Mitsena, The Wife Of Mitsos
The first time I saw her, three summers ago, she was picking tomatoes, placing the deep-red, shiny ones in a metal bucket. She appeared to be in her late forties, but I later learned that she was thirty-seven.
Article Selection
Greek Winds
WHAT’S the weather?’ A likely one-word answer is, ‘Fisai”. It’s blowing.
Fishing in Greece
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.
The Prison of Socrates
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.
Sheep May Safely Graze
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.
Better Red than Dead?
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.
Giving Up the Noxious Weed
Warning: The Surgeon-General has determined that reading this article may be hazardous to your intellect.
Marine Venus and Other Animals
I breathlessly dumped my clutch of dog-eared books into the author’s receptive lap. In confusion I said, ‘If you do sign my books I won’t tell you I read them as a little girl.’ Whereupon the author rejoined, ‘Very well, so long as you didn’t bring me my brother’s books to be autographed!’ Immediately he inscribed the first one, ‘To The Ideal Fan, by Larry Durrell, Athens, 1975’.
MONASTIRAKI: An Adventure in Consumerism
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.
Christina Savalas: A Woman All-Embracing
To the public on several continents the name ‘Savalas’ means Telly, the most famous of her children. To her children, however, it means ‘Christina’ — a woman who forged her own values and sought her own identity. In an age and in a society where women were expected to be docile and domestic, she emerged as an artist and a poet, and a woman very much aware of her individuality…
