Article Selection

SOME SEE Thessaloniki as a provincial town, a stepchild of Athens. Others consider the capital of Northern Greece, which is also a major seaport of Southeastern Europe, to be the most important academic centre of Greece, the nation’s defender of the Northern border, and an expanding multi-national centre in a United Europe, in any case, to the open-minded visitor, it has an exciting individuality, perhaps best described in terms of the senses: weeping, smiling, listening, touching and loving.

The National Gallery of Art, founded ninety years ago, was finally inaugurated on May 17. A section of the gallery has been open for several years, but the new museum provides a home for the gallery’s permanent collection which has long been stored in various warehouses in Athens.

The traditional mosaic technique involves the inlay of a variety of materials: precious or semiprecious stones, tile, glass — or even the ubiquitous pebble. Hoklakia is the modern Greek term for pebble mosaic surfaces.

Fair Prospects is British poet Glyn Hughes’s sagacious and affectionate journal of his first visit to Greece in 1973 during the turbulent period that witnessed the swan song of the dictatorship and its final collapse on July 23, 1974. By September, Hughes and his wife Roya visit Sifnos where they stay with their friend Ariadne Xenakis. This is the last of three excerpts from Fair Prospects which was published in July by Victor Gollancz, London.

Although an immense amount of work has been expended on the theory of ancient music, comparatively little is known about how ancient melody actually sounded. Ancient music was a product of the sharing of all citizens, however, and the poet who wrote the tragedies and composed his own music always had his fellow citizens in mind and articulated their experiences through the universal language of myth. It is this ancient concept of oneness —of poet, composer, and people— that Mikis Theodorakis has sought in his music for classical drama.

On August 2, in the Odeon of Herod Atticus, the Athens State Orchestra will perform Finikos, a rarely-heard, early work by Yanni Christou, who died in 1970 at the age of forty-four. Christou is today considered to be one of Greece’s most original composers, and is slowly winning international recognition.

Although many beautiful and historic houses grace the island of Hydra, the richest and most impressive is that known as the Koundouriotis House.

The average person who hears the name Sparta thinks of the heroic age of the Greek city-states and the great conflict between Sparta and Athens which was the Peloponnisian War.

In late August of 1975 I arrived with a young companion for a few days’ holiday on Chios. Almost immediately I hired a taxi to take me to the chapel at Vavili. The driver only vaguely knew where it was and asked directions of passersby as we rode along.

The highlight of the past month’s art scene was Mytaras’s exhibition of canvases at the Zoumboulakis Galleries, aptly complemented by the simultaneous showing of drawings by the artist from 1954 to 1976.