On Sunday, November 17, we go to the polls to elect a new Parliament — the first since the Chamber of Deputies was dissolved on April 14, 1967 as a preliminary to the May 28 election which was prevented by the military coup of April 21.
They are unique to Greece. They have become so popular that their production is now a major industry and their export a valuable source of balance of payments credits. Yet exactly what they are, how they are made, and how they should be taken care of are secrets second only to those of the ancient Eleusinian rites.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, two peculiarities in the art of Orthodoxy stand out increasingly. On the one hand there is a group of painters who flirt with the styles and iconography of Western art to the point of introducing oil techniques which destroy once and for all the character of the icon.
Homecoming — nostos— was to be a memorable experience for Kimon Friar. After a year of psychoanalysis with Theodore Reich in New York, he had overcome the psychological block to his creativity. Dr. Reich had urged him to complete his analysis by visiting Greece.
Kimon Friar is a human dynamo. Though his translation of Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is perhaps the work for which he is best known, it is but one in a long list of remarkable achievements.
In the fourth part of his series on Byzantine icons, Nikos Stavroulakis examines the development of iconography after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.
Modern man is not alone in his obsession with time; in fact, the tendency to make a fetish or a game out of time pieces stretches far back into antiquity.
The chaos of the Latin States which resulted from the Fourth Crusade’s seizure of Constantinople in 1204 did not succeed in extinguishing either Byzantium or its heritage. Both the usurping Latin ‘Empire’ as well as the Frankish principalities and dukedoms produced a veneer of Western affectations that was met by the conservative hatred of both the Orthodox clergy and the laity who waited patiently for the legitimate Empire to be re-established. Their hopes were not, however, simply the substance of dreams.
The young girls of Kalymnos sang their song of farewell, the wives and mothers wept as the diving boats left the harbor in slow formation, flags flapping in the breeze, newly-painted gunwales gleaming in the hard-white Aegean sunlight.
The acquisition of Cyprus by Venice in 1489 was an empty triumph commercially — and commerce was the only thing that Venice ever considered. It was not Venetian rapacity alone, however, that laid Cyprus desolate, but the loss of its economically strategic position.
