Souvlaki

Souvlaki is Greece's favourite fast food: small cubes of meat — most often pork, sometimes chicken or lamb — marinated in olive oil, lemon, garlic and oregano, threaded onto skewers and grilled over charcoal until smoky at the edges and juicy within. The name comes from souvla, "skewer," a nod to the little spits the meat is cooked on.

It is eaten every which way: straight off the stick, or wrapped in a warm pita with tomato, onion, a handful of chips and a generous smear of tzatziki. In that wrapped form it overlaps with its close relative gyros, and the two together define the Greek grill house, or psistariá, found on almost every street corner.

Grilling meat on skewers is one of the oldest cooking methods in the Aegean. Excavations at Akrotiri on Santorini uncovered stone souvlaki-style firedog supports dating to the Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago, and skewered meat appears in Homer and in later Greek authors, who called such portions obeliskos.

The modern dish took its current, street-food shape in the twentieth century, when charcoal grills and inexpensive cuts made it an everyday meal in Athens and beyond. Today souvlaki is both a beloved national comfort food and one of Greece's best-known culinary exports, found in tavernas and diaspora neighbourhoods all over the world.