when we were very young
After WWII Greece was involved in a five year civil war that stressed the already ravaged country to its limits.Refugees arrived from the north, chased by relentless rebels, their houses burned, their...
View ArticleA Hodja story
Hodja is a judge/imam/fool in the local tradition of Anatolia in Asia Minor. Though Greek, I have grown up with these stories. I was reminded of the following one hearing that there is thought of...
View ArticleNafplion
This is a story pertinent to this blindness of our own misdeeds, and how the enemy is not viewed as a person, but as the "other. Nafplion in the Peloponese has a venetian fort, Read More
View ArticlePerfection
Grade school in the post WWII and post civil war Greece was in the same stressed for resouces condition as the rest of the country. Classes were doubled up, and the children ended up hearing next...
View ArticleOne of my great grandfathers
as we all have four of the kind, organized armed escorts for mule caravans traveling from Caesaria, deep in Anatolia, to Constantinople ( Istanbul for you). This must have been around or even before...
View ArticleIndoctrination
My mother witnessed while in college back in the 1930’s a scene that she transmitted to me so vividly that it is as if I had been present. She and a young fellow student were at the Dean’s office...
View ArticleMarble cheese
A man goes to the next village to get himself a wife. He meets many young girls but one of them, who smiles very sweetly and only says "aye" and "no" appeals to him, and the marriage is arranged. He...
View ArticleThe Swalllow
The Swallow When God created the swallow, a migrating bird that winters in Africa, He started to show him how to build his nest. He showed how to make small mud balls with his tongue and how to...
View ArticleOn Aging
On Aging A good friend of mine once went to visit her parents who in retirement were living in their olive farm with chickens and a goat and all the rural delights. She found them high up on the...
View Articlethe bowl
Time to tell a tale. There was a culture where when people became old and were not productive for the family, they were given a bowl of food and sent away to seek life and mostly death wherever the...
View Articleanoter Hodja story
Early one morning Hodja started beating his wife.A concerned villager tried to intervene: "Hodja effendi, why are you beating her, what has she done to deserve a beating"?Hodja replied: "I do not...
View ArticleWhere do winds come from?
When I and my siblings were very young we lived in a house that had a huge eucalyptus tree next to the stone wall separating our house from the neighbor. On windy days the tree swayed and shook and...
View ArticleIs this the way to Japan?
My ex was in the merchant marine before I met him, and left when he became a second captain because he did not want to be tempted by the money a first gets and stay on until retirement. Once, he had a...
View ArticleClams
My father loved eating clams that I would gather from the sea lake in the summer every day, open and flavor with lemon. Then the scientific truth of the day came out tha...Read More
View ArticleMaths
Let me give you a rather long story:When I came to the US in 1958 with scholarship,for a BA in a seven sisters college I was placed in sophomore year. As I wanted to do physics, I ended for the...
View Articlememories of famine
We are entering a tough economic time in Greece, and thinking of tougher ones helps in enduring the present. After all it is only an economic war.During the second world war there was terrible famine...
View Articleshort Hodja stories relevant to the Greek crisis
Hodja, a fool or judge or both in Anatolian legends lives and arbitrates in a small village. One day a villager comes and describes his complaints against another villager . Hodja listens carefully,...
View ArticleStill on the palette
A painter came to stay in our house. Her cheeks suffused with a tint of titantium and napthol, her fingers long with the pressure of stroking carmine and mars with the tail of a comet stuffed into her...
View ArticleMortars and mortality
My mother, a long time ago, gave me a japanese lacquer box to keep my treasures in, and it has been sitting, with its prim and proper Japanese ladies on my dressing table all these years. In it there...
View ArticleBlockade
During the german occupation of Greece, 1940 to 1944, there was fierce resistance by the hotblooded youth and the not so young.The underground supplied arms and ammunition to the willing, even down to...
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