Aussaying in Greece Is Not Goodbye to Israel, It’s Letting Go
"My husband and I have been traveling to Greece for more than thirty years. At least once a year, sometimes more. Those trips are why I opened Ozeria, which is Mediterranean rather than fully Greek. I first went to Epidaurus 30 years ago. I have always wanted a house in Greece," says Avivit Priel-Avichai, the longtime owner of Ozeria in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market, about the new property she bought on Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula. "For years I told Yoav, my partner, that I wanted one, and he refused because home is here. Until October 7."
Priel-Avichai, who is almost 60, is one of the pioneers of the new wave in Tel Aviv’s old market. She opened Ozeria 14 years ago. In May 2024, along with 18 other chefs and food professionals, she received a tribute award as part of the Israeli Cuisine Awards for her contribution to society during the war. For almost two years, she paid out of pocket for dozens of sandwiches for patients at Sheba Medical Center. In our previous conversation, she told me she would keep doing it until the last wounded soldier was released home. But reality had other plans, the war did not stop, and in the end, after two years, she gave in and raised her hands. She is not closing Ozeria yet, but these days she has signed a contract to purchase 7.5 dunams in the small town of Epidaurus. She wants to live there part of the time, care for the olive trees on the property and, if possible, serve her excellent food.
Priel-Avichai is joining several other Israeli food professionals and restaurateurs who have already built businesses from scratch in Greece, among them Eyal Kitzes, from the Osu burger joint, and his partner Yonatan Gislר, who opened a restaurant in Athens, and Uri Eshet, from the Greenberg burger place, who opened a hotel and restaurant on the island of Kea.
We meet on a lovely sunny afternoon at Ozeria, and everything still seems calm and quiet in Tel Aviv. She serves excellent ikra, toasted bread, grape-leaf spread, anchovy chips, fettuccine with seafood in Pernod sauce, bruschetta with tuna, ceviche with pacus and apricot, and for dessert, affogato with Bahri date ice cream and halva strands. Everything is wonderful, and everything is made by Erez Umid, her chef, who is now effectively inheriting her place behind the stove. He has worked with her for a decade and has in fact been the operating chef for years.
"We are not leaving"
Why did you want a house in Greece?
"An anchor. I identified processes even before the judicial overhaul. I always said that if things didn’t change here, I would leave. If the election results were like that, I would leave. On October 7, something broke in Yoav, and for me it had already broken long ago. On the 7th I saw Yoav like I had never seen him before, and we have been married for many years. He was sitting in front of the ‘released for publication’ notices and crying, and he is not a man who cries. Then he said, ‘Come on, let’s buy something not here.’ He is a great Zionist, but something cracked in him. It was clear it would be in Greece, although we also looked in Portugal and other places."
So why Greece?
"Because it’s close and my father is here. And as you understand, we are not leaving. The restaurant is staying, and Yoav has work here too, and anyway most of the time only I’ll be there. The Peloponnese is relatively close to Athens airport. Yoav will be able to come for the weekend and go back to work. It’s very beautiful there, it looks like the road to Beit Oren."
It took them a year to find the place. At the start of her fantasy about Greece, she thought she would open a restaurant there, without asking herself who was even waiting for her. "But as I got closer to retirement age, I mean, I’m basically one second from retirement, I thought maybe I’d open a small Airbnb, some kind of guesthouse with chef dinners by request."
Besides the house, the property also has olive trees, "I’ll make oil at the press in the nearby town," fruit, a pool and two sheds that she wants to turn into a dining area and a ceramics studio. "Still, retirement," she laughs. There are even four guest rooms that need renovation. In short, a real Greek dream.
"I’m not opening a restaurant because that means sitting and waiting for people to come, and I don’t want that." She thinks it will at most break even and hopes to be there during the tourist season and in Israel in the winter.
Priel-Avichai confirms that everyone in Greece asks for black-market payment, including lawyers and bankers, and heaven help anyone who tries to be a good citizen and pay against invoices. The bureaucracy there is impossible. Despite the difficulties, she feels the need to arrange herself a form of insurance elsewhere. "I am still not giving up on the country. But even while doing all this, it eats at me to see the price we are paying here for the ability to survive. I am doing it out of desire and love, but what I really want is not to have to do it. I don’t want to have to help anyone. I want to be able to take care of myself, from lows and highs, physically. To see the water in the sea come and go."
A house by the sea?
"Seven minutes from the sea. The fantasy was a house by the sea, but financially that wasn’t possible. This will be the way to prepare for my retirement, because here that’s not possible."
So, as Meir Ariel said, where am I in all this?
"Yes. What about us, what about the future of our children, who by the way are not coming with us, of course, because they are adults. But let there be a place of refuge, among other things. Let me really have somewhere to run to if heaven forbid everything collapses here, for me and my family."
"I’m still optimistic"
Why not all the way? Leave completely.
"Because I love this place with all my soul and heart. Really. I’m not fighting for it for nothing. It’s like if your child behaves badly, you don’t stop loving them and you don’t leave them. I still think about how to help the country. I still go to demonstrations. But I felt I needed to prepare for a rainy day. This is not an easy move to make, to leave completely."
What do your children say?
"They find it amusing. But they’ll come if needed."
She says what broke her was not the missiles from Iran or the war, but what happened to Israeli society, the violent, shallow and fascist discourse.
What scares you most?
"That it won’t change. For example, Mordechai David versus Aharon Barak, and the fact that Mordechai David gets support. The elderly people who are beaten at demonstrations. The person who got hit in the eye by a water cannon, the woman who was knocked down at a protest."
This still feels like a goodbye.
"No, it feels like letting go."
It’s terribly sad to me.
"I’m not sad at all, quite the opposite. I walk around wearing a ‘still optimistic’ shirt with Dudu Geva’s duck. I believe, in the most naive way, that change will come. I look at reality and think there is no way people really think what is happening here is good. On the other hand, my optimism has not proved itself very much."
