‘What is kourou, please?’

People started lining up outside 10 Voulis Street in downtown Athens early on a recent Saturday morning, even before the city started to look properly alive. That the crowd was a multiethnic one was immediately apparent. Tourists from the length and breadth of the world had gathered in front of Ariston, investigating the window display of cheese, spinach and sweet cream pies and piroski buns.

A young Chinese woman read the signs out loud, pausing as she tried to pronounce the word "kourou." "What is kourou, please?" she asked the man behind the counter. "Traditional cheese pie," he said, as drily as the crispy, grease-free pastry that makes up the kourou cheese pie for which Ariston has been famous for years.

He didn't have the luxury to explain that the word is Turkish and means dry; to be fair, he probably had his fill of having to answer the same question a few...