End of an era: Bakolas, the city’s last all-Greek market, closes its doors

MANCHESTER, NH – If memories linger in buildings – and what sensitive human would doubt that they do? —then 110 Spruce Street in Manchester is crowded with recollections of countless delicious meals – Greek meals, that is. Fine cheeses, tangy olives, the freshest fish and poultry and lamb. Now, after close to a century of grocery history, the store we know as Bakolas Market will close later this month. The building, with its ground-floor market and upstairs apartments has been sold.

There was a time, nearly a century ago, when there were more than 30 grocery stores elbowing each other on the corners around Lake Avenue, Spruce and Cedar streets. Arthur Bakolas, whose father, Dimitrios, bought and gave the market its current name in 1979, remembers, when he was a boy, seeing a fat directory of Greek grocery stores … all within the city of Manchester. But for a long time now, Bakolas Market has been the last all-Greek-goods purveyor.

Like most things to do with Manchester’s Greek community, the various building owners, shopkeepers and workers were connected by marriage and friendship and their deep appreciation of the meals that the store made possible. Parents and children unloaded the barrels of cheeses, pasta, and crates of olives and other goods that came from Greece by way of long-established importers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

For decades, the families headed out to the Boston fish markets long before daylight on Tuesdays to get the fresh catch and crowded into the back room to clean the fish, and to pluck the chickens brought in from a nearby farm. They stocked the shelves and kept the lines moving and remembered names. Regulars walked in from around the block, visitors drove up from all over New England.

By the 1950s and ‘60s if you wanted a traditional feast for Easter, then you stood in a line that wound down the street to wait for the delivery of 40 whole lambs. Catherine Spinos Leuchs of Manchester remembers driving her family’s green Falcon station wagon to do such pickups while in college. Working in the store was very much a part of the daily lives of the children and grandchildren of the storekeepers over the years.

“My grandfather, Apostolou Ballas, and my great-uncle, Emanuel Ballas, ran the store in the mid 1930s,” Catherine says. After Emanuel died in 1950, Catherine’s parents John and Persifone Spinos, took over the store and ran it for three decades. Another owner, Helen Semos, was at the helm briefly, then  Dimitrios Bakolas (“Jimmy” or “Taki” to many of his customers) bought the place.

Both Dimitrios’s daughter, Mariana Gasis, and his son Arthur remember the store as their father’s dream and the focus of his tireless work. “The store was my father’s pride and joy,” says Mariana. (Every time the market comes up in conversation, Arthur remembers another very important thing: It is where he met his wife, Stavroula (Spirou) Bakolas.) Mariana and Arthur – and many longtime regulars – always wind up recalling a particular scene from Dimitrios’s later years: “Even after he retired he’d come down from their home upstairs, sit in a chair in the store and greet people.

Now, George Gasis (Dimitrio’s son-in-law and husband to Mariana) who ran the store for the past 32 years, is saying goodbye to many of those same longtime customers. The people who have stopped in (and those who emailed Manchester Ink Link to share news of the closing) know this market as a place where the food was always fresh and the cooking advice always generous.

Almost everyone who talks about Bakolas’ closing uses the same word: “Bittersweet.” It is that. The last all-Greek food market here will be gone in a matter of days, but the memories of it are unlikely to fade any time soon.

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett is a Manchester-based author, teacher, and former longtime journalist.

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