Greece

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Michael Llewellyn-Smith traces his early years, political apprenticeship in Crete, and energetic role in that island's emancipation from both Ottoman rule and the arbitrary rule of Prince George of Greece. Summoned to Athens in 1910 by a cabal of officers, Venizelos mastered the Greek political scene, sent the military back to barracks, and led the country through a glorious period of constitutional and political reform, ending in a Balkan alliance waging successful war against Ottoman rule in Europe. By 1914, Greece had doubled in territory and population, and was about to face the challenges of European war. Tensions were rising between the king and the prime minister, foreshadowing political schism. This book illuminates Venizelos' political mastery, liberalism and nationalism, and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George. A second volume will complete his story, with the Great War, the post-war peace settlement, Greece's Asia Minor disaster, and Venizelos' late years of renewed prime ministerial office, political polarisation and exile in Paris.

This book presents the artifacts found during the archaeological excavation at Vergina and it refers to the myths ans stories of the Macedonian land.

In this compelling tour of the classical world, Peter Jones reveals how it is the power, scope and fascination of their ideas that makes the Ancient Greeks and Romans so important and influential today. For over 2,000 years these ideas have gripped Western imagination and been instrumental in the way we think about the world. Covering everything from philosophy, history and architecture to language and grammar, Jones uncovers their astonishing intellectual, political and literary achievements. First published twenty years ago, this fully updated and revised edition is a must-read for anyone who wishes to know more about the classics - and where they came from.

Walking in Athens is a unique compilation of photos and accompanying articles, that came about from walking in various neighborhoods of the city. Mixed architectural styles, crumbling houses juxtaposed with concrete buildings, empty facades next to sound apartment blocks, this is a guide to a secret landscape. A compilation that speaks not just about architecture - it speaks about people coming and going, society changing, civilization evolving.

Cavafy travelled for the first time in Greece in the summer of 1901 during a period of leave from his job.The poet was 38 years old and was accompanied by his brother Alexandros. Travelling to Athens with Cavafy is a fascinating experience. We above all discover that despite the fact that a hundred and ten years have gone by and even dramatic changes have occurred in the capital, especially after the arrival of the million and a half refugees of Asia Minor, the city centre has preserved the broad outline of its physiognomy. The urban grid, shaped like a large isosceles triangle and dating from the time of King Otto is still the most obvious trait of Athens, while the large public buildings that are visited today would have been seen by Cavafy in the same way. The majority of changes have occurred in the archaeological zone which at the time of Cavafy was still partially inhabited, and in human geography. Many theatres, cafes and buildings mentioned by Cavafy no longer exist, being unable to survive the historical watershed between 1922 and 1949, which effectively marks the start of a new chapter in the history of “Athens the Capital” but above all marks the demographic and urban boom of the city.

"Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe. . . . So many memorable encounters with people and places! A book about gifts, modernity, endurance and landscape, it represents a fine addition to the literature of the leg."—Robert Macfarlane, award-winning travel writer, author of The Wild Places and The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot In 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to chance and charm his way across Europe, "like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar." The books he later wrote about this walk, including Between the Woods and the Water, are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct and landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century. Nick Hunt dreamed of following in Fermor's footsteps. In 2011 he began his own "great trudge"—on foot all the way to Istanbul. He walked across eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. With only Fermor's books to guide him, he trekked some 2,500 miles from Holland to Turkey. Why? For an old-fashioned adventure. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth that still flow beneath Europe's surface. This is a story worthy of Fermor's own. Nick Hunt is a travel writer, freelance journalist, fiction writer, and storyteller whose articles have appeared in the Economist, the Guardian, and other publications. He is also co-editor of The Dark Mountain.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history: a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery. His experiences in wartime Crete sealed the deep affection he had already developed for Greece, a country whose character and customs he celebrates in two books, Mani and Roumeli, and where he has lived for over forty years. Whether he is drawing portraits in Vienna or sketching Byron's slippers in Missolonghi, the Leigh Fermor touch is unmistakable. Its infectious enthusiasm is driven by an insatiable curiosity and an omnivorous mind - all inspired by a passion for words and language that makes him one of the greatest prose writers of his generation.

Words of Wisdom from Ancient Greece gathers the best of a thousand years of philosophy, history and literature, in a compilation of writing spanning from 800 BC to 200 AD. With selections from the five major schools of Greek thought -the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics- this survey of ancient wisdom offers guidance for a life well lived from luminaries of Greece's legendary past.

The first half of the book is devoted to the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and includes several of his longer poems in their entirety. In the second half are selections of mainly shorter by poems by the other five poets, although it includes Gatsos' long poem "Amorgos".