On the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, sits a 5,700-square-meter plot of land. There, a Vietnamese couple, Tr\u00fac and Qu\u1ef3nh, grow vegetables in their own garden, mill rice into noodles, and ferment fish sauce (n\u01b0\u1edbc m\u1eafm) by salting fish bought at the port. They spend two years deliberately making, by hand, condiments they could simply buy. Behind this lies the situation of the Vi\u1ec7t ki\u1ec1u (overseas Vietnamese), who had no choice but to rebuild the \"taste of home\" from the ground up in their new country. As interest in moving abroad and dual-base living grows in Japan too, it's a story rich with insight for anyone thinking about how far food culture can travel.<\/p>\n
Many people bring back local ingredients and seasonings before or after a trip to Vietnam, but this couple's efforts go a step further. Without relying on imports, they complete the entire process on-site, from growing the raw materials to fermentation.<\/p>\n
The couple moved to Thessaloniki in 2019, using a European residency-by-investment program (so-called investment migration). The following year, in 2020, they bought a house with land. However, the residency status they obtained did not permit salaried employment. So at the age of fifty, the two chose to \"retire\" and began studying Greek with the goal of obtaining citizenship.<\/p>\n
As the only Vietnamese household in the area, the couple began recreating fragments of their home life by hand to ease their homesickness. The garden became the centerpiece of that effort.<\/p>\n
Qu\u1ef3nh's husband went back to Hanoi once, bought fruit-tree saplings and vegetable seeds, and brought them back to Greece. They installed an automatic irrigation system on the land and turned it into a full-fledged kitchen garden. At first, they had assumed Greece's climate would be close to that of northern Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Reality, however, was not so kind. Winter snowfall killed off many of the Vietnamese plants they had brought. Hanoi's renowned \"di\u1ec7n\" pomelo, along with dragon fruit, lychee, longan, star apple, and herbs such as Vietnamese balm and rice paddy herb, couldn't survive the winter. The difficulty of bringing tropical and subtropical crops into a Mediterranean climate shows clearly here.<\/p>\n
Even so, the couple kept experimenting and shifted their focus to crops suited to the local climate. What began to thrive in the garden included figs, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, loquats, plums, pears, peaches, and grapes. Vegetables such as water spinach, glutinous-rice corn, beans, oriental melon, and mustard greens also began to grow. On top of that, fifty olive trees yield more than 100 liters of olive oil a year.<\/p>\n
The heart of their condiment-making is fish sauce (n\u01b0\u1edbc m\u1eafm). Qu\u1ef3nh learned the recipe from a friend in Hanoi and keeps fermenting it at home year-round so she never runs out. The mixture for a batch is as follows.<\/p>\n