Sloane Elliott

Former Minister of Environment, Antonis Tritsis, was commended for “knowledge, daring and courage” when he was dismissed from his post by the Prime Minster in late September.

It’s the opening of schools which usually gets Athenians back to the city and the winter season off to a start – no matter that half the textbooks haven’t been issued yet and that the pullman buses go on a strike three days after matriculation. Both help disperse Cycladic raptures and get the natives back in stride.

Facing the painful realities of modern life, The Bank of Greece is finally issuing a 5,000-drachma note.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the fall of the military junta in Greece.

On receiving an honorary degree from the faculty of philosophy at the University of Crete in Rethymnon on May 12, Jorge Luis Borges said that in so far as all western poetry was rooted in the Greek tradition, he could be either thought of as a South American who had come to Greece, or as a Greek who had lived here all his life.

For those who want culture and rest (and who happen to be of the people) there is, as the tourism pamphlets say, no place like Greece.

“A Greek magazine in English to serve the foreign community in Athens.” Such was the aim of The Athenian when it was founded ten years ago this month.

At a press conference on February 10, the Association of Greek Archaeologists together with technicians from the Ministry of Culture made a formal protest. This came in reaction to a recent government proposal that responsibility for the protection of historical monuments and sites be transferred by Presidential Decree from the Archaeological Service, which is under the Ministry of Culture, to the Ministry of Planning and Environment.

In the early ’50s, before the transistor radio had arrived in Athens and before electricity had arrived in most villages, it would be rare of a day (and especially of a night) not to hear wherever one was in city or country, ‘live’ voices raised, expressing the longings and laments, the hopes and sorrows that lived in the songs of Vassilis Tsitsanis.

Last month an opposition newspaper carried a large advertisement which may be appropriate here to quote from at length, for it shows to what extent this advanced, forward-looking country has left George Orwell’s modest predictions behind.