Zorba’s Embrace: Love, Lies and Lemon Groves

  First published in 2025

  Copyright © Peter Barber, 2025

  The moral right of Peter Barber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-91-657431-1

  Hardback: ISBN: 978-1-91-657432-8

  Cover Design and Formatting by Kathleen Harryman

  https://www.kathleenharryman.co.uk

  Books by Peter Barber:

  The Zorba’s Taverna Series:

  Zorba’s Parthenon: A Taverna by the Sea

  Zorba’s Taverna: The Trouble with Goats and Mayors

  Zorba’s Embrace: Love, Lies and Lemon Groves

  The Parthenon Series:

  A Parthenon on our Roof

  A Parthenon in Pefki

  The Parthenon Paradox

  The Musings Series:

  Musings from a Greek Village

  Musings from a Pandemic

  Scan the QR Code for more

  information about

  Peter Barber and his books.

  Contents

  Books by Peter Barber

  Prologue

  Chapter One: The Warmth You Can’t Order Off the Menu

  Chapter Two: The Season of Silence

  Chapter Three: Epiphany

  Chapter Four: The Expansion No One Asked For (But Everyone Wanted)

  Chapter Five: The Trial of the Stuffed Tomatoes

  Chapter Six: Theodora – Queen of Her Kitchen

  Chapter Seven: When the Almond Blossoms Arrive

  Chapter Eight: The Return of the Unreturned

  Chapter Nine: The Art of Not Being in Charge

  Chapter Ten: The First Nail Is Always Crooked

  Chapter Eleven: Things Not Said and Other Forms of Flirting

  Chapter Twelve: Dr Michalis and the Diagnosis of Bureaucracy

  Chapter Thirteen: The Tides We Never Name

  Chapter Fourteen: What She Didn’t Say

  Intermission: Dr Michalis Gives a Talk (and Everyone Regrets It)

  Chapter Fifteen: Inspector or Patient? Depends on Who You Ask

  Interlude: Convalescence and Consequence

  Chapter Sixteen: The Mayor of Absolutely Nothing

  Chapter Seventeen: A Wedding-Shaped Assumption

  Chapter Eighteen: George – The Quiet Cheesemaker

  Chapter Nineteen: Permission, Fire, and the Lemon That Wasn’t

  Chapter Twenty: The Fig-Tree Confessions

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Almost-Broken Engagement

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Thing About Help

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Saving Zoe

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Season Begins (Ready or Not)

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Church, a Curtain, and a Wedding to Be Booked

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Mayoral Manual and the Accidental Revolution

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Accidental Golden Age of Nothing

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Tourists Who Became Family

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Not-So-Secret Wedding

  Chapter Thirty: Dimitri and the Big Fish

  Chapter Thirty-One: Tourists, Tsipouro, and the Thing in the Sea

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Dimitri and the Even Bigger Fish

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Date With Destiny

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Catch

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Village Prepares (Badly)

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Value

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Great Cheese War

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Registry-Office Incident

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Princess Diaries of Maria (or, “Your Majesty, I’m Going to Need a Quote”)

  Chapter Forty: The Tuna Crisis

  Chapter Forty-One: The Day Phoebe Survived Dr Michalis

  Chapter Forty-Two: The Wedding Contagion

  Chapter Forty-Three: The Mayor of Nowhere

  Chapter Forty-Four: Mary’s Hen Night (or One Drink, Two Arrests, and an International Incident Involving Calamari)

  Chapter Forty-Five: Paulo’s Stag Night (or, One Goat, Three Theories, and a Fisherman with a Plan)

  Chapter Forty-Six: The Morning of the Wedding

  Chapter Forty-Seven: The Quietest Yes

  Chapter Forty-Eight: The Reception (or, The Goat Dances at Midnight

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Zorba, After the Music

  Epilogue: Under the Olive Tree

  Final Entry

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prologue

  We didn’t mean to open a taverna.

  We meant to retire. Quietly. Modestly. Preferably near the sea, with good coffee and just enough gossip to keep the blood warm. No ambition. No projects. Certainly, no business plans involving goats, bureaucrats, or regional health inspections.

  And yet, here we are.

  Half-legal. Whole-souled. Pieced together from wine crates, borrowed favours, and pure stubbornness. Chairs that don’t match and refuse to be stacked. Menus that read like they were translated mid-nap. Belonging to no one, run by everyone, particularly the least qualified.

  It started with Zorba.

  He handed us a key one dusty afternoon and muttered, “You break it, you fix it.” Then he wandered off to sigh at us professionally and drink coffee while judging our fish deliveries.

  We were underqualified, over-committed, and mildly tipsy.

  But Telios showed up.

  Our wine arrived from local vineyards in plastic bottles, paint buckets, and the occasional unmarked barrel that looked like it had been here since the Ottoman Empire. Never labelled, never vintage, but always fresh. Claude insisted on redesigning the wine list in four languages, none of which our customers spoke. It didn’t matter – we only served two kinds: red and white.

  Theodora, our kitchen queen, banned anything that wasn’t:

  Grown nearby

  Caught in the sea that morning

  Once furry or feathered and silly enough to wander past the taverna

  Spiros occupied a bench and ruled through silence and nicotine. Maria began recording everyone’s quotes for “the archive” (which may be imaginary). Dimitri formed emotional attachments to seafood.

  We tried to run a taverna.

  Instead, we built a metaphor.

  And metaphors attract bloggers.

  They came with linen shirts and ring lights. They called us “slow food with fast tempers”. One described us as “a chaotic culinary experience anchored by a goat and a dream”. That one got hit with a ladle. Gently.

  Still, people came. They ate, they argued, they came back.

  And somehow, Zorba’s – crooked, smoky, deeply unfashionable Zorba’s – became… something real. A place to come home to. Even if you weren’t from here. Especially if you weren’t.

  Even if you were me.

  I came here for peace. I got fish riots, three mayors, an accidental engagement, a suspicious cat, two unlicensed musicians, and a village that adopted me before I noticed.

  We survived the summer. The miracle wasn’t that we stayed open. The miracle was that we became a family.

  We weren’t restaurateurs. We were barely functional retirees. But somehow, between Alex’s charm, my inability to say no, and a village full of wildly underemployed characters, we ended up running the soul of Telios.

  There were health inspectors with opinions. Cheese wars. A goat-related incident we still don’t talk about. Dimitri started ageing octopus by counting the tentacles (they all seemed to be eight years old).

  Spiros had a bench. It wasn’t marked, named, or in any way distinguishable from the others, but it was his. Everyone knew it. Nobody sat there. Not even the cats. If someone new – say, a tourist who didn’t know better – wandered over and innocently perched on it, Spiros would appear within moments, like a storm cloud with a moustache, and simply stand there, silently, until the intruder relocated. He never said a word. He didn’t have to. The bench belonged to him by right of age, habit, and the sheer force of his disapproval.

  And as for Theodora, she went to war. Specifically, against anyone foolish enough to utter the word “tofu” within earshot of her kitchen. A man once asked if we had a vegan salad with seeds. She handed him a boiled egg and told him to come back when he was ready to eat like a grown-up.

  Zorba, meanwhile, sat under the fig tree like a retired oracle, sipping coffee and offering the occasional grunt of approval, or doom.

  And that’s where Book 2 left us.

  Book 3? That’s where things get complicated.

  Because reopening the taverna was just the beginning. Keeping it running was something else entirely. Book 3 is about what happened next. About finding rhythm in the chaos. About new faces at old tables. About saving something real, one grilled sardine at a time. We had survived a tourist season and a goat uprising, yet the off-season was always the real test. A full house in August could hide a multitude of sins; an empty pergola in January magnified them until even the cracked floor tiles looked judgemental.


>   We didn’t mean to run a taverna. But now that we do, we’ll do it the Greek way.

  With love.

  With drama.

  And with absolutely no substitutions.

  Pull up a chair.

  Chapter One

  The Warmth You Can’t Order Off the Menu

  When I was a child in England, winter mornings arrived quietly, like they were sneaking in before you could protest. You’d wake under a fortress of blankets, exhale, and watch your breath rise in pale clouds, each one a reminder that the fire downstairs hadn’t yet been coaxed back to life.

  The frost on the inside of the window was a gallery all of its own: ferns, feathers, and the faint tracery of autumn leaves, painted by an invisible hand in the night. It made the glass opaque, as if winter was determined to keep its own secrets.

  I’d press my palm against it. It was always shocking, that first contact. Not quite cold, not quite hot, just that strange, biting burn that made your fingers recoil before you could decide which it was.

  Downstairs, the ritual of morning began with the clatter of the coal scuttle, the scrape of the poker, and the reluctant roar of the fire. You learned quickly that “warming your hands” didn’t mean holding them too close, unless you wanted to smell like singed wool for the rest of the day.

  And then, years later, I found myself in Greece.

  Winter here doesn’t creep in. It sweeps down from the mountains, rattles the shutters, and flings rain against the windows sideways to see if you’re paying attention. The air smells of woodsmoke, oregano, and the occasional whiff of a neighbour’s sheep.

  The cold has a different face here. You feel it in the marble floors, in the way the stove breathes unevenly, in the draught that somehow finds its way under the door no matter how many rugs you pile up against it.

  But in Greece, winter mornings don’t start with silence. They start with a knock at the back door, or sometimes no knock at all, a neighbour coming in to see if you’ve lit the fire yet, bringing with them gossip, olives, or unsolicited advice about your chimney.

  And that’s the difference, really.

  In England, winter was something to endure until the spring bulbs pushed through the frost. Here in Greece, winter is something to share, with friends, with the village, with anyone who happens to wander in and claim a seat by the stove.

  And the windows? They stay clear. No frost to block the view. Lemon trees swaying in the wind and the sea beyond, reminding you that spring isn’t a promise here; it’s only the next chapter.

  It was winter in the taverna, and the weather outside had developed a personal grudge against everyone.

  The sea was throwing tantrums at the shore. The wind clawed at the windows, howling its disapproval. And the rain had moved beyond falling – it now came in diagonals, sneak attacks, and occasional sideways slaps that felt like regional insults.

  And yet… we were full.

  Packed.

  The pergola groaned under its plastic walls, puffing in and out like a stubborn lung. Every table was claimed, layered in coats, elbowed by wine glasses, scattered with olives and theories. Inside, we had people at the bar, behind the bar, and one particularly flexible man on the bar, who insisted it was warmer up there and wouldn’t come down unless promised soup.

  There were two stools in the kitchen and someone in a hat asking Theodora if the oregano was seasonal. She gave him a look that suggested he might become seasonal himself, depending on his next sentence.

  The storeroom, technically reserved for broken furniture and Alex’s mayoral desk, had been converted into an impromptu backgammon arena. There were five players, which is three too many, and a very old cat serving as referee.

  Spiros was out on his bench, as usual. He wore three coats, two scarves, and the distant expression of a man pondering the fall of empires. A large glass of tsipouro steamed gently in his hand. He refused to come in.

  “If I give in to the cold,” he said, “it wins.”

  We were not sure what “it” was. Possibly the government. Possibly pneumonia.

  And then… it happened.

  Someone turned up with a bouzouki. He arrived like fog: quiet, unexpected, and already part of the evening before anyone realised. He huddled himself against the plastic wall of the pergola, sat down on a wooden box that may once have held aubergines, and strummed a single note.

  Just one.

  And the whole taverna went still.

  It was beautiful – the kind of sound that doesn’t ask for attention but simply collects it. It slipped through the steam and the wine and the arguing, and it settled into the bones of the place like it had always been there. Even Theodora paused. Even the goat went quiet. And slowly, as if the weather had been bribed, the cold outside seemed to retreat, not because the stove was working better (it wasn’t), but because something warmer had taken its place.

  Someone clapped. Someone else sang half a verse of a song no one remembered learning. Claude added a harmony that was questionable but enthusiastic.

  Then it began.

  Maria started the table tapping. Father Evangelos, normally the embodiment of restraint, commandeered a spoon and began conducting from behind his wine. Dimitri banged a saucepan with a ladle in the corner until it cracked, at which point he claimed divine intervention and demanded another drink.

  Alex began dancing in her boots, the serious kind with a heel sharp enough to slice cheese. She threw her arms up and pulled half the taverna with her. Chairs screeched, tables shifted, and within minutes the floor was a shuffle of elbows, scarves, and half-remembered choreography.

  Someone dragged in an old speaker, which died halfway through an attempt at “Zorba’s Dance”, leaving the bouzouki player to rescue the melody like a surgeon saving a patient. He didn’t so much play as breathe the music out, eyes half-closed, smile faintly amused at the chaos he’d started.

  The songs came thick and fast then: old ones, defiant ones, one’s nobody would admit knowing but everyone did. Hands clapped out of time, bottles refilled themselves by some miracle of Greek physics, and at one point I’m fairly sure the goat joined in with perfect pitch.

  Zorba came in halfway through a rebetiko tune, looked at the chaos, people dancing with spoons, someone cutting cheese with a wood chisel, a pair of pensioners arguing about onions, and nodded.

  “Too much joy,” he said. “I’ll eat later.”

  And with that, he turned around and went to the kafenio, muttering something about needing peace and the dignity of a proper chair.

  Inside, we kept going. The bouzouki player never said his name. He just played.

  At one point the lights flickered, the stove groaned, and the wind outside howled like it wanted in – but nobody noticed. For a few wild, wine-soaked hours, we were unstoppable: the villagers, the romantics, the cynics, the accidental dancers, the soup thieves, the philosophers who mistake enthusiasm for wisdom.

  It was the kind of night that could only happen in winter, when there’s nowhere else to go and no reason to leave. When time forgets itself and you do too.

  Not tourists.

  Not schedules.

  Just warmth. Music. Laughter.

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  A night that left no photos, only stories.

  Chapter Two

  The Season of Silence

  It was a new year at Zorba’s.

  The tourist season was a memory, like a postcard you meant to send but kept for yourself. The taverna had settled back into what it always was: a meeting place, a place to argue, and most importantly, a place to escape your spouse for just long enough that they might forgive you for whatever you’d probably thought you’d got away with.

  I love this time of year. The village slows to a crawl, then lies down completely to sleep. The air smells faintly of smoke, lemon peel, and quiet suspicion. The sea, still glittering like it’s posing for a travel brochure, has no one to show off to. Even the cats look slightly bored.

  Zorba’s itself is not what you’d call polished. The floor tiles are a patchwork of at least three decades of aesthetic disagreement. The tables wobble unless you ask them nicely. And the bar leans – not because the building is crooked (though it is), but because Zorba once leaned against it during a storm in 1984 and it’s never quite recovered.