AT NOON on June 5 we arrived at the Saint Nicholas Terminal in Piraeus for the press preview of Posidonia, the international shipping exhibition which brings the luminaries of the maritime world to our shores every two years.
It has yet to be placed in many tourist itineraries, but the glorious sea, the grandiose mountains, the forces of nature that prompted ancient man to build here his edifices to the gods, remain the same.
The village of Lindos was still a quiet, primitive place when we first encountered it eighteen years ago. We were immediately won, even though our initial impression of it was all wrong. Seen from the heights of the approach, Lindos was undoubtedly beautiful, but on the “picturesque” side.
Or How to be Helpful to Innocents Abroad Looking for Panepistimiou Street
ATHENS, it is now acknowledged, is an endangered city. For many years there was a reluctance by both government officials and the public to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.
The biggest event in the maritime world, the Posidonia exhibition and forum which is held in Greece every two years, will take place in Piraeus in early June. Those who were here in 1976 will no doubt remember the vast invasion of thirsty shipping men who drank Athens dry of tonic water—a disaster that sent frantic hoteliers out into the countryside buying up every bottle in sight.
Everything we had heard or read about the firedancers of Greece turned out to be wrong. We had been led to believe that the men and women who take part in the annual ceremony were a strange, even satanic lot, that the ceremony had its roots in pagan, Dionysian rites, that the dancers drank heavily for days and worked themselves into a frenzy in order to walk barefoot on the red-hot coals. Yet another source insisted that the whole thing was a fraud, a carnival show put on for money, a piece of flimflammery.
LAST month, I begged the forbearance of our local readers in order to give visitors to this country a rundown on what it is all about.
The lemons and oranges seem to reach into my window. After the maze of multi-storey dwellings in Athens, the rain-slippery slopes around Kolonaki Square, the pock-marked asphalt, the cars parked on sidewalks discouraging even the most determined walker, Nicosia looks like a peaceful suburb, a garden city — a walker’s city, where nobody walks and everybody drives even for short distances.
THAT May Day coincides this year with Orthodox Easter Monday and that both days are by tradition legal holidays, led to some official shilly-shallying in April.
