I first tasted Sambuca in the 1970s. I was in Bari,
on the boot heel of Italy where I stayed for more than a month. On that August
day, I met a friend of my father, an older Armenian who had lived in Italy
since he was a teenager. He was a historian and a musician, and invited me to
lunch in an all’apperto restaurant overlooking
the bluest sea.
“Should we have Sambuca to clean our palate?” he
asked while rolling a cigarette.
I had tasted Lebanese Arak and Greek Ouzo, but not
Sambuca.
“The fragrance of Anise is the same, but Sambuca
has more history behind it” he replied.
When the dink arrived, there were five coffee beans
floating in it.
“We call it ghiaccio
e mosche” he explained. “meaning ice
and flies. You can have 3 or 5 coffee beans in it, and these are the flies.
Never an even number – it is bad luck.”
After his first sip and a
deep inhale from the cigarette, he started:
“You know, sambuca was
the name of a Roman war machine. In fact the sambucae were ships made for
attacking a sieged city from the sea. They were invented by Heracleides and in
Ancient Greek they were called σαμβύκη. You will be interested in knowing that
Heracleides was a physician and the first one to write a treatise on the
Hippocratic Corpus.”
At this point the sambuca had made me relaxed, and
while chewing on a coffee bean, I wondered why a physician had designed a ship-borne siege engine.
“Well, in ancient times,
a physician was also a philosopher, a scientist and often a musician. A learned
man cannot understand disease without understanding the man and his history.”
I often recalled his
statement when I first read “Man, the Unknown” by Alexis Carrel, Nobel
Prize Winner and father of organ transplant surgery.
“And the Romans took this
Greek invention and tried it during the siege of Syracuse in 213
BC. But Marcus Claudius Marcellus was unsuccessful in bringing the city to its
knees with sambucae because the Greeks had long-range
stone–throwing artillery and catapults designed by Archimedes that prevented the
sambucae to reach the shore and extend the ladders to climb the fortified city
walls.”
“Do you like the Sambuca?
Better than the Lebanese Arak? I know it is better than Ouzo” he added with a
twinkle in his eyes.
“And now, let’s have frutti
di mare con orzo perlato to celebrate our getting together.”
… It was a meeting that
has remained in my memory as an Italian moment. I have often recalled a few
lines from this historian through my past 50 years of experience with life.
Today I thought about him
again because when I was researching the origin of the Kamancha, a string
instrument used by Sayat Nova, a 1700s famous Armenian poet, and I came across the history
of a historical musical instrument called a sambuca. Consulting Wikipedia, here
is what I found:
The original sambuca is generally supposed to
have been a small triangular ancient Greek harp of shrill tone, probably identical with thePhoenician sabecha and the Aramaic sabbekā. The sambuca has been compared to the siege engine of the same name by some classical writers;Polybius likens it to a rope ladder; others describe it as boat-shaped.
It was the last line of
the above description that took me back half a century, to an open-air Italian
eatery in Bari, and the company of an Armenian-Italian philosopher who
introduced me to Sambuca.
April 16, 2023
© Vahé A. Kazandjian,
2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambuca_(instrument)
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