Archive:

It is an exaggeration to surmise that I go to places off my usual route when overseas, merely so they can serve as writing prompts. It is, but not as much of one as it should be. There have been several trips in my life where I spent more time writing about what I was […]

It’s an interesting thing, to interrogate one’s petty prejudices. Especially when you think yourself above petty prejudices. Your correspondent aspires to cosmopolitanism and objectivity, and whenever he runs into the siren song of Greek nationalism, he will spell Greek words with a <c> instead. But bias seeps under your skin all the more when you […]

At Pringipessa taverna, Salonica, 23 May 2023.

There’s been an election here. The results were SYRIZA electorally smashed. Partly by a resurgent right and far right, but it’s been far too convenient for to blame that alone. There’s been a whole lot more voters in no mood to give SYRIZA a third chance; and the memories of 2015–2019 are raw enough, that […]

Whenever I am anywhere near Salonica, this place gets a lot of money out of me, and I have to work out how to mail a whole lot of books back to Australia: The Educational Institute of the National Bank of Greece: Μορφωτικό Ίδρυμα Εθνικής Τράπεζας (MIET). A heavy hitter as an academic publisher in […]

I went and saw a play in my first week in Salonica, with my cousin Christos. It was one of only a couple of plays left to see, the season was nearing an end, and as my cousin is an aficionado of the theatre and the cinema both, I thought it appropriate to meet him […]

Salonicans are overall a much more low-key people than the Brian Blesseds of Crete. Something Salonicans themselves acknowledge. A decade before he became a sesquipedalian reactionary member of parliament, Kostas Zouraris was a magical realist author. And his “fairy tale” Μέσα στο σάμαλι η αχεροποίητος “In the shambali unmade of human hands” beautifully captures the […]

I’ve settled during my current sojourn in Greece into a comfortable pattern. I stay for three weeks somewhere familiar, where I settle down, get reacquainted with the surrounds, work, experience things, and don’t blog much at all. Halfway through, I do a side-trip to avoid feeling too settled. When the three weeks are up, I […]

Lindos itself is a Greek village from central casting, complete with whitewash everywhere, claustrophobic alleys (to confound raiding pirates), and flowers spilling out of pots. Still very much a tourist trap, and around every corner there is another shop to cater to the passing souvenir collector, but punctuated with lots of nice villas. To cater […]

When I was touring the Hospitaller Palace, high school children were rehearsing for a musical performance. (You could tell they were high school children from the especial exuberance of their “Hey, Malaka!” to each other, once they were outside the palace.) So I went back at 8:30 pm for the free concert, which turned out […]