-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The occupants… occupied!
One might consider that our “little stories”—recalled during family gatherings—often illustrate only the anecdotal side of events, the sort of historical details too hastily dismissed as secondary. In our family, our late uncle Chrístos loved to share his anecdotes from the 1940s: the Greco-Italian War, the Occupation, the Resistance, and—subsequently—the utter, profound illogic of the Greek Civil War (1944-1949). He would recount these events down to the finest detail—details that were, first and foremost, his own personal history. He would also readily share his accounts regarding the presence of Italian soldiers in Greece—a subject whose historical reality, winding through the twists and turns of time, remains to this day caught somewhere between memory and oblivion.
-
Thessaly Flooded
Thessaly, the region I come from, has just experienced… yet another Greek disaster. Huddled together in our family home near Trikala, we waited for the… event to come to an end. The heavy rain, which began on Monday, September 4, finally stopped on Thursday, September 7. Three houses in our village were partially flooded, but elsewhere—for instance in Palamas, the village where my mother’s family is from in the neighboring region of Karditsa—many homes ended up literally underwater.