Before the citizens of Azoria abandoned their city on the island of Crete, they shared many dinners out. There were no restaurants in town (or, likely, anywhere in 500 BCE), but there was a building where citizens met to offer sacrifices to the gods. They would share meals there and, also, at a building up the hill dedicated to communal dining. Donald Haggis, a professor of Greek Studies and Classical Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has devoted the better part of his career to uncovering the ancient foodways of Crete. His family hails from the island, where he is the director of the Azoria Project, a dig he established two decades ago with the goal of understanding the agro-pastoral world between Bronze Age Minoan culture and the Classical Age, a moment when Azoria was established, thrived for a century, then disappeared.
What does a place for dining in public look like in 500 BCE?
At Azoria, there are two main buildings for communal dining. On the lower slope, the Monumental Civic Building was filled with the remains of food and equipment for drinking and dining. The building up above is really complex—lots of dining rooms, clustered in groups of two or three. Each suite was connected to one or more kitchens and one to three storerooms. It’s the repetition of these dining rooms, and the replication of food processing and storage areas, that suggests the main function of the building was communal dining.
Later historical sources and contemporary and later inscriptions comment on communal dining events, called syssitia. In such communal meals, we don’t know whether everyone drank and dined together in a single space or whether they were segregated. Historical sources imply that groups of diners may have been in separate rooms.
What we have found at Azoria would suggest an unusual concentration of public dining. If we seated those people on benches, the number of diners would be about ten to twenty per room. In a cluster of three rooms, there might be thirty to sixty men [and we presume that they would have all been men]. Given the segregation of space, and that this building exists alongside a more monumental, openly communal space, there seems to have been some intentionality in separating into groups.
What sort of groups would come together for meals?
One of the possible divisions for those diners is in fellowships; hetaireiai are social associations or civic fellowships—but it’s not clear whether members of a hetaireia actually dined together. Some people have suggested the division may be tribal. Or they may have been arranged according to different clans, actual kinship groups.
What we might have at Azoria is actual evidence for these communal meals: Dining together in different areas that would emphasize their social affiliation.
What might have been available for them to eat?
In a number of rooms, they were eating sheep, goat, cow, pig, hare and lots of marine animals. We have found lots of fish, sea urchin, limpet and top shells, a lot of seafood.
We uncovered a huge storage building in our last season of excavation. There is evidence of olives, for eating and for making oil, a variety of grains and pulses, broad beans, chickpeas, barley, lentils. And there were two rooms dedicated almost exclusively to wine.
The correlation we’ve made is based on carbonized (burned) remains of seeds derived from soil samples in and around the vessels in the room. They were using pithoi, large clay storage containers, which could be used for anything. In one of the storerooms, our botanist tells us, there were hundreds of fragments of grape pips and skins, suggesting the remains of wine lees—the sediment or dregs from the storage of wine. We have seven jars in that room, 400 to 500 liters on average. Some approach 1,000 liters.
While the grapes could have been consumed fresh, it is mostly likely that grape remains indicate the storage of wine or raisins. They were certainly preparing and eating raisins. We have found fragments of strainers for making raisins—they look like classical strainers, which are dead ringers for what you can buy today in a hardware store in Greece. They are the same size and shape; even the handles are the same. They were probably using ash in antiquity as part of the desiccation process.
Do we know how the foods might have been prepared?
In the Monumental Civic Building, we found two basins full of food—stews or gruel. One basin contained chickpeas, grapes, bulbs (onions), cut-up sheep or goat meat, possibly thyme or oregano (little bits of plants that are a member of the mint family).
I asked Evi Margaritis (an associate professor at the Cyprus Institute) what the grapes were doing in the stew. She said they were probably a seasoning. Squeezing underripe or wild grapes provided a form of acidity, what we would use lemon for today.
The other stew had boiled wheat, broad beans and some grapes, but no meat. There was a vegetarian dish and a non-vegetarian dish!
They could also have been preparing breads of various kinds in the Communal Dining Building: At least one kitchen has an oven. Three have curved hearths, about a meter square, where you could spit roast and pot boil. It’s likely they were pot boiling grains, pulses, meat and shellfish. They may have been roasting the hare; it’s likely they were stewing the hare as well. And they would have had various kinds of breads and cakes, but that evidence comes from literary sources.
In both residential contexts as well as within the civic building, they are eating well, and good food. We are seeing things brought to the city for feasting—in the classical period, they would call that the opson, the relish that complements the setos (the staple) of the meal.
What wine might they have drunk?
We have found transport amphoras from Samos and Chios—Eastern Aegean islands—so they could have been importing Samian or Chian wine. But the more we think about it, the primary consumption would have been local. We do have some evidence—the volume of wine, in primary dregs—to suggest they were producing wine on site. We are collecting bits of grapes and stems from the wine in the pithoi, which also contain some heavy sediments, I imagine, because they were not filtering the wine very well.
How would they present the wine?
In the typical Cretan high-necked cup. There were also a variety of double-handled wine cups, but the main thing is the local cup, like a big mug. Cretan citizens were a closed group; when they came together for communal gatherings, the plainness of the cups may have been an expression of equality within the group.
They were dispensing the wine from kraters, big wine mixing bowls. Just like anywhere in the Aegean, they were mixing wine with water.
Who were the people dining, and who was serving them?
We’re dependent on later historical sources that describe this communal dining simply as a custom for members of the citizen class, a relatively narrow spectrum at the top. Large segments of the population would be dependents in citizen households, tenant farmers, or serfs.
We assume it would have been the urban elite, segments of the citizen class, who would have been drinking and dining in our buildings. We want to find out who the rest of the people were. We have only dug the top of the hill; we expect that farther down the slopes will be the other strata of the population—merchants, craftsmen, laborers and other segments of the society.
In The Deipnosophists, Athenaeus, a Roman writer, quotes an earlier Greek historian, Dosiades, a fourth-century source, perhaps closer in time to Azoria. The context is a famous Greek city, Lyttos, or Lyktos. [Haggis paraphrases the text:]
Every man contributes a tithe of his crops to his club (the andreion), as well as income from the state which the magistrates divide among the citizens. The mess is in the charge of a woman who has assistants, three or four men chosen from the common people, each attended by two people who bring in the firewood, called the faggot bearers.
In the house intended for the mess, two tables are set out—the guest tables—at which sit the strangers intown. An equal portion is served to each person; only half is given to the younger men. And on each table is placed a cup filled with wine much diluted, and a second cup is served when they have finished the meal. For the boys, a krater is prepared which they share in common.
The woman in charge of the mess takes from the table, in the sight of all, the best of everything that’s served and sets it in front of the men who have proved their bravery in battle.
Where would the servers eat and drink?
The peasants were eating at home or in the fields.
The economy was agro-pastoral; the commodities and their distribution were largely controlled by the citizen class.
So, no one was going out to a tavern…
Public taverns probably do not exist until well on in the classical period (ca. 480 BCE to 323 BCE). Taverns are hard to identify archaeologically because they might look like a house—but bigger, with different kinds of wine vessels and lots of cups. The ratio of cups to jugs is key: In a house, it might be one jug to five cups; in a tavern, it might be one to 20 or one to 40.
Taverns emerge in a much more complex economy. A lot of it has to do with how society is interacting, when the nuclear household or the individual emerges as the actor, distinct from tribes or cohorts or these social fraternities; until then, there’s no independent dining outside the household other than those communal venues, such as feasts associated with religious festivals, burial or government.
How do you tell when that independent dining begins?
Foodways—drinking and dining—leave archaeological traces. Those traces allow us to study commensality, how communities and societal structures are formed around eating and drinking. It was one of the reasons why we started this project 20 years ago.
We eat and drink together. The deep history of communal dining as a critical social, political and religious practice compels you to consider the contemporary societal critique: “We all used to sit down and eat together and now people are eating a sandwich in the subway, or on a bus, or students sit alone and force down their food.” We don’t have time to go back to a process that was highly ritualized in most societies. Taverns are liminal in that respect, something between the structured communal dining, which is a ritual process, and just eating food to survive, basic sustenance.
Then how would eating and drinking in a tavern be different from dinner at Azoria’s Communal Dining Building?
When we speak about commensality in ancient Greece, it is, in most cases, inextricable from religious ritual. It wasn’t just a matter of sacrificing an animal to the gods. You also consume the animal: It’s a feast. The residues of that in modern Christianity are what we call “feast days.” Religious festivals throughout the year usually have an associated celebration that involves the consumption of food after you go to church. Whenever we think of any form of communal dining, it ultimately has its origins in deeply rooted religious and social structures.
We’re not conscious of its importance. It’s the transformational aspect of eating that pulls people together. It’s critical. If you’re in a group and some are eating but you are not, it’s socially disruptive to the group. Today, when you sit down to drink in a tavern in Crete, the idea is you’re all drinking one thing, beer, or wine, or rakí. You bring a single vessel from which you dispense to the individuals. That’s an important part of the social interaction. The point is not to drink, the point is to drink together. There’s always this moment of discomfort for me when Americans sit down and one person has a beer, another has wine, another has a soft drink, each has their individual bottle and their own drink—even if everyone is drinking rakí, everyone has to have their own carafe, and that confuses the tavern owner.
Greeks don’t drink from their own, individual carafes. A single carafe is brought and then they communally serve. It’s shared as the expense is shared. When someone at the table orders the next carafe, the tavern owner adds it to their bill; so, for one table, you could have six tabs running for different carafes of rakí. The tavern owner is reluctant to remove those carafes; it’s a way to keep track of how many you’ve consumed.
And there is a kind of material memory that’s preserved in those objects, as important integrating mechanisms in the communal act of drinking and dining. The vessels you use and how the wine is dispensed help to shape the activity, give one a sense of belonging, a sense of community. These culinary and drinking practices are deeply ingrained in cultural patterns that probably emerged out of eating and drinking in rituals associated with sacrifice; the two are inextricably linked. So, taverns, as a place for people to stop and have a drink emerge as another form of communal dining. They are distanced from that highly ritualized form, although they have ritual components still in them.
If I go to a roadhouse in North Carolina, there are long tables set up where you have your own meal elbow to elbow with someone that you don’t know. And somebody brings a platter with big pieces of cake for everyone, as if we are at some big, ritual celebration. There’s no charge for the cake; it’s a gratuity of the house. Fifty years ago, I wouldn’t have been in that roadhouse. It would have been a more closed community where they shared food.
Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.
This story appears in the print issue of Summer 2022.
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