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This Town in Iceland Is a

Modern Pompeii
Icelands Mountain of Fire volcano wreaked havoc
with an island and the island fought back

What if you could visit Pompeii or Herculaneum and meet the inhabitants who
fled the horrific volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and decided to
come back, dig out their old houses from under tons of pumice, and bring the
towns back to life?

On the island of Heimaey, in the Westman island archipelago in the southern

part of Iceland, you can do just that. Through guided tours, multimedia
presentations and eyewitness accounts from survivors, an astonishing story of
catastrophe and rebirth is vividly recreated.

On the morning of January 23, 1973 the Eldfell volcano erupted without
warning, spewing lava over the fishing port of Vestmannaeyjar. In quick dispatch
the entire population of the island was evacuated. People thought it was the
end of life here, a guide recently told a small group of visitors who were
listening with rapt interest. But within two years, most of the 5,000 inhabitants
had returned. Try to imagine your house buried in ash, the guide continued.
And you come back to dig it out and move back in again. For five months,
Eldfellthe name means Mountain of Fire in Icelandichad its way with the
island. Then, at last, the eruptions stopped. In all, half a million cubic meters of
black volcanic ash covered their town. One third of the houses had survived.
One third could be dug out. And one third were gone forever. Families started
digging their way into their houses, literally picking up the pieces of their lives.
Kids were overjoyed to find their toy trucks. Some folks just came to say
farewell to their homes and their island, but most stayed.

Volunteers came from all over Iceland and then from all over the world to help.
They removed an astounding 800,000 tons of ash and rebuilt the destroyed city.
At some places, like the cemetery, removal of the pumice was all done by hand
with garden shovels. Today, as the visitor enters the cemetery, he or she reads
the words, I live and you shall live. The haunting phrase is repeated in one of
the many eyewitness accounts available as part of the audio tour at the
Eldheimar museum, which is located in one of the houses that lay covered by
50 meters of pumice for 40 years.

Walking through the house is like entering a time capsule. Here dwelled a
woman, her fishing boat captain husband, and their three kids, all asleep in the

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early hours when the volcano erupted. Visitors are hushed as they pass by a
dinner plate, ceiling beams, a piece of clothing, a hanging lamp. They peer into
the remains of the family fireplace, abandoned rooms, light bulbs in ceiling
fixtures, blown-out windows.

An audio guide leads tourists through the sounds and sights of the explosion
and its aftermath in images, words, and actual sound recordings. Visitors watch
video footage of the evacuation and hear the announcement that was made to
inform all the inhabitants that they had to leave their homes and head
immediately for fishing boats. And they learn how the residents reacted: One
man ran back to get his wallet. Someone grabbed a parakeet. Kids ran outside
in pajamas. One kid took a school book, not realizing it would be a while before
he could go back to school. By some miracle, all of the fishing boats were in the
port that night because of recent storms, and the dazed locals climbed on
board. They spent about four hours at sea, and then were met by buses and
taken to Reykjavik.

The immediacy of the museum recreation is startling, moving, sometimes

overwhelming, and unforgettable. Outside of the museum is a house that is still
buried in lava, which looks like a huge pile of black coal.

Eldfell still looms large over the island. It remains active although it hasnt
erupted since that fateful night 44 years ago. Today, when tourists fly into the
local airport on Haimaey, they may not realize that part of the runway was
constructed from tephra, which is material that spewed into the air during the
volcanic eruption. If they arrive by ferry, accompanied, perhaps, by puffins and
gannets flying overhead, they are likely unaware that the island that stretches
before them has increased by more than two kilometers since l973about
seven football fields as a result of concentrated lava flow.

The island is easily accessed by driving 2-3 hours from Reykjavik and then
boarding a ferry for a 30-45 minute ride. Visitors can learn as much as they
desire about volcanoes (at the museum), see the volcanic features and the new
parts of the island formed by lava, meet inhabitants and stop by other local
sights, including a mountain that is considered one of the least hospitable
locations on earth, with winds gusting up to 110 miles per hour.

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Using Your Heartbeat as

a Password
Researchers have developed a way of turning the
unique rhythms of your heart into a form of
identification

Your fingerprints. Your voice. The irises of your eyes. It seems that these days
any part of your body can be used for biometric authenticationthe process by
which your physical characteristics are used to prove your identity, allowing you
access to your cell phone, your bank account or your front door.

Now, you can add your heartbeat to the list. Researchers at the State University
of New York-Binghamton have developed a way to use patients heartbeat
patterns to protect their electronic medical records, opening the door to a new
method of biometric authentication.

As wearable health devices that monitor everything from blood pressure to

respiratory rate become more popular, theres an increasing need to transmit
health data electronically to doctors offices, explains Zhanpeng Jin, a professor
in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton who is
working with fellow professor Linke Guo and his student Pei Huang.

During this process, the data transmission is vulnerable to cyber attacks or

data breach, which may expose sensitive users [electronic health] data, Jin
says.

Since mobile health devices would have already collected a patients

electrocardiogram (ECG)a measurement of the hearts electrical activitythe
heartbeat data can simply be reused for security purposes. This has an
advantage over many existing encryption techniques, Jin says, because it's far
less computing-intensive and uses less energy, which is important when
working with energy-limited devices like small wearable health monitors. Since
the data has already been collected, it adds little extra cost to the process as
well.

While the peaks and valleys on people's ECGs may look identical to the
untrained eye, theyre actually anything but. Though your heartbeat speeds up
and slows down, your ECG has a signature, much like a fingerprint, based on
the structure of the heart itself.

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The existing studies on ECGs have proved that the ECGs are quite unique by
nature among different individuals, says Jin.

There's only one problem: these unique patterns are also changeable. A
persons ECG can change with physical activity, mental states (like stress), age
and other factors.

We are still working on better algorithms to mitigate those influences and make
the ECG-based encryption more robust and resistant to those variabilities, Jin
says.

These issues would need to be overcome in order for ECGs to become a

common biometric identifier like irises or fingerprints. But, Jin says, the
technology is ready to be used as a secondary form of authentication. Since, by
nature, an ECG only comes from a person who is alive, it could be used in
tandem with another form of identification to both authenticate a persons
identity and prove that theyre living. Gruesome as its sounds, the scenario of a
plucked-out eyeball or a severed finger being used to trick security scanners is
something biometrics researchers must consider. An ECG as a secondary form
of ID would remove that issue.

Jins previous work has involved using a persons brainprintthe unique

electrical activity of their brainas a password, which also solves the plucked-
out eyeball problem. In Jin's research, volunteers' brains responded differently
when presented with different words. The brainwaves reflecting those
differences could be used as passwords. But unlike heartbeats, brainwaves are
not recorded by a personal health monitor, which makes them less useful in the
case of protecting electronic health records.

As more and more doctors diagnose and treat patients remotely

through telemedicine, Jin and his team hope their new technique can help
secure vulnerable data. So one day soon, your heartbeat may join your
fingerprints as yet another key in an ever-increasing number of locks.

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Much of the Cuisine We

Now Know, and Think of
as Ours, Came to Us by
War
The long and winding road that brought "local" dishes
to our plates

The relish on my plate is Sicilian, a tangy blend of sweet and sour flavors. I can
pick out some of the ingredientseggplant, capers, celeryright away. I
havent a clue, however, about the forces that came together to create this
exquisite vegetable dish.

Gaetano Basile, a writer and lecturer on the food and culture of Sicily, does
know. He has invited me to Lo Scudiero, a family-run restaurant in Palermo, as
a tasty introduction to the islands food and its history. He explains that the
appetizer I am eating, caponata, exists because of transformative events that
took place more than a thousand years ago. It was then that Arab forces
invaded, bringing new crops, agricultural know-how, and other innovations that
were far above the standards of medieval Europe.

On the first day of the conquest, in June, 827 a.d., ten thousand men arrived
from Tunisia. They were not led by a general as you might think, Basile says,
but by a jurist, an expert in law. What was their business here? They were
Aghlabids from Tunisia and Fatimids from Egypt. These guys came here for a
simple operation of religious conquest. But along with that mission they brought
so many things I cant even list all of them, Basile adds. Hard grain, without
which we could not make pasta, and sugarcane. Sugar alone would have
already been enough, since it means having a powdered sweetener with which
wonderful things could be made.

We are sitting at a table, formally set with a starched tablecloth, sparkling

glasses, silver chargers under the plates, and a menu of traditional Sicilian
dishes. I think to myself that Basile has thoughtfully chosen Lo Scudiero,
meaning squire, because it, too, reflects the cultural history I am eager to
understand. Chargers, he says, were characteristic of the Sicilian aristocracy,
and place settings were thought to have been introduced with the arrival of
Jewish families who came with Spanish Muslims in the early ninth century.

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They were the only ones to have tablecloths and napkins in an epoch when
many here were eating on the floor.

A succession of invaders cameamong them Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians,

followed by the Islamic army of Arabs, Berbers, Moors, and Cretans. Then the
Normans and other outsiders arrived, until 1860, when Sicily became part of the united
Kingdom of Italy. These conquests left culinary marks, as foreign explorations and
invasions usually do. Basile starts ticking off a long list: pecorino cheese made from
sheeps milk has Greek origins (the cheesemaking of the Cyclops in Homers Odyssey,
he points out, is set in Sicily); Arabs introduced the grain dish couscous, still a specialty
of the western Sicilian city of Trapani; rice, also an Arab import, stars in arancini di risu,
or rice croquettes, typically Sicilian. And the Normans? The Normans were a bunch of
barbarians, says Basile. By the time they invaded southern Italy, they already had a
reputation as robbers, murderers, rapists, and horse thieves. But they didnt come with
nothing: They brought salted cod, or baccala, a dish most commonly associated with
Portugal and Spain.

It wasnt just new food that the invaders introduced. They brought better farming
techniques as well. Clifford Wright, who has traced the history of Sicilian-Arab
foods in two books, Cucina Paradiso and A Mediterranean Feast, points to the
Arab approaches to irrigation and agronomy, which led to larger crop yields.
Before the Arabs, Sicilian peasants had avoided planting in the hotter summer
months. After the Arabs, the land was in cultivation all year round. The new
immigrants planted lemons and other heat-tolerant fruits and vegetables that
would increase the bounty of the harvest.

Sicily became quite famous for its fruits and vegetables, and that can be traced
back to the Muslim era, when the gardens probably began as pleasure
gardens, says Wright. Pleasure gardens were designed as places of repose,
and for Muslims, a reminder of the paradise awaiting the virtuous. They were
eventually turned into kitchen gardens, Wright continues, describing them as
experimental horticultural stations to develop better propagation methods. But
at the same time, they were places of beauty. The gardens were lush with
vegetable crops, flowering bushes, and fruit trees, and graced with water
fountains and pavilions, Wright explains in A Mediterranean Feast. During the
300 years that the Arabs ruled Sicily, its agriculture and economy grew, and
institutions evolved. In fact, when the Normans seized power, they kept many
practices of their predecessors, including the organization of the government
and, in the upper classes, the wearing of flowing robes.

Humans are bound to food by necessity first, and then by choice. The types of
food you eat distinguish your country from another country, your group from
another group. When new influences comewhether from conquest or colonial
exploration or the popularity of a TV cooking showthere is a period of
adaptation, and then often the full incorporation of a new technique or ingredient
into the countrys culinary lexicon. The potatoes and tomatoes that went from
the New World to Europe in the Columbia Exchange of the 15th century were
first scorned by Old World diners who feared they were poisonous, then in time
became emblematic of their cuisines. In its original form, Sicilian caponata

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would never have been made with tomatoes, but today there are versions that
include them and they are considered perfectly Sicilian.

Food constantly evolves, as do taste buds. To the Western palate, Japanese

food seems so distinctly Japanese, yet it went through many modifications once
the country opened to the West in the 19th century, explains Katarzyna
Cwiertka, the chair of modern Japanese Studies at Leiden University and a
scholar of East Asian food. New ingredients, new cooking techniques, and new
flavorings were adapted to Japanese customs, she says. The changes were
really tremendous.

Military canteens played the role of first adopters. Once Japanese soldiers
became accustomed to a food, they would eventually introduce it to the wider
public when they returned to civilian life. Such was the case with curry, which
started appearing in Japan in the late 19th century. It was a borrowing not
directly from India, but from the British Empire. The Japanese start to serve it
as a Western food, says Cwiertka. It enters military menus and canteens and
continues after [World War II] into school canteens. By the 1950s and 1960s it is
a national dish. When you ask Japanese students abroad what they crave most,
they would say ramen or curry. And ramen [of Chinese origin] is also not a
Japanese food.

What the Japanese have doneover and over again, Cwiertka points outis
move foreign foods into the category of washoku, the genuinely Japanese. They
adapt and absorb foreign culinary influences this way. Its more like the
invention of a tradition than a tradition, she says.

For Maria Grammatico, ties to the past are what matter most. Her bakery in the
misty mountaintop town of Erice, in western Sicily, turns out pastries of such
seductive aroma and delicacy that they have become famous throughout Italy. (I
make the detour to see her during a Sicilian vacation, but she is, on this rare
occasion, out of town. Later I pose questions by phone.)

The medieval town with cobblestone streets is 2,400 feet above the plains of
Trapani. Driving up these dizzying heights on a narrow road, its hard not to
think of the visit to Grammaticos home village as some sort of quest, which for
fans of her cooking, it is. She has dedicated herself to pure ingredients and
time-tested techniques. The result is classic Sicilian pastryredolent with
almonds and jamsjust as she knew them as a child. The almonds she uses
must come only from Avola, on the eastern side of the island. (They contain
more oil than most almonds, so sweets turn out better, Grammatico explains.)
Her milk comes only from local cowsand its crucial, she says, that they are
milked by hand. Of course this makes a difference! she insists in a voice that
brooks no dissent.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in his 1958 novel, The Leopard, describes a

fabulous banquet scene where the island's memorable desserts are lavishly on
display. It is 1860, a pivotal year: Garibaldi's troops have landed in Sicily; the

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march to the unification of Italy has begun and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
will soon end. Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, stands before a table piled
with sweets and considers the role of nuns in local pastry making a Sicilian
convent tradition since the 18th century: Huge blond babas, Mont
Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and
green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolatecovered pastry, brown and rich as the
topsoil of the Catanian plain Don Fabrizio selects the pastry known as minni
di vergine, made in the shape of breastsan apparent reference to Saint
Agatha, the Sicilian saint whose breasts were cut off by the Romans. Why ever
didnt the Holy Office forbid these cakes when it had a chance? Don Fabrizio
muses. Saint Agathas sliced off breasts sold by convents, devoured at dances!
Well, well!

These desserts are still Sicilian standards, and Grammatico learned how to
make them in the most traditional wayfrom nuns. In the aftermath of World
War II, when Sicily was struggling to recover from the devastation of bombings
and loss of life, Grammaticos mother was caring for five children. She was
widowed and poor, barely able to feed her family. Given these circumstances,
she sent her two oldest to live with a group of nuns at the Istituto San Carlo in
Erice. Grammatico was 11 at the time, deemed old enough to take on a harsh
routine of kitchen and household work.

The livelihood of the convent was baking. Especially on holidays and holy days,
the people of Erice would go to the convent and, speaking through an iron
grate, place their orders. After a short wait, the pastries would be ready and
delivered.

The nuns were secretive about their recipes for the cakes and cookies. They
used a variety of stones to weigh ingredients; each stone indicated a certain
specific weight in grams or kilograms. They tried to make sure that Maria and
other helpers would never see the exact proportions for any particular creation.
But Maria had moxie. When her formal duties were over she would snoop from
a careful distance, looking to see which stone was used; later she would
calculate proportions, which she wrote down on a piece of paper, kept close to
her chest so the nuns wouldnt find it.

After 15 years in the convent she left to make her own way in the world. She
was 26. To the alarm of the nuns, she started her own bakery just around the
corner from the convent. She had a meager income, just a few molds, little else.
Nonetheless, they were jealous, says Grammatico. The recipes were secret.
They wouldnt give them to anyone. She chuckles. Id stolen them.

Now 76, Grammatico still dedicates much of her time to making pastries. She
also runs a cooking school, popular with Americans, she says. She works every
day, dressed in a chefs coat, typically with a scarf around her neck. Her fingers
move nimbly as she fashions small marzipan flowers to place on top of her
confections. There is no hint that any of this routine has become drudgery. Quite
the opposite. When she talks about the process of baking, she describes the

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almonds that are so essential to Sicilian pastry as beloved, like children. As with
a child (she has none of her own), you never get tired of them.

But Grammatico questions whether this celebrated tradition has staying power. I
ask her if young people want to learn how to make Sicilian pastries the old way.
No, she says, she doesnt think so. It requires sacrifices, she says.

Reflecting on her words later, I wonder if she has forgotten all those aspiring
chefs who have made the pilgrimage to her mountaintop just to learn from her.
Food, whether caponata or almond pastry, evolves, and often we find it far from
its original home. While I fully expect there to be a pastry shop in Erice for a
very long time, its also possible that the next great practitioner of this Sicilian
art will be running a bakery not in Sicily, but in some faraway place.

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