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Category: Greece
Why are Cretan murals done so well compared to Roman ones?
What you’re seeing as Cretan murals, dug up from Knossos, look shinier and more vivid than anything dug up from Pompeii, don’t they. It’s almost as if… their painting is modern. And indeed, they are. When you see Cretan murals in situ, they are mostly modern reconstructions; the original bits are the dull looking, barely […]
Can I get a Greek tattoo when I’m not Greek at all?
I live in Greektown, Melbourne. Which means I see a lot of Greek tats sported by Greeks. And I do plenty of looking down on the cookie cutter nationalism of biceps with inked Molon labe, and Maeanders that look a little too close to swastikas. But of course, I’m a cultural conservative, so I would […]
Do people in other countries “hate” their capital city?
The reason why we in Australia built Canberra in a middle of nowhere sheep paddock was precisely that the two main cities, Melbourne and Sydney, hated each other. NSW and Victoria were quite independent colonies before Federation; and Australia is a federation, as in decentralised state, precisely because of that independence. (As with other federations, […]
Alas I’m forty
I’m turning 45 in a month, actually; but this Cretan song I heard in my youth has been haunting me since I turned forty. I even had the first verse of it as my Skype mood message for a fair while. Άχι και σαραντάρισα, δεν κάνω μπλιο γι’ αγάπεςκαι μου ’ρχεται να τροζαθώ και να […]
Why do we call 5th century BC Greek the Classical period?
Classics The word Classics is derived from the Latin adjective classicus, meaning “belonging to the highest class of citizens”. The word was originally used to describe the members of the highest class in ancient Rome. By the 2nd century AD the word was used in literary criticism to describe writers of the highest quality. For […]
In memoriam Gerasimos Arsenis
Context: Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to How does one cook lokma? I was bantering with Dimitra on the Melbourne nouveau Lokma place, St Gerry’s. Named after the patron saint of Cephallonia, Gerasimus of the Jordan. Which reminded me of the funniest joke I’ve heard in Greek, told by the late Gerasimos Arsenis, another Cephallonian. As recounted […]
Markos Vamvakaris: Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο
Rebetiko music was a fusion of styles, and the fusion can be seen in progress through the ’30s. The antecedents of rebetiko are murky, but the most visible antecedent is Smyrneika, the music of Anatolian cafés, which came with the Anatolian refugees to Greece in the ’20s, and was taken up as the emblem of […]
The ashes of Sukhumi
This story picks through the ashes. When I was finishing my undergrad and moving through to linguistics in 1993, the war in Abkhazia was underway. There was plenty of grubby conduct on both sides, and Abkhazia was in the end thoroughly ethnically cleansed; but outsiders with no stake in the Caucasus had sympathies for the […]
… “We’re talking about people’s lives!”
I have been wanting to write, since reading of it, about the deaths in Athens. And unhealthily (because of such recursion is our society enmeshed), I have been wanting to write about the reactions to the deaths. What I would write would be reactionary, and vindictive, and uninformed. I don’t particularly want to say I’m […]
Greeks speaking the wrong language
The Mariupolitans are a distinct group of ethnic Greeks living in the Ukraine, who formerly lived in Crimea. Like I explained in the Other Place, a minority of Mariupolitans speak not Greek, but a variant of Crimean Tatar they call Greek: Urum. They are not the only people who consider themselves Greek but speak a […]