Category: Culture

My travelogue posts have a spasmodic character, and they reflect the spasmodic way they have been authored. The travelogue pattern I have established in this sojourn to Greece has been: Walk 100 m Take 5 photos Spend an hour in a cafe writing commentary about those photos, often with tangential excursions into other aspects of […]

I didn’t have a local guide in Corfu, so I couldn’t work out what the local rivalries are among the Seven Islands. Working out what town the locals resent is ground zero for establishing contrasts and getting people on side, I’ve always felt. (Mainly because of how much Salonicans resent Athens.) I tried that technique […]

I came to Corfu and Zante in my 50s, out of a nebulous query that I had formulated in my teens. The Ionian islands were the only part of Greece not to have been ruled by the Ottomans. They had 600 years of continuous rule from Venice instead. How did that make them different from […]

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 […]