The coffee of peace into the “reconciliation bar”
Wrote at 11:00 by Stefano Urso in: Coffee World,
Until a few years ago no one would bet on the project of three young Greeks: to open in Turkey, in the city of Smyrna, a Greek coffee bar. Since centuries the rivalry between Greeks and Turks is very high, but the dividing point of the two countries is considered in Greece the "catastrophe of 1922", where the Turkish army defeated the Greek one its Smyrna, assassinating then the Greek orthodox community of that city.
Just in Smyrna the three businessmen wanted to open the Island of Mastic Bar (referring to the mastic tree, an evergreen shrub of the Greek island of Chios, which yields the resin for chewing gum).
In a few time the bar has become so popular that it has been renamed the “reconciliation bar" where the diplomacy armies are the
baklava, coffee and chewing gum. The success of the bar is a symbolic gesture but it suggests a deeper peace that began in 2008 with the visit to Ankara of the former Greek premier.
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