Preparation:

Sprinkle the eggplants with salt and let drain in a colander for 1 hour. Rinse and squeeze out the excess moisture. Heat half the oil in a skillet or frying pan. Add the eggplants and cook over medium heat, turning occasionally, for 8 minutes, until lightly browned. Remove and drain. Heat the remaining oil in a large pan. Add the meat and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, for about 8 minutes, until golden brown. Add the onion and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Add the pureed tomatoes, sugar, and parsley and season with salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours, or until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C/Gas Mark 6). Lay two eggplant strips in the shape of cross, place a cube of meat in the center, and fold the ends of eggplant over it to make a parcel. Put a piece of red and green bell pepper on top and secure with a wooden toothpick. Repeat with the rest of the meat and eggplant. Arrange the parcels close together in a shallow ovenproof dish and pour the sauce over them. Season with salt and pepper and bake for 15-20 minutes.

Serves 6

Preparation time 1 1/2 hours (including salting) Cooking time 2 hours

Pita The flat flaky pastry pasties with a thousand and one fillings are a Greek national dish and are made throughout the mainland. The main differences lie in the number of pastry sheets that puff up in the oven, giving pita its characteristic crispiness. Making pita involves a great deal of work and used to be left mostly to the skilled hands of Greek grandmothers. They often got up with the sun to knead the required pastry mixture by hand. They then kneaded individual portions of dough before rolling them out with a thin wooden rolling pin, turning them, and rolling them out again, until the whole table was covered with a paper-thin layer of pastry. That layer was folded together, and the rolling process would start all over again. It was hours before all the ingredients were ready, and the baking sheet, (which was usually extremely large), could be taken to the nearest baker. In the countryside, this ritual still hasn't quite died out (and no one is sure whether that's something to be welcomed or regretted). No one knows why Epirus in particular became so famous for its pita. But anyone who has tried a pita here will vouch for its distinctive appearance and taste. In the towns, guesthouses with a sense of tradition have made an even better name for themselves with homemade pita. There you can recognize a good host by the various types of pita on the menu. The fascinating thing about pita is the imagination that their fillings can inspire, because there is nothing that would not taste even better when baked in the paper-thin flaky pastry. As with anything made with fillo pastry, the same applies for pita: it must never be covered when taken out of the oven, as this would make the softly crisp layers collapse in on themselves, and all that effort would have been in vain. Apart from that, they can be enjoyed either warm or cold, as a meal or as a snack, at any time of the day or night.

In his work Pneumatica Heron describes a great invention, the steam whirl (or steam stele), thus putting the basis for the modern steam engine. The rotating steam whirl invented by Heron is known as Aeolosphere or Gate of Aeolos. Water is vaporized through a boiler and steam goes to a sphere with special valves by the means of two tubes bent at a right angle. This sphere has two outgrowths diametrically arranged and bent in such a way so as the steam pressure can make the sphere move in rotation, by escaping through them.

Excerpt from:
Ancient Greek Technology,
by Ailos Publications
(in English and Greek)