Human & Travel Stories
A PASTRY SHOP IN ATHENS: PETEK’S STORY
I have always loved pastry shops—not only for their sweets, but for the way they serve as places of memory. Love is born in their hidden corners. The earliest hurried conversations slip between two lips. Their tables fill with those who, having eaten something sweet, cannot help but speak sweetly in return.
A child who once leaned against his mother’s coat, pointing with a small finger toward the cake display, will one day grow up, return through the same door as an adult. He will eat his dessert now with a certain shyness. The old menu still hangs upon the wall, the notebook of debts rests in a drawer. Each morning the shutters are lifted; each evening the lights are turned off and the day is left behind. Flour, sugar, and eggs carry a different story each time. And even as the years pass, such places hold the lingering traces of those who have vanished—of lives and memories quietly lost.
Just a few steps beyond Victoria Station, there is a pastry shop with the name Petek written above its door. It is New Year’s Eve, and the display window gleams brightly. The name, of course, is Turkish. One cannot help but feel that if we were to search for this place’s roots, we would find ourselves facing a piece of land in Istanbul, or somewhere deep in Anatolia. With that curiosity, with that familiar feeling, I step inside.
The shop is busy; people come and go in constant motion. It is the liveliness one expects before the turning of the year. In the window, syrup-soaked melomakarona, risen holiday breads, and cookies as white as clouds stand before me like heralds of the new year.
A child enters with his grandmother. A little while later, he leaves the shop laughing, a decorated cake box in his hands and the quiet triumph of success upon his face. I wonder what treasures lie inside.
We begin with a simple hello, and from there we speak of this and that with Dimitra, the shop’s present owner. She is the daughter-in-law of Serafina and Yannis. But who were Serafina and Yannis? How did their path lead them to this street in the year 1964?
Now, let us rewind the film.
1964: A One-Way Ticket to Athens
Yannis was from Istanbul; Serafina was the child of a family from Cappadocia. Their lives unfolded in Istanbul. Until the law of 1964—the decree of exile against the Greeks of the city—they lived peacefully, even happily, in Kurtuluş. The pastry shop Yannis had opened with his own hands lasted only a few short years, until the forced departure. Because they were Greek nationals, they were made to leave their city behind.
Before that, in the early 1960s, Yannis worked as a pastry chef at Minyon, one of the most beloved pastry shops of Kurtuluş. Those were years when many establishments were owned by Armenians, Greeks, or Jews. The owner of the pastry shop at the time was Jewish. The gradual wave of migration that began in 1964 did not only empty such shops—it left the neighbourhood of Kurtuluş itself partly orphaned.
When Yannis was torn away from the cakes he made with such devotion, from the shop he had built, from the city he loved, he feared that his wife Serafina would not survive such pain. And so, in his own way, he offered her a white lie. “Do not worry,” he said. “We will go to Greece only for a short while. I have found work as a pastry chef in Switzerland. I will take you and the children there, and we will begin again.”
Serafina, barely persuaded, agreed. Months later she learned the truth—and faced the reality that they would never return to Istanbul.
Nea Filadelfeia was the first district they settled in, in Athens. Later they moved to the more central Patisia. The wound of forced migration remained within them like a paper cut—small, invisible, yet always present. And in that ache, Petek Pastry Shop became, in some measure, a remedy for Yannis and Serafina. They held on to Petek with all their strength—and to new recipes, new beginnings.
1964: Petek Is Born in Athens
With the experience they had carried from Istanbul, husband and wife rolled up their sleeves and opened Petek. In a short time, word spread from mouth to mouth. In those days, Athens offered few pastry shops of such kind. The Victoria district, compared to today, was far more fashionable—a place where high society, actors, and singers chose to live. Familiar faces began to appear at Petek, most of all for baklava and ice cream. Slowly, the shop gained its loyal clientele. And since many people in the neighbourhood had also arrived from Istanbul, conversations often turned to Poli—the City—and to AEK matches, the Athletic Union of Constantinople.
Among Petek’s signature creations, kaimaki stood out. Made with buffalo milk and mahlep, it was a kind of ice cream unlike the kaymak we know in Türkiye. Mastic buns, countless varieties of baklava, kadaif desserts, cookies, classic galaktoboureko and its kadaif-filled form, Easter breads, and so many other flavors first lived in Yannis’s notebooks, and then upon the shelves of the shop.
And so that customers might sit and linger at the tables, small offerings would appear beside their raki—cheese, mezze, little bites of comfort. Serafina, meanwhile, sewed dresses for her special clients. Yet at home, too, her own cooking was beyond praise.
The Passing of Time
One day, the moment came for Yannis to bid farewell to the pastry shop that had become so loved and respected. His heart was strained, his hands were tired. This time, his son Giorgos took over. Though Giorgos had studied engineering, he learned many recipes from his father. Perhaps through inheritance—through talent carried in the blood—he succeeded in continuing the work. While his wife Dimitra greeted the customers in the shop, Giorgos rolled up his sleeves in the workshop, preparing the sweets whose recipes he now knew by heart. How many winters, how many springs have passed on the calendar since that day?
Alongside the daily labour, Giorgos attended courses in pastry-making, and whenever time allowed, he went to seminars. He wished to preserve the spirit of his father’s legacy, yet also to modernize it, gently.
In time, the tables and chairs disappeared. New recipes found their place on the shelves. Every morning, at the same hour, a vehicle arrived from the workshop, carrying wide trays into the pastry shop. The sweets lifted from those trays and placed one by one into the display—who knows in whose homes they later brought joy, and to whom they offered sweetness.
Petek Today
Victoria is no longer the fashionable district it once was. In Athens, the variety of pastry shops is far greater than it used to be. And yet, the loyal customers who are still alive continue to find their way to Petek. Perhaps, in the years to come, their grandchildren will do the same.
This time, I speak with Eri, Yannis’s granddaughter. She is responsible for the pastry shop’s social media. When I ask whether she has an interest in the craft, she smiles and says: “I studied economics. I don’t really know pastry-making. Perhaps my sister will take an interest one day—she has become a chef.”
She looks through old black-and-white photographs as she speaks, telling me of her grandparents’ first excitement, their earliest hopes. Yet she remembers nothing of Istanbul herself. “When we were children,” she says, “whenever they spoke about Istanbul, they would switch into Turkish. We couldn’t understand anything. Years later, we realized they changed the language whenever they were speaking of things that would make us sad, if we understood.”
I also ask Eri about the Easter buns—the ones I know so well from Üstün Palmie in Kurtuluş. “They are among our regular products,” she tells me, “but during Easter, people come in crowds, especially for those buns.” As she speaks, I can almost imagine the scent spilling out into the street: mahlep and mastic, sweetness and memory entwined.
When we finally leave the shop, Dimitra sends us off with a gift—several varieties of baklava, each more delicious than the last. And I know then: the spirit of this place will not die, even if a hundred years pass. Because places like these continue to live on in memory. The hands that built them, the recipes passed from one generation to the next, the glances that sometimes look joyful and sometimes heavy with sorrow, the unforgettable wounds—these settle into every corner, and remain forever.
Even now, at this very moment, Yannis still seems to be smiling somewhere with his chef’s hat upon his head; and beautiful Serafina with her pearl necklace and whose face is softened by the tender rush of sweetness of life.