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Christmas Pig
In every traditional culture, time is defined by the meaning it holds for human beings, in connection with the tasks they must carry out throughout the year. Life is paced by the cycles of day and night, the seasons, and the harvests. This relationship between humanity, nature, and weather conditions—along with the impact these factors have on the means of subsistence—largely shapes the unfolding of daily time, as well as the structure of the calendar, which is then termed “traditional”.
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The Egg Monastery
Greece, like so many other countries, is dotted with unusual places that are well worth a visit. These include natural sites—often steeped in history and memory. Among the most remarkable of these is the Monastery of Saint Demetrius also known as Moní Avgoú, literally “the Monastery of the Egg”, located in the Argolis region, in the northeastern Peloponnese.
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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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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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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.
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August 1922. The Great Disaster
August is a month heavy with significance for Greek historical memory. In 1922, the country experienced what was, up to that point, its greatest catastrophe: the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and the recapture of Smyrna by the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—an event referred to in Turkish historiography as the “Great Offensive.” The Greek population of Asia Minor, which had been established there for centuries—dating back to antiquity—was first subjected to widespread massacres by the Turks; subsequently, the survivors were expelled to Greece, following a mandatory population exchange and the treaty signed between Greece and Turkey in Lausanne in 1923.