Category: Culture

Famagusta is in Northern Cyprus. Outer Famagusta, Varosha, was left for decades as a ghost town after the invasion, with a vague notion that it might be returned to the Republic of Cyprus eventually. That prospect was abandoned in 2019. and people are starting to move in to Varosha from the north. Greeks are not […]

Ledra St is the main drag of Nicosia, and this is Ledra St on a Saturday night. … It’s disappointing. Nicosia is not a big place to begin with, population of 200k. But as a capital of a sovereign state, I do still expect a bit more than the central square such as it is, […]

I’ve had a rather ambivalent time of it being in Athens, but I’m more than happy to be spending my last night of it here, in the Roman theater of Herodes Atticus, right under the Acropolis (see first picture). Verdi’s Requiem playing. It’s pretty awesome. And the seats are a welcome touch. So that was […]

Occasionally among the jumble of artifacts in a museum, something pops up out of nowhere with huge symbolic meaning, and you wonder just how the hell the museum even got hold of it, and why it doesn’t have a room to itself. In the museum of folk instruments, that was the lyra of Nikos Xilouris, […]

Mid-19th century sketches of ruins in the Peloponnese by Edward Lear. Yes, that Edward Lear. Mr Limerick had another career as a painter, with a particular affinity with Greece. His manservant was a Suliote. Lear even visited the Greek colony in Corsica, but was disappointed that the locals had long abandoned traditional Greek dress, which […]

A 19th century take on the Corfu Esplanade, and on Governor Maitland’s mansion, a bit before it turned into the museum of Asian Art. As I found on my own visit, Corfu is a lot more built up now. In fact, I would have thought it was a lot more built up even in the […]

A take from Siphnos, early 19th century, on what Constantine the Great in the hippodrome of Constantinople must surely have looked like, complete with the True Cross and the serpents column originally from Delphi, and still to be seen there. Notice of course that no 19th century Greek could imagine Constantine the Great clean shaven, […]

The Benaki Museum has a few ancient bits and pieces, and a quite decent Byzantine collection, a large part of it, to my surprise, originating as family heirlooms of refugees from Turkey. But the real point of the museum is its folk art exhibit, upstairs. Rather early on, this tapestry, whose geometry I recognized even […]

I did manage to sneak in to the Benaki Museum before the concert on my last night in Athens. (Free after 6 pm? Open to midnight? Sign me up!) The Benaki Museum, like many such museums, feels at times like a cliche simply because so many of the paintings it houses have attained meme status. […]