The companionship and solidarity between families was a wonderful thing, something really enviable! When someone fell ill in a house, it was a major event for the neighbourhood! Everyone would go out of their way to help if the home was in need. The housewife would take care to decorate the bed with the best sheets and lace pillowcases, because that same day she'd be receiving visitors to the sick person,... sometimes even people taking turns to look after them...
The other thing typical of the neighbourhood was the skouteliko. When a housewife cooked something nice, she had to serve up a few plates of it and take them to her favourite neighbours. And the plates would come back home with a different skouteliko from the neighbours - they were never empty!
In the days before television, everyone would get together in the evenings, before dusk fell. The women would take their embroidery and come out into their whitewashed courtyards, which were fragrant with the smell of flowers in pots, and chat to one another.
The courtyard outside our house, on Korais Square, was in its heyday then. In the evening, almost all the neighbourhood would get together there. The women would make and serve appetizers at some point a guitar or a mandolin would appear, and then the singing would begin.
