Our Town

ATHENS, it is now acknowledged, is an endangered city. For many years there was a reluctance by both government officials and the public to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.

THAT May Day coincides this year with Orthodox Easter Monday and that both days are by tradition legal holidays, led to some official shilly-shallying in April.

THAT Easter called in Greek pascha, from the Hebrew word for passover, or lambri, which means brightness coincides with a rebirth in nature is not accidental, of course.

NOT so long ago, when approached in sinister fashion by a swarthy character pointing inside his topcoat while mumbling, ‘very cheap’, one was being offered contraband cameras, postcards, or cigarettes.

OUR OLD friend Kyria Koula paid us an untimely visit recently as we were in the midst of moving our offices. Not phased in the least by the reigning confusion, she went about her regular routine of greeting, embracing, kissing and pinching the cheeks of our staff members.

YOU can’t keep a good man down. Philip of Macedon’s enemies certainly tried. During his twenty-four-year reign, from 359 to 336 B.C., he was viciously attacked in the orations of Demosthenes, blinded in one eye, and paralysed in one arm and one leg.

A HEAVY rain fell on Athens on election day, grounding the millions of political leaflets which had been gliding, soaring, billowing, alighting on windshields and branches, and forming drifts in the streets since the early weeks of the campaign.

SHOPKEEPERS who have been spending sleepless nights wondering if the predicted return this autumn to continuous nine-to-five shop hours would rob them of their three-hour afternoon repose, may now rest peacefully both night and day. On September 22, the government announced that the current, mixed, summer schedule would remain in effect until May 15, 1978.

FOR A good many years now we could always depend on Avgoustinos, the Bishop of Florina, to take up the banner of Virtue and Family Solidarity and to relentlessly crusade against Divorce, Pornography and Sinful Ways.