A community with a human face
It would be nice this August, at the very peak of the tourist season, to sing the praises of Greece for all the wonderful things it offers in almost careless abandon: its physical beauty, its dazzling seas, its inspiring monuments and, above all, what an old Murray guide once described as its “stubborn, but often sympathetic, inhabitants”.
Biscottas and his Wonderful Censer
Professor Panayotis Kefalosystolakts, the renowned psychoanalyst, sat at the head of the couch in his consulting room, taking notes as the plump young man who was being analyzed spoke in an agitated manner.
Alcibiades dog
The fanfare which accompanied the recent visits of Turgut Ozal and Elizabeth Taylor emphasized the importance given to public relations today and how it’s become almost an end in itself.
The Happy Puffers
Most Athenians blame the factories around Athens and car engine exhausts for the noxious nefos that often sits on the capital of fair Hellas and plays hell with the Hellenes, sending the elderly to an early grave and inflicting sore throats, headaches and conjunctivitis upon everybody else.
Trials of the spirit
The spirit of Davos, conceived last January by the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey in an anteroom of a deluxe hotel at the Swiss resort made famous by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain got its first eyeball-to-eyeball test in hardcore Greek reality when Bedreddin Dalan, mayor of Istanbul, paid a five-day visit to Athens early last month.
Arabian Nights Entertainments
At an archaeological dig on the outskirts of Baghdad, two ancient manuscripts were found that turned out to contain one of the original tales told by Sheherezade to King Shahryar in the “Thousand and One Nights” that had somehow got lost in the sands of time. At great expense, I was able to obtain a copy of the first manuscript which had been cleaned and restored and my English translation of it appears here for the first time.
Escape into Greek reality
As in many other Western countries the national holiday here, celebrated on March 25, has been reduced mostly to a pageant for children during which boys and girls, dressed up as tsoliades and Amalias, recite in poetry the bold feats of Markos Botsaris in monotone squeaks to the delight of their parents.
The world according to November 17
After every one of its crimes, the ability of members of the November 17 terrorist organization to vanish blithely into thin air, has aroused the awe, and even the suspicion, of the public.