If you you are riding the electric railway from Omonia to Piraeus, take a look outside just after you pass the Monastiraki stop. You will see on either side of you the ruins of the ancient Agora, the civic and commercial centre of classical Athens.
Ioannina’s most famous son was not even Greek. But increasing numbers of tourists will be flocking to this lake-side city in western central Greece, where, in the vermin-infested splendour of early 19th-century Epirus, lived one of the most colorful and blood-curdling characters of history and folklore.
Every nation has its built-in myths and one of these is that Corfiots are the most musical people of Greece.
One of the more curious assumptions of the civilized mind is that during an uncivilized age there’s no one living in it.
Visiting the old former Turkish Quarter of Chania is somewhat like moving into the centre of a whirlwind: as one moves away from the edges of the funnel, one increasingly approaches a centre where there is no movement.
They hated each other, and for the best of reasons: money. So much (it could almost be said) for the ancient history of those two small nations whose fortress-sanctuaries, Acropolis and Acrocorinth, were still, on clear days, visible to one another as late as the 1940’s.
There recently took place in Eretria a curious spectacle which should be of interest to
Edward Lear has two claims to fame, as the author of nonsense poems and as a landscape artist. His nonsense verse — including the limerick form, which he perfected and made popular — is known and loved wherever English is spoken. To many people, in fact, Lear is known only for his ‘nonsenses’ and it comes as a surprise to learn that they were merely an occasional diversion, and that he was, by profession, an artist who earned his livelihood, at times precariously, as a painter.
Solomos needs explaining to the English-speaking reader. Not only because it is the anniversary of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s death at Missolonghi and Solomos is conventionally placed in a bracket with the great Scotsman; but because Solomos, universally admired in Greece, is almost as generally unknown abroad.
The sun shone at Missolonghi on Monday, January 5, 1824. By morning the crowds of citizens and soldiers — men and women of every age — were thick along the shore, waiting for the man they reckoned their ‘delivering angel’, watching for his arrival. And then at eleven, with all eyes on it, a Speziot boat crossed the lagoon, came alongside the quay, and George Gordon Noel Byron stepped ashore.
