Leriadis also spoke about the local “mountain tea”, made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a kind of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves with a little lemon added. “People here think they’re drinking a comfort drink, but they’re all medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey is also considered a panacea. “They have types of honey here that you won’t see anywhere else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating injuries to hangovers to treating the flu. Here, elderly people will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.
Over the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’ patients. In the neighborhood known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman. years old who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekends.
On a trip the year before, I visited a slate-roofed house built into the slope at the top of a hill. I came here after hearing about a couple who had been married for over 75 years. Both Thanasis and Eirini Karimalis came to the door, clapped at the pleasure of having a visitor, and waved me in. They were each perhaps five feet tall. He wore a shapeless cotton shirt and a worn baseball cap, and she wore a housedress with her hair in a bun. Inside there was a table, a medieval-looking fireplace heating a blackened pot, a corner of a cupboard containing a wool coat, and faded black-and-white photographs of ancestors on a soot-stained wall . The place was warm and comfortable. “Sit down,” Eirini ordered. She hadn’t even asked my name or my company but was already making cups of tea and a plate of biscuits. Meanwhile, Thanasis walked around the house with nervous energy, cleaning.
The couple was born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early twenties and raised five children on Thanasis’ salary as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all traditional inhabitants of Ikaria, their daily routine was as Leriadis had described it: waking up naturally, working in the garden, eating late, taking a nap. At sunset, they either visited their neighbors or their neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey, and bread. Lunch almost always consisted of beans (lentils, chickpeas), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion, or a spinach-like green called horta), and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner consisted of bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they slaughtered the family pig and enjoyed small portions of pork lard for the following months.