RETURNING to England after two years in Greece was a return to language and to rain. The soft English language is natural to a rainy country; the gifts of moistness, scents rising from the ground after a rain shower, the vegetating clouds of a rainy sky, are to be found abroad in the soft, moist vowels of English people.
“ALL OF us in Anafiotika live for many years,” said Kyrios Mytilineos. “I remember my grandfather shovelling our doorstep one dawn after a heavy snowfall in old Athens. He was then over a hundred years old.”
For those who think Greece ‘operates’ behind the times — take note — there are twenty-seven plastic surgeons in this country, daily transforming women into Venuses, men into Adonises, women into men and men into women. Cosmetic or aesthetic surgery — the latter term is preferred — has become an important aspect of Greek life. Furthermore, it remains comparatively inexpensive so that many visitors come to Greece for surgery and a bonus vacation in the sun…
My love for antiques is not a recent development. As a young student, I spent hour upon hour in the basement of our old, two-storied summer house in the Peloponnisos. It was a dusty, dimly-lit world in which the oddest things imaginable lived together in peace and isolation, separated by the walls from the noise and activity of the seaside town.
It was late December, 1963. Dimitri Tselos and his young nephew were approaching Syntagma Square, when the boy suddenly called out, ‘Themis the big tree and Saint Basil!’ The tree was a tall and magnificent Scandinavian fir, fully decorated with ornaments and lights. Near it stood a man, dressed in a red fur-trimmed suit and cap, resembling a Salvation Army Santa Claus.
GREEK archaeology, and particularly that of the Bronze Age has been one of the great popular romances of the last century, but its story, without the story of La Belle Helene, a small inn at Mycenae, cannot be quite complete.
‘WHEN you educate a man, you educate an individual. When you educate a woman, you educate a whole family,’ Dr. John Henry House used to say.
IT IS said that when God was completing his creation of the world and had nothing left in his hands but stones and rocks, he threw these down to Greece and formed the area known as the Mani. Its backbone is the jagged southern half of the Taygetus mountain range which juts into the sea to shape the central peninsula of the southern Peloponnisos.
THIS tribute to anonymous Greek architecture is by Aris Konstantinidis, and it is fortunate that he has been appointed architectural director of a new project by the National Tourist Organization (EOT) which plans to restore a number of dilapidated but architecturally important Greek villages.
HAVE YOU ever wondered what lies behind the historic buildings of Athens? A stroll around to the back of the buildings might seem to provide the answer, but more often than not these mute, imposing edifices harbour little-known tales of epic proportions.
