Autumn Years Winter 2023/24

Barbara and Manos are storytellers who have experienced “trips” of a lifetime and shared them with the world through their writings and imagery.

and attended as many opera and ballet performances as she could afford. Barbara also enrolled in City College of New York as a part-time student, only taking night classes because she had to work full time to support herself. Manos is the oldest of two boys born seven years apart and grew up in Athens, Greece, during World War II. His mother was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, to an affluent Greek family. She was an accomplished pianist and mixed doubles tennis player who was fluent in four languages—Greek, Turkish, French and English. Turkey was non-aligned during World War II, while Greece was under German control. Her dual citizenship in Greece and Turkey qualified her to receive food rations from the Turkish consulate in Athens during the war, which Manos credits with keeping the family alive during the German occupation. A German officer who had a child around the same age as Manos also snuck a little food and fresh oranges to him during the years of occupation. Manos’ mother was a very good cook admired by friends and family. Still, Manos, a self-described miserable eater as a child, ate mostly charcoal grilled lamb chops, french fries and

Barbara in Santorini, Greece, 1993.

an occasional hard-boiled egg; so it is remarkable that he eventually became a gastronome, food and restaurant writer and critic. Manos’ early education was more extensive than Barbara’s. He attended a multilingual school in Athens, where lessons were taught in Modern and Formal Greek and English, and his mother saw to it that he was introduced early on to international cultural influences. His path to New York City was far more circuitous than Barbara’s. While finishing school in Athens, Manos learned that his paternal grandfather— who was the first senator from Eastern Crete to the Greek parliament following the unification of Crete with Greece— left sufficient funds in his will for Manos to pursue his higher education at a European university. His father Manos and Barbara by his grandfather’s statue in Sitia, Crete.

was adamant that Manos should study medicine or law at a French or British university. By this time, Manos was fully trilingual in Greek, English and French, so studying in any of these languages was of no concern to him. What was a problem, however, was that he had no desire to become a doctor or lawyer. He wanted to become an artist, a painter in Paris. One of his father’s brothers graduated from the University of Grenoble in France as a tropical diseases epidemiologist and was regarded as a distinguished alumnus. So, Manos agreed to study medicine at the university. After three months of theoretical studies, all medical students would experience their first cadaver dissection and were advised that if they passed out or threw up, they

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WINTER 2023/24 I AUTUMN YEARS