gravity for the rest of us to spin around.
And when future generations ask how we overthrew the system and elected a man without his knowledge… We’ll nod toward the bench and say, “He was already there.”
Chapter Six
The Hour of the Olive Shadow
There’s a moment in Telios, somewhere between the late lunch rush and the early evening drinks, when time doesn’t stop (this is Greece, not a fairy tale), but it does something quieter.
It exhales.
The cicadas hush. The sea grows contemplative. The sun softens its glare, as if it too is tired of shouting and would like a sip of something cold.
We call it the hour of the olive shadow.
Zorba insists it’s the best time of day. Not because of beauty or meaning or any of that foolishness. But because it’s the one hour when no one expects anything from anyone. The hour when ambition itself dozes off with a half-finished frappe and one shoe off.
At the taverna, the chairs sit empty. The grill is cold. Claude isn’t experimenting with bunting. Dimitri has wandered off in search of an olive tree that grants wishes. Alex leans on the kitchen counter with her arms crossed and a coffee in hand, silently judging the fridge.
Mary sits beneath the fig tree with her notebook and a pen that doesn’t work but still travels with her everywhere. Sometimes she draws – “Maria’s Last Argument”, “Claude’s Existential Corner”, and “Spiros’s Bench of Reluctant Wisdom”.
As for me, I wedge myself between two flowerpots and a cat, scribbling half-thoughts into a notebook that claims to be for receipts. Notes like:
“Don’t trust a man who uses a fork for olives.”
“Lemon and truth: both sting a little.”
“Never argue with someone who owns a goat and a chainsaw.”
And Spiros sits exactly where you’d expect: on his bench, cigarette in one hand, silence in the other. No one talks to him during the olive shadow. It’s understood. It’s sacred.
This is the time when everything softens. Before Claude catches fire again. Before Alex discovers the new health inspector form has a third appendix. Before Dimitri tries to convince us that tsipouro improves with age.
It’s also the time when, if you’re quiet enough, you begin to understand why Spiros is the right choice.
He won’t say yes. He’ll grumble. He’ll deny. He’ll flick ash in the general direction of enthusiasm. But that’s exactly why he’s perfect.
Because sometimes what a village needs isn’t a mayor with ideas.
It’s a mayor with memory.
Someone who knows what happens when too many rules arrive too quickly, when the bins are suddenly numbered, the olives are taxed, and the cats need vaccination records to sit under a table.
Someone who remembers what it was like before the mayor tried to mandate matching shutters.
Someone who can tell you, over a bitter coffee, exactly where the last overachiever cracked.
Spiros doesn’t want change. He wants the hour of the olive shadow to stay exactly as it is, slow, quietly alive.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not laziness.
Maybe it’s loyalty.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll hear Spiros say something that sounds like annoyance but is actually a kind of blessing:
“Let things be.”
Chapter Seven
Alex: The Reluctant Co-Conspirator
Somehow, a whisper turned into a movement.
And Alex, on reflection, was furious.
She had played along at first, asking Spiros if he wanted to be mayor, adding her sharp little quip about the Cinnamon Code, even laughing when Claude suggested bunting. But the more it grew, the more it began to smell like politics. And Alex hated politics.
“This is politics,” she said now, folding napkins with the kind of intensity usually reserved for interrogations. “You know how I feel about politics.”
It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen the humour in the idea at the start. She had. Everyone had. But somewhere between a joke, a poster, and Spiros’s unhelpful silence, things had stopped being funny. And Alex, with her fierce instinct for when the line had been crossed, was the first to call it.
Alex never cared for politics. Not the official kind, with suits and slogans and campaign songs sung by people who’ve never unclogged a drain. What she had wasn’t political at all. It was something older, purer, and far more terrifying: she had justice running through her veins instead of blood.
Before she became the woman who could silence a room with a single look and convince an electrician to rewire the kitchen using only a pencil sketch and a shared bottle of tsipouro, Alex was only a small girl with scraped knees and stubbornness in her spine. She also had a moral compass so finely tuned it once got her barred from lunchtime duties for quietly re-packing every child’s food so that the ones with nothing found koulouri in their bag, while the ones with extra mysteriously ended up with a little less. No one saw her do it. Except Yiayia, who gave her an extra olive and whispered, “You’ve got your grandfather’s heart.”
She grew up in old Glyfada. Not the polished version with boutiques and rooftop sushi bars pretending to be inspired by Cycladic seaweed. No, hers was the real Glyfada. Laundry on balconies. Fish bits on the pavement. Arguments louder than the evening church bell. Her house had cracks, possibly due to the tremors of history, but more likely thanks to the sheer gravitational pull of her grandfather’s opinions.
Captain Manolis. Retired sea captain, reluctant hero, occasional storm cloud. He lived nearby and haunted the house like a particularly principled ghost. During the war, the real one, he had been captured by the Nazis and escaped. Twice. Once freed by a German sea captain, who knew Manolis from before the war, and once by impersonating a Swedish priest. The stories changed slightly each time, but the moral never did: “Sometimes the law must be ignored to save what’s worth keeping.”
He taught Alex how to tie knots, how to listen to silence, and how to detect dishonesty from the way someone stirred their coffee. He also taught her that speaking up wasn’t a choice; it was a duty. Even if your voice cracked. Even if no one listened. Especially if no one listened.
She absorbed it all. Like sea salt into skin.
By six, she’d started collecting bottle tops and string for the village school’s craft table, redistributing them to the younger children like a benevolent supply smuggler. By seven, she’d convinced the headmistress to stop burning old notebooks and instead let the children use the blank pages at the back. By eight, she was leading an informal morning inspection of the school courtyard, tutting at cracked steps and sweeping it with a broom twice her size. And by nine, she’d marched barefoot to the town hall with a handwritten note demanding to know why the school had no proper toilet doors and why the only swing in the square had been tied up “for maintenance” since before she was born.
Her kindness ran as deep as her fury. She wept at the stories of her grandfather’s wartime friends, some lost, some scarred, all remembered. She would rescue injured pigeons, and hug anyone who looked like they hadn’t been hugged in a while.
But if you crossed a line, any line, she’d draw a bigger one around you in chalk and make you answer for it.
As Glyfada modernised, Alex felt each change like a paper cut. First came the boutiques. Then the neighbours who didn’t greet anyone. Then the cafés charging extra for ice. The fig tree behind her house was chopped down for a parking space. The street signs changed to English. Then came the sushi bar with no fish. It stopped feeling like home.
She missed it all – the fig trees, the old women shouting across balconies, the smell of wet ropes and thyme, folded into her chest like a secret map of what the world could still be.
So when we arrived in Telios, our sunburnt, cat-drenched, gloriously inefficient corner of coastal chaos, she didn’t hesitate. She embraced it.
When we reopened Zorba’s Taverna, she looked at the half-crumbling wall, the seaweed drying on the railing, and the electrical wiring that hummed and sparked, and she said, with terrifying calm, “Perfect.”
She brought with her a moral code that predated most forms of government. She said no when no one else would. She said yes when it mattered. She didn’t wait to be asked. She fixed things. Argued. Pacified. Rallied. Rebuilt. She hung her grandfather’s compass above the taverna sink and claimed the fridge.
She moves through the village like she’d been born knowing where the broken things were. She settles arguments without choosing sides. She calms storms by appearing in the doorway, hair tied back, tea towel in hand, daring anyone to continue shouting in her presence.
No job is beneath her. No nonsense goes unchallenged.
She has a way of listening that makes you forget you’d meant to lie. A way of looking into your soul that makes you remember the lie anyway. She handles bureaucracy like it was a personal insult.
But she is kind, too. Fiercely kind.
She remembers names. She remembers who hates parsley. She visits the cemetery to tidy the graves no one else did. She slips koulourakia into the hands of crying children and the pockets of men too proud to ask for help.
She laughs loudly and doesn’t apologise. She cries in public and doesn’t explain. She yells at Dimitri, then feeds him. She calls Theodora terrifying and means it lovingly.
Some evenings, after the rush of plates and politics and people needing things they didn’t quite know how to ask for, she would walk out to the lemon grove behind the taverna, where the goat slept like an empress and the stars hung low enough to scold.
