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The Day of No
Greece celebrates its national holiday on October 28th. This is the country’s second major annual commemoration—the first, on March 25th, honors the beginning of the revolution of the modern Greeks, or in other words, the Greek War of Independence of 1821, which sought liberation from the Ottoman yoke. Rather unusually, October 28th marks the beginning of the Second World War for Greece, rather than its end.
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A Belle Époque
Neo Faliro—situated at the start of the area known in antiquity as the Bay of Phaleron, or simply “Faliro” to modern-day Greeks—is a district on the outskirts of Piraeus whose waterfront has, since the 1960s, become something of a dead zone. Currently disfigured by its position between two marinas, three stadiums, and an urban expressway, the area has lost both its regular patrons and its very soul. Yet, a mere century ago, the now-faded destiny of Neo Faliro appeared to be something entirely different.
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The Tile
In Greek, Keramídi means “the roof tile,” but for our family, it is the name of a small village—once considered all but lost—nestled between “its” two Thessalian rivers. If you take the road from Tríkala, in Western Thessaly, toward Palamás, you will find it just upstream from that larger town—the very place where my mother’s family hails from. For us, then, passing through is, in a sense, unavoidable.
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Pinerolo, the… divided armed division!
It is in the nature of man to oppress those who yield and to respect those who resist – wrote Thucydides in his time—the era of his – History of the Peloponnesian War. This work chronicles the great conflict between Athens and Sparta that unfolded between 431 and 404 BC, and has since become, as they say, a classic of historical literature. This holds true—or, at the very least, is largely applicable—regarding those who are oppressed or those who resist; a case in point is the grim fate that befell Italian soldiers in Greece between 1941 and 1944, an account of which—detailing their experiences—we have presented here in its initial, factual form.
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Take care, master!
The writer and poet Yórgos Ioánnou was, first and foremost, an educator. His long years as a teacher—in the noblest sense of the term—even took him to Tríkala between 1956 and 1957, where he taught classical and modern literature at a private high school in this historic city in Thessaly. He has thus left us a moving account, drawn from his own experience as a young teacher during that period.