The Athenian

Fishing has always been a tough way to make a living in Greece but from time immemorial Greeks have loved, feared and fished the sea, praying first to the god Poseidon and later to Saint Nicholas, the patron of seafarers.

For some years Eugene Vanderpool, retired Professor of Archaeology and, for over forty years, connected with the Agora Excavations, has been in the habit of reading Plato everyday to keep up his ancient Greek. It was while rereading the Crito and the Phaedo, which describe with some specific detail Socrates’s last days in prison, that Professor Vanderpool was reminded of the mysterious Poros Building partially excavated in the forties near the Agora.

In the half-light and silence before dawn, the distant tinkling of sheep’s bells and shepherds’ piercing whistles echoed from hill to hill. The darkness turned blue, then a faint pink, and then became light as the day of the sheep blessing in Asi Gonia began.

The recent row between the government and the industrialists has convinced many of my friends that the spectre of a Greek socialist or even communist state may soon take on the flesh and bones of stark, staring reality.

Warning: The Surgeon-General has determined that reading this article may be hazardous to your intellect.

Monastiraki means ‘little monastery’, named after a monastery founded in the tenth century on the site of today’s Monastiraki Square and now refers to the entire area which comprises the last remnant of the old style, oriental bazaar.