Category: Greece

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. […]

A sign I’ve come to recognise, that Here Be an AirBnB Rental. A key safe, this one in Athens. Ubiquitous in both Athens and Salonica, just as I’d been warned. As I’ve been told, it is noticeable that there are a lot fewer locals around in downtown Salonica than there used to be, as they […]

The Karamanlides/Karamanlar were a Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox people living in Anatolia. The term was generalised to all Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox. Since the Karamanlides were Greek Orthodox, and since alphabet went with creed in much of the world, the Karamanlides read Turkish in Greek script, which is accordingly called Karamanlidika. Karamanlidika is the name of ANYTHING […]

In the wee hours of 23 June, just before the second round of Greek parliamentary elections, I was staying up to finish off a work task, and instead of Law and Order Criminal Intent, I’m watching the electoral speech of Zoe Konstantinopoulou: daughter of the president of SYRIZA’s predecessor party, former unsmiling SYRIZA speaker of […]

The Tzisdarakis Mosque, towering over Monastiraki, the Athens flea market district. The mosque now houses the Greek folk art museum. It was built by Ottoman governor Dizdar Mustafa Ağa in 1759. The story goes that he ground down one of the columns of Olympian Zeus for limestone for it, and that the Ottoman authorities, as […]

Smack in the middle of Ermou St Mall, the Church of Panagia Kapnikarea, Our Lady of the Chimney Officer. (A Chimney Officer, kapnikarios, was a building tax collector, who worked out which buildings to tax from which buildings had their chimneys working.) Thank you Byzantine Athens.com. This 11th century church is now used by the […]

Athens Cathedral (“the metropolis”). Tucked in the corner, the cathedral’s Mini Me, the far older Church of Panagia Gorgoepikoos (Our Lady of Granting Requests Promptly), aka The Little Metropolis. Facing down the cathedral, the statue of archbishop Damaskinos. The inscription I caught sight of commemorates in Ancient Greek the fact that he was briefly vice […]

There are in fact plenty of nicer bits of Athens, all of them characterized by the fact that they are nowhere near the city center. My relatives and friends have taken me to several of them, including Kifisia and Palio Faliro and Glyfada. And so it was that I ended up at Souare bar in […]

Athens did some premature optimisation with its street names. When Athens became capital of the Greek State, there was a rush to name its streets after all the gloried personages of antiquity. The problem was, Athens in 1833 was just Plaka and other densely laned streets, and a building project of new avenues. The new […]