In some villages of Karpathos — Olympos in particular — the communal stone oven still exists. It isn't a tourist attraction: it's a working oven, where some families still bring the dough on the appointed day and collect the baked bread. The smell of freshly baked bread in Olympos, mixed with the clean mountain air, is one of the things you remember best.
The traditional Karpathian bread is made with locally grown durum wheat flour — a different wheat, denser, with a flavour you can taste. The dough uses sourdough starter, kept for generations within families. The result is a bread with a thick crust and a compact crumb, that keeps well for two or three days and improves with time.
I ate the bread of Olympos with olive oil and fresh oregano picked at the roadside. I don't recall eating anything simpler or better that same week.
In the most traditional taverns of Karpathos, the bread they bring you is homemade. They don't say it for marketing: it's simply the way it's done. Some women of the village make bread for the local restaurants too. It's a local, circular production chain that has never needed to reinvent itself because it never stopped.