Black and Brown with a hint of White

Katerina at Fashion Week Athens F/W'10'11, Technopoli at Gazi. Photo by Streetgeist

What makes this "so Greek"?
Conservativism: black and more black in somber, Spartan lines. Check!
Rebelliousness: introducing a non matching toffee-brown hue via the accessories. Check!
Unwillingness to forsake femininity: nipped waist, hose, high-heel T-bar ankle-straps, red lipstick. Check!
Tradition: The white scarf on the head turban-style isn't miles removed from the folk garment of centuries past. Check!

It's all so quiet, it's all so still

photo by caribb/flickr

Plaka down the Acropolis, strewn with red for the Olympic run in 2004.

Like a hot star towards your island

All these years I have been searching for you in my maps,
even though you never leaned your lips on my forehead to leave a breath in my life.
And if my prayer smells of alcohol, of tobacco and of fever,
to the glassy wave your name I shout;
I shout your name, so that my voice is mirrored.
And if on the shore where you're combing your hair,
it's heard like a salty song that the water brings you, enamored,
to the devil I'll sell my soul, I, so that I can be wrapped tonight
at your body's depths.

Somewhere the night is hanging mid-ocean to the gallows of the skies,
and the demon is riding the darkness, clutching my wish mid-air.
Like a hot star towards your island, he throws my words,
hurting the rocks and the sand,
and he pins my soul on your hair comb.
And drop by drop, I stream, I,
like salty water on the shoulders and your dear neck.
Nevermind that I know he is biding his time on top the rope-ladder,
waiting for me, waiting to file away the ropes.

It's been years that strange lights shine across on some land,
on some forsaken island,
which is said to be the peaks of heaven.
But I know it's the sea's spell,
there's no such land, since no one ever went there.
So I grab myself tightly from your body,
and in front of the damned I pass,
like a shadow which promenades your scent through Hades.
And I think, it's heaven, my little love,
to share this hell together.

translation author's own

Life Needs a Touch of Spice

From the film "A Touch of Spice" (Cuisine from Istanbul)by Tasos Boulmetis, 2003.

Fred Boissonnas & The Greek Outlook part2

photo scanned by buruburu,gr

The bridge of Arta over the Arahthos river in 1913.
"Forty-five cobblers and sixty apprentices were building a bridge over Arta's river. All day long they were building, each night it was falling down. [...] A bird came and sat, across the river. It didn't sing like a bird, neither as a sparrow, but it sung and said in human speech: "If you don't wall a man, the bridge won't stand; don't wall an orphan, or a stranger or even a passerby, but the arch-cobbler's pretty wife who comes late in the afternoon, early in the evening."

(traditional folk song)

Toil without sacrifice is unthinkable. It almost challenges the gods.

Monastery of Arcadi, Crete

by melissa dpgr.gr


The upper floor of the monastery houses the monks' cells, across the church.
The ground floor comprises the historic dining room where monks' heads were cut on the tables by the Turks yielding yatagans during the Arcadi monastery holocaust.

Greco-venetian architecture framing the sun, reflecting it on rosy surfaces like a maiden's cheek.

Hellenism and Pessimism

"The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god, He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. [...] But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect [...] We must keep in mind the measured restraint, the freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god. His eye must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when it is angry and distempered it is still hallowed by beautiful illusion [...]

Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. [...] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt or pity born of consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called 'healthy-mindedness' looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them".

[from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik), 1872, by Friedrich Nietzsche; translated by Walter Kaufmann]