It started as an anthology of texts about souvlaki from Greek and world literature, a collection of excerpts from articles and books that were painfully few. Then it evolved into a research on the souvlaki of the Greek space from the time of Homer, and even earlier, to the present bastardized versions of it (which are NOT souvlaki). Then we extensively researched the souvlaki of Athens and conducted countless interviews, collected testimonies and stories from souvlaki sellers, and started composing an incredible story that was much bigger than what we expected. We tried countless souvlaki, almost from every souvlaki shop in Attica, daily, for years, we spoke to people who have studied Greek food (all foreigners), ancient and contemporary, we searched for a bunch of exhausted and rare books - we even found chronicles from campaigns of Byzantine soldiers that detailed what they ate -, narratives of travelers, ethnographers, we searched for songs (almost all satirical, because souvlaki is humble and despised and no one ever took it seriously).

The result is this book, which doesn't have a single photograph and is entirely hand-drawn by Konstantinos Fyntanis, and which is the first attempt to record the history of the most popular Greek street food, perhaps the most famous Greek food in the world.