God Loves Caviar

--The modern history of caviar

Caviar is the only food in this world that can show a person's status by eating it.

Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare mentioned caviar in Act II, Scene II of his classic play Hamlet: he declared that the taste of caviar was unknown to the masses and that it was reserved for the chosen few.

In the 1998 film Titanic, caviar was explicitly used as a tool to distinguish between different classes.

In this way, caviar has appeared in many literary works and films and has made a strong impression on people.

In any case, caviar's history as one of the world's most prized luxury delicacies is not as ancient as many roadside legends and some sellers' marketing materials would make it out to be.

Demetrius J. Georgacas, a researcher at the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the United States and one of the greatest Greek scholars of the twentieth century, hypothesized that the word "caviar" actually originated in Greek and conducted research. He was unable to find the origin of the word caviar in the Greek literature he searched for, but he clearly and thoroughly elucidated the history of sturgeon consumption in ancient Greece, and indirectly proved that real caviar did not exist in Europe before the Middle Ages.

In ancient Rome, sturgeon, a rare and expensive food, usually appeared at great banquets and ceremonies. According to the records of Pliny the Second, author of "Natural History" and the so-called encyclopedia of ancient Rome, at a banquet hosted by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to celebrate the Roman victory over Carthage in the Punjab War, the appearance of sturgeon as the main course was heralded by musical performances accompanied by drums and served on a platter decorated with a garland of roses.

Cicero, the eloquent writer and philosopher who was elected consul of the Roman Republic in 63 BC and was known worldwide for his eloquence, wrote of sturgeon, "This fish is eaten only by a select few."

However, despite the prominent role sturgeon played in the ancient Roman diet, the ancient Romans didn't say a word about caviar.

According to relevant literature, caviar first appeared in Medieval Europe around Constantinople, and then spread to the surrounding areas centered around the Greek Orthodox Church.

Greek Orthodox law, derived from the Greek Messianic faith, included a 180-day annual fasting period and a seven-week period of fasting before Easter, during which believers were forbidden from eating meat for 229 days a year.

In 988 AD, after a complicated international conflict, Vladimir I, Grand Prince of Kievan Rus (the precursor to modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), married the Byzantine princess Anna in an arranged marriage, banned polytheism, forced all Russians to jump into the Dnieper River to be baptized, and declared Orthodox Christianity the official religion of Russia.
Obviously, the climatic conditions in Russia are much harsher than those in the Mediterranean basin, so the Russian Orthodox Church officially allowed believers to eat fish, including sturgeon, and sturgeon eggs during the fasting period.

In 1240, shortly after the Mongol conquest of the Volga River, Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan and commander of the expedition, visited a nearby Orthodox cathedral with his wife. To feast the conquerors, the church laid a table full of the best dishes, including a soup made from sterlet meat. The final dessert was cooked apples with a sort of marinated sturgeon roe.

When the dish was presented to Lady Batu, she immediately got up from the table and quickly ran away. Batu casually ate it all up. This is the first recorded historical record of the eating of caviar.

During the time of Peter the Great, small amounts of caviar had already been brought to Europe, but limited storage and logistics meant that it tasted so bad that when French King Louis XV first tasted some presented to him by the Russian ambassador, he spat it directly onto the opulent carpets of Versailles.

In Italy, the handling of caviar on Venetian merchant ships presented a bizarre scene. A contemporary account stated that eating caviar was "the same as eating salt, eating feces, or eating flies." Galileo Galilei, the chief philosopher and mathematician appointed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, sent some caviar to his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Kreister, who opened it and immediately threw it in the trash.

Thus, the birth of truly delicious caviar had to wait for the appearance of Ioannis Varvakis, a Greek man born on the island of Psara in the eastern Aegean Sea.

He was in the Ottoman-controlled Greece, where he had been running his family's shipping business. When the Fifth Russo-Turkish War began, Varlavakis, a devout Orthodox Christian, joined the uprising against Ottoman rule and tried to side with the Russians. Soon after he sold his house and equipped a warship, the Ottoman Sultan offered Russia peace, and the war ended.

The war began when Russia invaded Poland to secure ports on the Black Sea, and the Ottoman Empire, in turn, declared war on Russia after France and Austria took over.

When the war ended, Russia received its desired northern Black Sea coast as a condition of peace, and traitors like Varlavakis were forgotten in the Ottoman Empire and would eventually be punished by their country.

With everything lost, he made a bold decision and set off on a 8,000 mile journey to Petersburg to petition, a journey that would change his own destiny and also usher in a new era of caviar production around the world.

In Petersburg, Varlavakis met one of the most powerful men in Russian politics at the time: the queen's lover, future marshal of the Russian Imperial Army, commander-in-chief and governor-general of Ukraine, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin. Descendant of Polish nobility, Potemkin graduated from Moscow State College and enlisted in the heavy cavalry of the Imperial Guard at the age of 16.

In 1762, the German-born Empress Catherine II faced exile after a new affair with Tsar Peter III. Using her influence in the Royal Guard, she staged a coup and became queen of the Romanov dynasty.

Potemkin took part in Catherine II's coup and was personally promoted to lieutenant in the Royal Guard by the Empress, after which he served with distinction in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. In 1774 he was made a count and promoted to vice dean of the military academy.

Impressed by Varvakis's bravery as a soldier in the recently concluded war, Potemkin arranged a meeting with Catherine the Great, who awarded him a packet of gold florins and unlimited tax-free fishing rights in the Caspian Sea. Varvakis went to the Caspian port of Astrakhan and built up a powerful fleet of fishing boats, which he prospered at.

One day, he ate a loaf of bread given to him by a local farmer, which was coated in a strange, thick, black sauce, and that was when he first encountered caviar.

Luckily, the caviar he ate was delicious. Lucky for him, if it had been caught in the wrong season, improperly stored, or the fish eggs themselves had been of poor quality, he would never have been drawn to it.

After realizing the great commercial value of caviar, he set out to find ways to improve its quality, and listening to the advice of Cossack fishermen, he built barrels out of zelkova wood from the Caucasus Mountains to pack and preserve the caviar.

This improvement gave his caviar a longer shelf life and ultimately allowed it to withstand long-distance transportation and storage, making it a more expensive food.

By 1788, Warwakis' caviar production had grown into a large operation employing over 3,000 workers.

In 1824, Varrouakis returned to his homeland, Greece, which had recently gained independence from the Ottoman Empire. By this point, he had become a millionaire, and in his short time back home, he donated vast sums of money to the vast covered marketplace, the Athenian School, and numerous city utilities.

He died two years after his return and was never able to return to Astrakhan, the caviar capital he had built. The canal he dug in Astrakhan to transport barrels and timber still flows today, and was once named the "Mayday Canal" after the Russian Revolution.

In 1991, the Astrakhan municipal government renamed the canal "Varvakis Canal" to commemorate the father of the city's revival and to recall its glory days.

In 2012, Greek director Yanis Smaradis adapted Varrouakis' life story into a film called God Loves Caviar.