A Family Album of Memories
🍇 Chapter 3
Part 1. Spiridon Kyriakidi, the Soda-Water Vendor
For more than thirty years, soda-water vendor Spiridon Kyriakidi greeted the people of Odessa near the City Garden. This is the story of one man, a Greek family, a vanished profession, and an Odessa that can now be found only in memory.
How Much Sweet Syrup Does Happiness Need?
⏳ The Man Who Was Never in a Hurry
One of the long-time residents of our courtyard was Spiridon Khristoforovich Kyriakidi—a man with Greek roots and an Odessan soul. He had been selling soda water from his kiosk near the City Garden for so many years that many children—and possibly even a few adults—were convinced that first, long ago, Kyriakidi’s soda-water kiosk had been placed there; then a flourishing garden had naturally grown around it; and only after that had some clever people accidentally thought of building Odessa nearby.
Spiridon worked in the same place for more than thirty years. He had been there longer than the clock installed nearby on the orders of one of the city’s earliest governors. Kyriakidi knew half of Odessa by sight. At heart, he was something of a philosopher, and he was never in a hurry.
Day after day, he watched the water pour in a thin stream, bubbles appear inside the glass, and cold glass mist over in the sun. Perhaps that was why he could never understand people who were forever rushing somewhere.
Odessa. City Garden. Mid-1970s. Hundreds of people stopped at Spiridon’s kiosk every day. For adults, it was simply a glass of refreshing soda water. For children, it was a small celebration they would remember for the rest of their lives
By then, the second and third generations of Odessans were already coming to him for a glass of cold soda water on a hot afternoon. And he noticed how much the people of Odessa had changed over the years.
Children grew up and became adults. Many moved away. Some married. Some returned from military service looking older and more serious. Others now came with children of their own.
During his years at the kiosk, Spiridon sold so many glasses of soda water that, had they been lined up one after another, they might have stretched all the way from Odessa to Athens, the capital of his ancestors’ homeland.
Spiridon Khristoforovich never tried to verify this calculation. First, he never had the time. Second, who would collect all those glasses afterwards and wash them? And third, the possibility of setting a world record did not interest him in the slightest. It would not make the soda water taste any better. Besides, he had never heard of the Guinness Book of Records anyway.
— Spiridon Khristoforovich, how much sweet syrup does a person need to be happy?
— Young man, that depends entirely on your age.
— What do you mean?
— In childhood, a double portion of syrup is enough. In youth, you need just enough for the girl to finally say yes. In middle age, happiness means that your children and grandchildren are healthy. Once you have them, you’ll understand. And in old age, it is enough if the doctor does not forbid sweets altogether.
Odessa. City Garden. Mid-1970s. This was Spiridon’s view of every working day from his small soda kiosk. Before him passed a small world each day: children, parents, pensioners, young couples, and hurried passers-by. To most of them he was simply the man who sold soda water. To Spiridon, they were the people with whom his own life quietly unfolded
👉 Historical Note
The history of manufactured carbonated water is commonly traced to 1767, when the English chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) first produced artificially carbonated water by dissolving carbon dioxide in it.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, carbonated water was being sold as an almost medicinal product. It appeared in pharmacies and at special counters known as soda fountains. Fruit syrups were gradually added to it.
During the 1880s and 1890s, drinks that we now know as Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, and others began to appear. They, too, were originally sold in pharmacies.
Later, Prohibition in the United States gave an enormous boost both to the soft-drink industry and to the production of ice cream. Bars closed, but people still needed places where they could meet. Instead of visiting the now-prohibited drinking establishments, many began gathering at soda fountains—counters inside drugstores where sweet drinks, ice cream, and milkshakes were served. In effect, they became a legal alternative to saloons. It was during this period that sales of sweet carbonated drinks rose sharply.
United States. The Prohibition era. While the sale of alcohol was banned, American soda fountains flourished. They became places for dates, friendly conversations, ice cream, milkshakes, and carbonated drinks. Sometimes prohibition changes not people’s desire to gather, but simply what is served in their glasses
• The American soda fountain and the Soviet soda-water kiosk belonged to completely different worlds, but they performed remarkably similar social functions. In the United States, people gathered at soda fountains partly because the bars had been closed.
• In the Soviet Union, children, students, young couples, and pensioners gathered around soda-water kiosks simply because they offered a convenient place to stop, drink a glass of cold water, and exchange a few words.
On opposite sides of the ocean, ordinary carbonated water became more than just a drink. It became an excuse for human contact
Wine brings people together. So does beer. And, strangely enough, so does ordinary soda water. It simply does it in its own way—through a faceted glass, a double portion of syrup, and a vendor who knows half the city by sight.
— 🍇 —
🌿 Roots That Put Down New Life
Spiridon Kyriakidi was born in Odessa at the beginning of the turbulent twentieth century.
Long before that, his ancestors had been brought as children to these shores of the Black Sea. Since then, the family had put down such deep roots that Spiridon himself never stopped to wonder where his Greek family history ended and his Odessan life began.
Nor did he spend much time thinking about whether fate had treated him kindly. As everyone knows, we do not choose our parents or the place where we are born. Those decisions are made without consulting us.
He spoke Russian with the usual Odessan intonation, bargained expertly at the Privoz Market, knew every caretaker and flowerbed attendant in the City Garden, and had given a name to each pigeon in the flock that was forever pecking at something near his kiosk.
What remained Greek were his last name, his first name, several family recipes inherited from his grandmother, and the older generation’s stories about a distant homeland he had never seen.
— 🍇 —
👉 • Dolmades—stuffed grape leaves. In this family, before anyone began making cabbage rolls, the young grape leaves came out first.
• Pastitsio—whenever good pasta could be found.
• Horiatiki salad—in its Soviet version, without expensive feta but with homemade brined cheese.
• Baked fish with lemon and herbs—a perfectly natural dish for a Greek family living in a seaside city.
• Fried squid or octopus—whenever they managed to buy some from the fishermen.
But as several generations of the family lived away from Greece, the traditional recipes gradually began to acquire Odessan features. Local tomatoes appeared, along with sweet peppers, Odessan brined cheese, Black Sea fish, and local herbs.
What emerged was no longer purely Greek cuisine, but something distinctly Greek-Odessan.
Whenever Spiridon’s grandmother served food to guests, she liked to say:
— My mother used to make it this way back in Greece.
Aunt Rosa never failed to add:
— What Greece? You’ve already put half of Odessa into it.
After eating one of the family’s traditional dishes, Spiridon liked to say:
— You can forget Greece with your eyes. But as long as you remember its taste, it still lives in the house. The flavors of the homeland are a family’s genetic memory.
At the time of the events described here, Spiridon had never once been to Greece. In the mid-1970s, such a journey seemed almost impossible. Beyond the Black Sea and the straits lay a capitalist country that belonged to the hostile NATO alliance. The Soviet border was tightly sealed behind the Iron Curtain, and foreign travel required far more than desire and money. A great many circumstances had to come together in exactly the right way.
For Spiridon, they never did. He was not a member of the Communist Party, had never shown any particular enthusiasm for public or political activity, and lived the entirely ordinary life of a soda-water vendor. People like him were almost never sent abroad. The state preferred not to tempt fate. A visitor from the land of developed socialism might see a different kind of life, return home, begin comparing it too eagerly with his own, and then tell the neighbors all about it.
— 🍇 —
🏛️ A Little Greece at Home
That was why Spiridon knew Greece only through old family photographs, a handful of yellowed letters, a few keepsakes, and stories that, with each passing generation, became a little less like memories and a little more like legends.
Odessa. Spiridon’s apartment. Mid-1970s. This modest corner of the room revealed more about its owner than any lengthy biography. Ancient Greece, a beloved football club, family memory, and the Odessa courtyard all existed here not as separate things, but as parts of one life
► Framed on the bedroom wall hung a badly faded picture of the Parthenon, apparently cut from an old issue of the Soviet travel magazine Around the World.
👉 The Parthenon is the most famous temple of ancient Greece. Built in the fifth century BC on the Acropolis of Athens in honor of Athena, the city’s patron goddess, it is now regarded as one of the world’s greatest monuments of classical architecture and one of the enduring symbols of Greek civilization.
► On a small shelf stood a plaster copy of the Venus de Milo. Spiridon had bought it years earlier at a flea market—not because he considered it a masterpiece of world art, but simply because Venus was Greek!
👉 The famous Venus de Milo was discovered in 1820 on the Greek island of Milos, already missing both of her arms. No one knows exactly when or how they disappeared—whether in antiquity, during an earthquake, or much later. Over the past two centuries, scholars have proposed countless reconstructions. Some believe the goddess held an apple, others a shield, still others a wreath. No definitive answer has ever been found.
Perhaps that mystery is precisely what made the statue one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. The missing arms never diminished Venus’s fame. If anything, they may have added to it.
One day Spiridon’s young son asked:
— Dad, why doesn’t that lady have any arms?
Spiridon paused for a moment and came up with an explanation that later surprised even himself.
— Maybe so people won’t look only at her hands, but will learn to see her face.
Then he realized that answer might be a little too complicated for a small boy and quickly added,
— Because, son, she’s been standing there for two thousand years. Just imagine having to stand perfectly still for that long. What do you think would happen to your arms?
It is difficult to imagine what the little boy made of such an explanation. Perhaps years later, after he had grown up, he would take down the family’s well-worn copy of Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece by the Russian historian and Moscow State University professor Nikolai Kun—with its bookmarks, yellowed pages, and loose spine—and discover the real answer for himself.
But that would come much later. For now, his mother shouted from the kitchen:
— Don’t listen to your father. Next he’ll be telling you the Parthenon was the very first Greek soda stand!
► A small cartoon, apparently clipped from the Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil, showed Diogenes peeking out of his barrel.
👉 Diogenes was an ancient Greek philosopher who, according to tradition, lived in a large clay storage jar (often mistakenly called a barrel), believing that a person needed very little to be happy.
► But the greatest treasure among the family’s Greek keepsakes was a team photograph of the Athens football club Panathinaikos.
In 1971 the club reached the final of the European Cup, where it lost to Ajax of Amsterdam, led by the legendary Johan Cruyff, at Wembley Stadium in London.
👉 Panathinaikos, founded in Athens in 1908, is one of Greece’s oldest and most successful football clubs. During that unforgettable 1971 season, the team was coached by Ferenc Puskás, one of the greatest footballers of the twentieth century. After the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he never returned to his homeland. Instead, he built a brilliant career with Real Madrid before later becoming a coach in Greece. It was a Hungarian who guided a Greek club to the greatest achievement in its history.
To this day, Panathinaikos remains the only Greek club ever to reach the European Cup final. For Soviet Greeks, that was a quiet source of pride.
— One of ours made it all the way to the European final.
A sailor had brought the photograph home from one of his voyages and given it to Spiridon.
To anyone else, it was simply an old football picture.
To the owner of the house, it was another small bridge to his family’s roots.
► Spiridon was not a religious man. He rarely visited the small Greek Orthodox church in the center of Odessa, observed no religious fasts, and knew no prayers.
Yet a small Orthodox icon and an old cross still hung above his bed. They had belonged to his mother, and before her, to his grandmother. The thought of taking them down had simply never crossed his mind.
A small corner of the home reflected the faith of Spiridon’s ancestors. He was not deeply religious himself, yet he always respected his family’s traditions. Sometimes family memory outlives personal beliefs
All these objects served as quiet family landmarks that had somehow survived amid the ordinariness of Soviet life.
Most visitors to Spiridon’s home hardly noticed them. But every now and then, as he walked past the cabinet, he would absentmindedly straighten Kun’s book or wipe the dust from the armless Venus.
Not because he was a passionate admirer of antiquity.
But because, through these simple objects, the memory of his family continued to live inside the house
— 🍇 —
⚓ Greece on the Other Side of the Sea
Perhaps Spiridon’s closest friend was a fisherman named Nikolaos Stavridis. In everyday life, everyone simply called him Nikos. The two met one day in the fish market at Privoz. One had come to buy fresh fish. The other had just brought his catch to sell.
They struck up a conversation. As soon as they heard each other’s names, they realized they were both Greeks.
Odessa. Privoz Market. Fish Row. Mid-1970s. This is how Spiridon first met Stavridis. They bargained over the price, joked, argued—and almost immediately realized they had found each other not only as customer and fisherman, but also as two Odessans sharing a common Greek heritage
Nikos was five years older than Spiridon and, like him, had been born in Odessa. His father had been a fisherman. So had his grandfather.
Unlike Spiridon, who spent his days selling soda water in the center of the city, Nikos had spent almost his entire life by the sea. Water too, Spiridon liked to joke—only a little saltier, without the bubbles, and with the unmistakable smell of hydrogen sulfide.
Nikos knew exactly where the mullet would be today, when the horse mackerel would start running, where to look for gobies after a storm, and how the sea changed before bad weather. To him, the sea was almost a living creature.
The two men quickly discovered that they shared much the same fate. Both were Odessans, yet descendants of Greek families. Both occasionally heard Greek spoken at home. And neither had ever seen the land of his ancestors.
Their personalities complemented one another perfectly. Spiridon loved to read. Nikos preferred to tell stories. Spiridon liked to remember history. Nikos never stopped thinking about the sea. Spiridon dreamed. Nikos lived more in the present.
Every couple of weeks they met in Nikos’s little shed by the water’s edge, where he kept his boat and fishing gear. The place smelled of fish and pine tar.
Inside there was almost nothing: a wooden table, two old creaking chairs, a kerosene lamp, a transistor radio, and a folding cot.
Whenever they met, olives, bread, brined cheese, and fried mullet quickly appeared on the table. There was usually alcohol as well. More often than not, a bottle of Metaxa or Ouzo stood between them. Metaxa could occasionally be found in local stores. Ouzo usually arrived as a gift from sailors—small messengers from the homeland their families had never forgotten.
Sometimes there was wine as well.
Odessa. A small seaside shed. Late 1970s. This was where Spiridon and Stavridis could spend hours talking about Greece—its history, music, cuisine, football, and its people. Sometimes a long conversation needs nothing more than a bottle of Metaxa, the sea beyond the open door, and a friend who understands you without many words
👉 Metaxa is Greece’s famous amber-colored spirit, first created in 1888. It is made from grape distillates blended with aged Muscat wine and aromatic Mediterranean botanicals. Today it is considered one of the national symbols of modern Greece.
👉 Ouzo is Greece’s traditional anise-flavored spirit. It is usually served in small glasses and often diluted with cold water or ice, turning milky white in the process.
👉 Xinomavro is one of Greece’s finest red grape varieties, producing complex wines with aromas of red berries, spices, and sun-dried tomatoes. It is often called “the Barolo of Greece.”
👉 Muscat of Samos.
As Spiridon once remarked,
— Even the ancient Greeks praised the wines of Samos…
👉 Malvasia is not a single grape variety but an entire family of grapes whose story forms one of the great chapters in European wine history. The name comes from the Byzantine fortress town of Monemvasia. Venetian merchants transformed its name into Malvasia, and from there both the wine and its reputation spread across Europe.
It was Spiridon’s favorite.
Whenever a sailor managed to bring back a bottle and it found its way onto the table in Nikos’s fishing shed, a respectful silence settled over the room.
— Well, — Nikos would ask, — shall we open it today?
— Then no talking about work, — Spiridon would reply.
And that bottle instantly turned an ordinary evening into a small celebration.
One day, after the first couple of drinks, Spiridon said quietly,
— You know, Nikos… We’ve spent all these years drinking and loving Greek wine… yet neither of us has ever seen a real Greek vineyard.
With good food, familiar wines and spirits, the gentle whisper of the Black Sea, and the slow rhythm of the evening, conversations drifted effortlessly from one subject to another—and sometimes to nothing in particular.
— 🍇 —
— Nikos, did you hear? Our Aristotle Onassis is back in all the newspapers.
— How could I miss it? He married the widow of an American president.
— You see? Greeks really do know how to surprise the world. Jacqueline Kennedy herself! Winning the heart of a woman like that is no small achievement.
— Spiridon, why don’t you sort things out with your own Frosya first? Then you can start worrying about Onassis.
— Our accomplishments may be a little more modest—horse mackerel and soda water—but they’re still something to be proud of.
👉 Aristotle Onassis was the legendary Greek shipping magnate and one of the wealthiest men of the twentieth century. His vast merchant fleet made his name synonymous with the success of Greek maritime enterprise. In 1968, he married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, bringing him even greater worldwide fame.
— 🍇 —
One day Nikos asked,
— Do you ever listen to Demis Roussos?
— Sometimes.
— Do you understand his English?
— No.
— Then why listen?
Spiridon shrugged.
— So my heart can remember, if only for a little while, that it’s Greek.
👉 Demis Roussos was a Greek singer who became an international star during the 1970s. In the Soviet Union, he was especially loved for his warm, almost otherworldly voice and for melodies that touched people even when they understood neither English nor Greek.
— 🍇 —
Nikos quietly poured them each a little more Metaxa. For several minutes they sat in silence. From the half-open door of the shed came the cries of seagulls.
— Spiridon… — Nikos finally said. — If they suddenly allowed it tomorrow… would you go?
— Go where?
— To Greece.
Spiridon slowly turned the little glass in his hands.
— I don’t know…
— What do you mean, you don’t know? You’ve been talking about Greece your whole life.
— That’s exactly why I don’t know.
Nikos looked at him in surprise.
— You see… sometimes you’re afraid your dream will turn out to be smaller than you’ve imagined.
Silence settled over them again.
— And what if I get there… only to realize it isn’t my country after all?
Nikos smiled quietly.
— It never was.
Spiridon looked up.
— You and I were both born in Odessa. So were our parents. We simply love—and perhaps idealize—a country we’ve never actually seen.
Spiridon nodded thoughtfully.
— Even so… I’d like to walk those streets just once… See the Parthenon… Drink a glass of wine in some little taverna… Listen to people speaking Greek.
— And then?
Spiridon smiled.
— Then I’d buy a ticket home.
— Why?
Spiridon looked out toward the sea.
— Because I may finally be able to say hello to the homeland of my ancestors… but this is where people will still be waiting for me.
Two Greeks sit together beside the Black Sea, sipping Metaxa and talking about Greece…
Yet both know that, long ago, Odessa had already become their true home.
— 🍇 —
To be continued…
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