1.
Xanthi
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Xanthi, is a city in Thrace, northeastern Greece. It is the capital of the Xanthi regional unit of the region of East Macedonia, other landmarks in Xanthi include the Archaeological Museum of Abdera and the Greek Folk Art Museum. Xanthi is famous throughout Greece for its annual spring carnival which has a significant role in the citys economy, over 40 cultural associations from around Greece participate in the carnival program. The festivities which take place during the period include concerts, theatre plays, music and dance nights, exhibitions, an event, games on the streets. Xanthi is known as İskeçe in Turkish and Скеча or Ксанти in Bulgarian, probably is identified with the ancient city of Xantheia mentioned in the 1st BC century by the geographer Strabo, but was not mentioned by any other ancient historian. It began as a village and experienced all the tumultuous periods of the history of Thrace, such as raids, disasters, ethnic conflicts. For this reason, the Ottomans brought settlers from within of Asia Minor, known references to Xanthi, or Xanthia, the citys origins are obscure, it was a prosperous stronghold of the Byzantine era but latter became a colony of the Turks known as Eskije. Xanthi is first recorded in 879AD through its Bishop Georgios, from 13th to 14th century it was the most important city of the region. Three monasteries date from the Middle Ages Pammegiston, Taxiarxon, and Panagia Archaggeliotisa, Xanthi featured in the campaign of Andronikos II Palaiologos in 1327. By 1715, Xanthi, as well as Genisea, became renowned for its tobacco quality, many foreign sightseers traveled throughout the region and described both the life and struggles of the locals. Tobacco commerce throughout Europe led Xanthi into a course of prosperity, george Demetriou was active in the Xanthi area during the Greek Revolution of 1821. In March and April 1829 two earthquakes literally leveled the city, however played a role in the further developments. The citys re-building immediately got underway, in 1870, the city of Genisea was burned down and thus all of the agencies and services were transferred to Xanthi which, at that time, had a population of about 10,000 inhabitants. In 1891, the line was established near the city, while further economic development led to the founding of schools. During the First Balkan War, Xanthi was captured by the Bulgarian army from the Ottomans in 8 November 1912, in the Second Balkan War the Greek army captured it in July 1913. However, with the Treaty of Bucharest, Xanthi along with Western Thrace were ceded to Bulgaria, following the Bulgarian defeat in this war, Western Thrace came under Allies of World War I administration, on 4 October 1919 before being ceded to Greece in the Treaty of Neuilly. 4 October, the day the Greek army under Georgios Leonardopoulos command entered the city, is celebrated in Xanthi as the anniversary of its liberation, anthypolochagos Gavriel Ladas, who was from Xanthi lead the first troops in the city. Ladas became mayor of the city from 1959 to 1964, on 8 April 1941 the 164th Infantry Division captured Xanthi following the German invasion of Greece and it was liberated by the Bulgarians
2.
Greece
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Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, historically also known as Hellas, is a country in southeastern Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2015. Athens is the capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. Greece consists of nine regions, Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring a vast number of islands, eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as polis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming a part of the Roman Empire and its successor. The Greek Orthodox Church also shaped modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World, falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, the modern nation state of Greece emerged in 1830 following a war of independence. Greeces rich historical legacy is reflected by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, among the most in Europe, Greece is a democratic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, and a very high standard of living. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001. Greeces unique cultural heritage, large industry, prominent shipping sector. It is the largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor, the names for the nation of Greece and the Greek people differ from the names used in other languages, locations and cultures. The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, all three stages of the stone age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries and these civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC and this ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, in 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the worlds first democratic system of government in Athens
3.
Athens
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Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. In modern times, Athens is a cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime. In 2015, Athens was ranked the worlds 29th richest city by purchasing power, Athens is recognised as a global city because of its location and its importance in shipping, finance, commerce, media, entertainment, arts, international trade, culture, education and tourism. It is one of the biggest economic centres in southeastern Europe, with a financial sector. The municipality of Athens had a population of 664,046 within its limits. The urban area of Athens extends beyond its administrative city limits. According to Eurostat in 2011, the Functional urban areas of Athens was the 9th most populous FUA in the European Union, Athens is also the southernmost capital on the European mainland. The city also retains Roman and Byzantine monuments, as well as a number of Ottoman monuments. Athens is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery, Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it welcomed home the 2004 Summer Olympics. In Ancient Greek, the name of the city was Ἀθῆναι a plural, in earlier Greek, such as Homeric Greek, the name had been current in the singular form though, as Ἀθήνη. It was possibly rendered in the later on, like those of Θῆβαι and Μυκῆναι. During the medieval period the name of the city was rendered once again in the singular as Ἀθήνα, an etiological myth explaining how Athens has acquired its name was well known among ancient Athenians and even became the theme of the sculpture on the West pediment of the Parthenon. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the god of the seas, Poseidon had many disagreements, in an attempt to compel the people, Poseidon created a salt water spring by striking the ground with his trident, symbolizing naval power. However, when Athena created the tree, symbolizing peace and prosperity. Different etymologies, now rejected, were proposed during the 19th century. Christian Lobeck proposed as the root of the name the word ἄθος or ἄνθος meaning flower, ludwig von Döderlein proposed the stem of the verb θάω, stem θη- to denote Athens as having fertile soil. In classical literature, the city was referred to as the City of the Violet Crown, first documented in Pindars ἰοστέφανοι Ἀθᾶναι. In medieval texts, variant names include Setines, Satine, and Astines, today the caption η πρωτεύουσα, the capital, has become somewhat common
4.
20th-century classical music
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This era was without a dominant style and composers have created highly diverse kinds of music. Modernism, impressionism, post-romanticism, neoclassicism, expressionism, and, later, atonality, serialism, musique concrète and electronic music were all developed during this period. Jazz was an important influence on composers in this period. At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style, composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France, maurice Ravels music, also often labelled as impressionist, explores music in many styles not always related to it. Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in different directions. From this sprang an unprecedented linguistic plurality of styles, techniques, in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg developed atonality, out of the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed the technique which was developed further by his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Stravinsky explored twelve-tone technique, too, as did many other composers, indeed, even Scott Bradley used the technique in his scores for the Tom, after the First World War, many composers started returning to the past for inspiration and wrote works that draw elements from it. This type of music thus became labelled neoclassicism, igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Ravel and Paul Hindemith all produced neoclassical works. Italian composers such as Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo developed musical Futurism and this style often tried to recreate everyday sounds and place them in a Futurist context. The Machine Music of George Antheil and Alexander Mosolov developed out of this, in the 1940s and 50s composers, notably Pierre Schaeffer, started to explore the application of technology to music in musique concrète. The term electroacoustic music was coined to include all forms of music involving magnetic tape, computers, synthesizers, multimedia. Live electronic music uses live electronic sounds within a performance, Cages Cartridge Music being an early example, spectral music is a further development of electroacoustic music that uses analyses of sound spectra to create music. Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono, from the early 1950s onwards, Cage introduced elements of chance into his music. Process music explores a particular process which is laid bare in the work. The term experimental music was coined by Cage to describe works that produce unpredictable results, important cultural trends often informed music of this period, romantic, modernist, neoclassical, postmodernist or otherwise. Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev were particularly drawn to primitivism in their careers, as explored in works such as The Rite of Spring
5.
Music of Greece
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The music of Greece is as diverse and celebrated as its history. Greek music separates into two parts, Greek traditional music and Byzantine music, with more eastern sounds, Music is a significant aspect of Hellenic culture, both within Greece and in the diaspora. Greek musical history extends far back into ancient Greece, since music was a part of ancient Greek theater. Later influences from the Roman Empire, Eastern Europe and the Byzantine Empire changed the form, in the 19th century, opera composers, like Nikolaos Mantzaros, Spyridon Xyndas and Spyridon Samaras and symphonists, like Dimitris Lialios and Dionysios Rodotheatos revitalized Greek art music. In ancient Greece, men usually performed choruses performed for entertainment, celebration, Instruments included the double-reed aulos and the plucked string instrument, the lyre, especially the special kind called a kithara. Music was an important part of education in ancient Greece, due to Romes reverence for Greek culture, the Romans borrowed the Greek method of enchiriadic notation to record their music, if they used any notation at all. In his lexicographical discussion of instruments, the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih cited the lūrā as an instrument of the Byzantines along with the urghun, shilyani. These genres have certainly reached a degree of evolution. They were forms of a music that had many elements of ancient Greek origin but also. By the beginning of the 20th century, music-cafés were popular in Greek cities like Constantinople and Smyrna, the bands were typically led by a female vocalist and included a violin. The improvised songs typically exclaimed amán amán, which led to the name amanédhes or café-aman, Greek musicians of this period included Marika Papagika, Rosa Eskenazi and Rita Abatzi. This period also brought in the Rebetiko movement, which had local Smyrnaic, Greek folk traditions are said to derive from the music played by ancient Greeks. There are said to be two musical movements in Greek folk music, Acritic songs and Klephtic songs, akritic music comes from the 9th century akrites, or border guards of the Byzantine Empire. Following the end of the Byzantine period, klephtic music arose before the Greek Revolution, developed among the kleftes, Klephtic music is monophonic and uses no harmonic accompaniment. Many of the earliest recordings were done by Arvanites like Yiorgia Mittaki, instrumentalists include clarinet virtuosos like Petroloukas Halkias, Yiorgos Yevyelis and Yiannis Vassilopoulos, as well as oud and fiddle players like Nikos Saragoudas and Yiorgos Koros. Nisiotika is a term denoting folk songs from the Greek islands. Among the most popular types of them is Ikariótiko traghoúdhi, song from Ikaria, ikariótikos is a traditional type of dance, and also the name of its accompanying type of singing, originating in the Aegean island of Ikaria. At first it was a slow dance, but today Ikariotikos is a very quick dance
6.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
7.
Greeks
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The Greeks or Hellenes are an ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Albania, Turkey, Sicily, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, other countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world, many of these regions coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of ancient Greek colonization. The cultural centers of the Greeks have included Athens, Thessalonica, Alexandria, Smyrna, most ethnic Greeks live nowadays within the borders of the modern Greek state and Cyprus. The Greek genocide and population exchange between Greece and Turkey nearly ended the three millennia-old Greek presence in Asia Minor, other longstanding Greek populations can be found from southern Italy to the Caucasus and southern Russia and Ukraine and in the Greek diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, most Greeks are officially registered as members of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Greeks speak the Greek language, which forms its own unique branch within the Indo-European family of languages, the Hellenic. They are part of a group of ethnicities, described by Anthony D. Smith as an archetypal diaspora people. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans quickly penetrated the Aegean Sea and, by the 15th century BC, had reached Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus and the shores of Asia Minor. Around 1200 BC, the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus, the Dorian invasion was followed by a poorly attested period of migrations, appropriately called the Greek Dark Ages, but by 800 BC the landscape of Archaic and Classical Greece was discernible. The Greeks of classical antiquity idealized their Mycenaean ancestors and the Mycenaean period as an era of heroes, closeness of the gods. The Homeric Epics were especially and generally accepted as part of the Greek past, as part of the Mycenaean heritage that survived, the names of the gods and goddesses of Mycenaean Greece became major figures of the Olympian Pantheon of later antiquity. The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation is linked to the development of Pan-Hellenism in the 8th century BC, the works of Homer and Hesiod were written in the 8th century BC, becoming the basis of the national religion, ethos, history and mythology. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi was established in this period, the classical period of Greek civilization covers a time spanning from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC. It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras, the Peloponnesian War, the large scale civil war between the two most powerful Greek city-states Athens and Sparta and their allies, left both greatly weakened. Many Greeks settled in Hellenistic cities like Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia, two thousand years later, there are still communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan, like the Kalash, who claim to be descended from Greek settlers. The Hellenistic civilization was the period of Greek civilization, the beginnings of which are usually placed at Alexanders death. This Hellenistic age, so called because it saw the partial Hellenization of many non-Greek cultures and this age saw the Greeks move towards larger cities and a reduction in the importance of the city-state. These larger cities were parts of the still larger Kingdoms of the Diadochi, Greeks, however, remained aware of their past, chiefly through the study of the works of Homer and the classical authors. An important factor in maintaining Greek identity was contact with barbarian peoples and this led to a strong desire among Greeks to organize the transmission of the Hellenic paideia to the next generation
8.
Mikis Theodorakis
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Michael Mikis Theodorakis is a Greek songwriter and composer who has written over 1000 songs. He scored for the films Zorba the Greek, Z, and he composed the Mauthausen Trilogy also known as The Ballad of Mauthausen, which has been described as the most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust and possibly his best work. He is viewed as Greeces best-known living composer and he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Politically, he is associated with the left because of his ties to the Communist Party of Greece. He was an MP for the KKE from 1981 to 1990 and he continues to speak out in favor of left-liberal causes, Greek–Turkish–Cypriot relations, and against the War in Iraq. He has consistently opposed oppressive regimes and was a key voice against the 1967–1974 Greek junta, Mikis Theodorakis was born on the Greek island of Chios and spent his childhood years in different provincial Greek cities such as Mytilene, Cephallonia, Patras, Pyrgos, and Tripoli. His father, a lawyer and a servant, was from the small village of Kato Galatas on Crete and his mother, Aspasia Poulakis, was from an ethnically Greek family in Çeşme. He was raised with Greek folk music and was influenced by Byzantine liturgy, theodorakiss fascination with music began in early childhood, he taught himself to write his first songs without access to musical instruments. In Patras and Pyrgos he took his first music lessons, and in Tripoli, Peloponnese, he gave his first concert at the age of seventeen. He went to Athens in 1943, and became a member of a Reserve Unit of ELAS, and led a troop in the fight against the British and the Greek right in the Dekemvriana. During the Greek Civil War he was arrested, sent into exile on the island of Icaria and then deported to the island of Makronisos, where he was tortured and twice buried alive. During the periods when he was not obliged to hide, not exiled or jailed, in 1950, he finished his studies and took his last two exams with flying colours. He went to Crete, where he became the head of the Chania Music School, at this time he ended what he has called the first period of his musical writing. In 1954 he travelled with his young wife Myrto Altinoglou to Paris where he entered the Conservatory and studied musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and his time in Paris, 1954–1959, was his second period of musical writing. His symphonic works, a Piano concerto, his first suite, his first symphony, in 1957, he won the Gold Medal in the Moscow Music Festival, President of the Jury was Dmitri Shostakovitch. Chairman of the International Theodorakis Foundation FILIKI, list of works based on the research of Asteris Koutoulas, published in O Mousikos Theodorakis. Κύκλος τραγουδιών για πιάνο και φωνή Χαιρετισμοί,4 Maria Farantouri — Asmata Mikis Theodorakis — Symphony No. A - Γ Να μαγευτώ και να μεθύσω Μάνου Χατζιδάκι εγκώμιον I had Three Lives Σπίθα, Music and Social Change, Foreword by Mikis Theodorakis
9.
Never on Sunday (song)
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Never on Sunday, also known as Ta Pediá tou Pireá, is a popular song by Manos Hadjidakis. A vocal version was released and performed by Melina Mercouri in the film of same name directed by Jules Dassin. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1960, the film score to the movie was first released on October 1,1960 by United Artists Records. The song has since recorded by numerous artists, and has gained various degrees of success throughout the world. Never on Sunday was written by Manos Hadjidakis originally in Greek with the title Ta Pedia tou Pirea, the original Greek version featured lyrics also written by Hadjidakis, and was performed in the film by Melina Mercouri. The original Greek lyrics do not mention Never on Sunday, but rather tell the story of the female character of the film. Illya is a woman who sings of her joyful life in her port town of Piraeus. Although she earns her money as a prostitute, she longs to meet a man someday who is just as full of joie de vivre as she is herself. In 1960, the song was nominated and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the song has been recorded in a number of languages since its release, Greek by Melina Mercouri, Nana Mouskouri, and Pink Martini. English, An orchestral version recorded by Don Costa reached number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960 and his version also peaked at #27 in the UK Singles Chart. Following the success of the version as well as the Oscar win. The lyrics to the English version of the song were written by Billy Towne, a vocal of the song by The Chordettes reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1961. The Ventures released a version on their 1963 Dolton album The Ventures Play Telstar, in Britain, there were five versions in the UK Singles Chart. Italian by Dalida, Milva, Isabella Fedeli, French by Dalida, Melina Mercouri, Darío Moreno. Dalidas French version of this song topped French singles chart in 1960, nunca en Domingo by Xiomara Alfaro. English / Spanish by Los Umbrellos, based on the melody, German, Lale Andersen scored a number one hit in 1960 with the German-language version of the song titled Ein Schiff wird kommen. It was also covered by Dalida, Caterina Valente, Lys Assia, Nana Mouskouri, Helmuth Brandenburg and Melina Mercouri. In 1982 the Neue Deutsche Welle band Der Moderne Man recorded a gay themed new wave version named Blaue Matrosen with the same German lyrics of Lale Andersens version, dutch by Mieke Telkamp, based on the melody
10.
Never on Sunday
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Never on Sunday is a 1960 Greek black-and-white romantic comedy film. Homer feels Ilyas life style typifies the degradation of Greek classical culture and attempts to steer her onto the path of morality and it constitutes a variation of the Pygmalion plus hooker with a heart of gold story. The film stars Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin, and it gently submerges the viewer into Greek culture, including dance, music, the theme song and the bouzouki theme of the movie became hits of the 1960s and brought the composer, Manos Hadjidakis, an Academy Award. It won the Academy Award for Best Song, Mercouri won the award for Best Actress at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Document N°33379 signed on 26 November 1960 by Minister Ruggero Lombardi, never on Sunday was released in a Region 1 DVD by MGM Home Video on July 1,2003. Pote tin Kyriaki at the Internet Movie Database
11.
Agios Vasileios, Rethymno
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Agios Vasileios is a village and a municipality in Rethymno regional unit, Crete, Greece. The seat of the municipality is the village Spili, the municipality has an area of 359.171 km2. It had the territory as the present municipality
12.
Rethymno (regional unit)
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Rethymno is one of the four regional units of Crete, Greece. Its capital is the city of Rethymno, today its main income is tourism. The countryside is also based economically on agriculture and herding, the regional unit Rethymno is subdivided into 5 municipalities. These are, Agios Vasileios Amari Anogeia Mylopotamos Rethymno The Rethymno prefecture was created while Crete was still an autonomous state, as a part of the 2011 Kallikratis government reform, the Rethymno regional unit was created out of the former prefecture. The prefecture had the territory as the present regional unit. At the same time, the municipalities were reorganised, according to the table below, Rethymno Province - Rethymno Agios Vasileios Province - Spili Amari Province - Amari Mylopotamos Province - Perama Note, Provinces no longer hold any legal status in Greece
13.
Crete
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Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, 88th-largest island in the world and the fifth-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Corsica. Crete and a number of surrounding islands and islets constitute the region of Crete, the capital and the largest city is Heraklion. As of 2011, the region had a population of 623,065, Crete forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece, while retaining its own local cultural traits. It was once the centre of the Minoan civilization, which is regarded as the earliest recorded civilization in Europe. The island is first referred to as Kaptara in texts from the Syrian city of Mari dating from the 18th century BC, repeated later in Neo-Assyrian records and it was also known in ancient Egyptian as Keftiu, strongly suggesting a similar Minoan name for the island. The current name of Crete is thought to be first attested in Mycenaean Greek texts written in Linear B, through the words
14.
Edirne
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Edirne served as the third capital city of the Ottoman Empire from 1363 to 1453, before Constantinople became the empires fourth and final capital. At present, Edirne is the capital of Edirne Province in Turkish Thrace, the citys estimated population in 2014 was 165,979. The city was founded as Hadrianopolis, named for the Roman Emperor Hadrian and this name is still used in the Modern Greek. The name Adrianople was used in English, until the Turkish adoption of Latin alphabet in 1928 made Edirne the internationally recognized name. The Turkish, Edirne, Bulgarian, Одрин, Albanian, Edrêne, Slovene, Одрин and Serbian, Једрене / Jedrene are adapted forms of the name Hadrianopolis or of its Turkish version, see also its other names. The area around Edirne has been the site of no fewer than 16 major battles or sieges, military historian John Keegan identifies it as the most contested spot on the globe and attributes this to its geographical location. According to Greek mythology, Orestes, son of king Agamemnon, built this city as Orestias, at the confluence of the Tonsus and the Ardiscus with the Hebrus. The city was founded eponymously by the Roman Emperor Hadrian on the site of a previous Thracian settlement known as Uskadama, Uskudama, Uskodama or Uscudama and it was the capital of the Bessi, or of the Odrysians. Hadrian developed it, adorned it with monuments, changed its name to Hadrianopolis after himself, licinius was defeated there by Constantine I in 323, and Emperor Valens was killed by the Goths in 378 during the Battle of Adrianople. In 813, the city was seized by Khan Krum of Bulgaria who moved its inhabitants to the Bulgarian lands towards the north of the Danube. During the existence of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Crusaders were decisively defeated by the Bulgarian Emperor Kaloyan in the Battle of Adrianople. Later Theodore Komnenos, Despot of Epirus, took possession of it in 1227, in 1369, the city was conquered by the Ottoman sultan Murad I. The city remained the Ottoman capital for 90 years until 1453, Edirne is famed for its many mosques, domes, minarets, and palaces from the Ottoman period. Under Ottoman rule, Edirne was the city of the administrative unit, the eponymous Eyalet of Edirne, and after land reforms in 1867. Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, was born in Edirne, Sultan Mehmed IV left the palace in Constantinople and died in Edirne in 1693. During his exile in the Ottoman Empire, the Swedish king Charles XII stayed in the city during most of 1713, baháulláh, the founder of the Baháí Faith, lived in Edirne from 1863 to 1868. He was exiled there by the Ottoman Empire before being banished further to the Ottoman penal colony in Akka and he referred to Edirne in his writings as the Land of Mystery. Edirne was briefly occupied by imperial Russian troops in 1829 during the Greek War of Independence, the city suffered a fire in 1905
15.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
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Fix (beer)
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FIX is a brand of Greek lager beer. The FIX brewery was founded in 1864 by the Fuchs family in Athens, Greece and this became the first major brewery in Greece and made many deliveries to Mediterranean countries where beer is now very popular. FIX became synonymous with beer in Greece, enjoying a monopoly in the country for about 100 years until the mid-1960s. It lost first place in the Greek market in 1973 and continued to decline until 1983, a FIX legacy is its historic industrial buildings throughout the country. In 1995, the FIX trademarks were bought by D. Kourtakis wineries from the National Bank of Greece, Kourtakis organized the Olympic Brewery to produce FIX Hellas beer, with a label design strongly reminiscent of the original FIX label. The new FIX beer was not financially successful and, in 2009, the relaunched beer has a new label, with references to the gold medals and prizes won by the original FIX beer. Ownership and usage of the trademark has been a source of conflict, there are Fix Beers brewed in the United States. Fix Hellas Beer Official Web site Olympic Brewery S. A
17.
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
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The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, usually referred to simply as the University of Athens, is a public university in Athens, Greece. Today it is the biggest university in Europe, with more than 104,000 registered students, the University of Athens was founded on May 3,1837 by King Otto of Greece and was named in his honour Othonian University. It was the first university in the liberated Greek state and in the area of the Southeast Europe as well. It was also the academic institution after the Ionian Academy. This fledging university consisted of four faculties, Theology, Law, Medicine, during its first year of operation, the institution was staffed by 33 professors, while courses were attended by 52 students and 75 non-matriculated auditors. It was first housed in the residence of architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert, on the slope of the Acropolis, in Plaka. In November 1841 the university relocated on the Central Building of the University of Athens and he followed a neoclassical approach, combining the monuments magnificence with a human scale simplicity and gave the building its H-shape. Construction began in 1839 in a location to the north of the Acropolis and its front wing, also known as the Propylaea, was completed in 1842–1843. The rest of the construction, that was supervised at first by Greek architect Lysandros Kaftantzoglou. The building is part of what is called the Athenian Neoclassical Trilogy. The Othonian University was renamed to National University in 1862, following events that forced King Otto to leave the country and it was later renamed to National and Kapodistrian University of Athens to honour Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of the independent modern Greek state. In 1919, a department of chemistry was added, and in 1922 the School of Pharmacy was renamed a Department, a further change came about when the School of Dentistry was added to the faculty of medicine. Between 1895 and 1911, an average of 1,000 new students matriculated each year and this resulted in the decision to introduce entrance examinations for all the faculties, beginning for the academic year 1927–28. Since 1954 the number of students admitted each year has been fixed by the Ministry of Education and Religion, from 1911 until 1932 the university was separated into the Kapodistrian University and the National University. In 1932, the two legal entities were merged into the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. During the 1960s construction work began on the University Campus in the suburb of Ilissia, in a statement, the University Senate said that any educational, research and administrative operation of the University of Athens is objectively impossible. The emblem of the University of Athens is the pagan goddess Athena, the University of Athens is divided into schools, faculties and departments as follows. The naming is nοt consistent in English for historical reasons, but in Greek the largest divisions are generally named σχολές and are divided in τμήματα, there the faculties of Science, Theology and Philosophy are situated
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Giorgos Seferis
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Giorgos or George Seferis, the pen name of Georgios Seferiades, was a Greek poet-diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and he was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962. Seferis was born in Urla near Smyrna in Asia Minor, Ottoman Empire and his father, Stelios Seferiadis, was a lawyer, and later a professor at the University of Athens, as well as a poet and translator in his own right. He was also a staunch Venizelist and a supporter of the demotic Greek language over the formal, official language, both of these attitudes influenced his son. In 1914 the family moved to Athens, where Seferis completed his school education. He continued his studies in Paris from 1918 to 1925, studying law at the Sorbonne, while he was there, in September 1922, Smyrna/Izmir was taken by the Turkish Army after a two-year Greek military campaign on Anatolian soil. Many Greeks, including Seferis family, fled from Asia Minor, Seferis was also greatly influenced by Kavafis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He returned to Athens in 1925 and was admitted to the Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the following year and this was the beginning of a long and successful diplomatic career, during which he held posts in England and Albania. He married Maria Zannou on April 10,1941 on the eve of the German invasion of Greece, during the Second World War, Seferis accompanied the Free Greek Government in exile to Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy, and returned to liberated Athens in 1944. He continued to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held posts in Ankara, Turkey. He was appointed minister to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1961, the last post before his retirement in Athens. Seferis received many honours and prizes, among them honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Thessaloniki. Seferis first visited Cyprus in November 1953 and he immediately fell in love with the island, partly because of its resemblance, in its landscape, the mixture of populations, and in its traditions, to his childhood summer home in Skala. His book of poems Imerologio Katastromatos III was inspired by the island and its original title Cyprus, where it was ordained for me… made clear the optimistic sense of homecoming Seferis felt on discovering the island. Seferis changed the title in the 1959 edition of his poems, politically, Cyprus was entangled in the dispute between the UK, Greece and Turkey over its international status. Over the next few years, Seferis made use of his position in the service to strive towards a resolution of the Cyprus dispute, investing a great deal of personal effort. This was one of the few areas in his life in which he allowed the personal, in 1963, Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture. Seferis was the first Greek to receive the prize, but in his acceptance speech, Seferis chose rather to emphasise his own humanist philosophy, concluding, When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was, Man
19.
Odysseas Elytis
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Odysseas Elytis was regarded as a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, descendant of the Alepoudelis, an old industrial family from Lesbos, Elytis was born in Heraklion on the island of Crete, on 2 November 1911. His family later moved to Athens, where the poet graduated from high school, in 1935 Elytis published his first poem in the journal New Letters at the prompting of such friends as George Seferis. His entry with an earthy and original form assisted to inaugurate a new era in Greek poetry. From 1969 to 1972, under the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 and he was romantically linked to the lyricist and musicologist Mariannina Kriezi, who subsequently produced and hosted the legendary childrens radio broadcast Here Lilliput Land. Elytis was intensely private and vehemently solitary in pursuing his ideals of poetic truth, in 1937 he served his military requirements. As an army cadet, he joined the National Military School in Corfu and he assisted Queen Frederika off the train and on to Greek soil personally when she arrived from Germany to marry hereditary Prince Paul. During the war he was appointed Second Lieutenant, placed initially at the 1st Army Corps Headquarters, then transferred to the 24th Regiment, Elytis was sporadically publishing poetry and essays after his initial foray into the literary world. He was a member of the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA-Hellas, in 1948–1952 and 1969–1972 he lived in Paris. There, he audited philology and literature seminars at the Sorbonne and was received by the pioneers of the worlds avant-garde as Tériades most respected friend. Teriade was simultaneously in Paris publishing works with all the renowned artists, Elytis and Teriade had formed a strong friendship that solidified in 1939 with the publication of Elytis first book of poetry entitled Orientations. Both Elytis and Teriade hailed from Lesbos and had a love of the Greek painter Theophilos. Starting from Paris he travelled and subsequently visited Switzerland, England, Italy, in 1961, upon an invitation of the State Department, he traveled through the U. S. A. and —upon similar invitations— through the Soviet Union in 1963 and Bulgaria in 1965. Odysseas Elytis had been completing plans to travel overseas when he died in Athens on 18 March 1996, at the age of 84. He was survived by his niece Myrsene and his older brother Evangelos, a parallel manner concerning technique resulted in introducing the inner architecture, which is evident in a great many poems of his, mainly in the phenomenal landmark work It Is Truly Meet. Elytis theoretical and philosophical ideas have been expressed in a series of essays under the title The Open Papers, besides creating poetry he applied himself to translating poetry and theatre as well as a series of collage pictures. Translations of his poetry have been published as books, in anthologies or in periodicals in eleven languages. Procedute dal Canto eroico e funebre per il sottotenente caduto in Albania, robert Levesque Six plus un remords pourle ciel
20.
Angelos Sikelianos
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Angelos Sikelianos was a Greek lyric poet and playwright. His themes include Greek history, religious symbolism as well as universal harmony in poems such as The Moonstruck, Prologue to Life, Mother of God, and Delphic Utterance. His plays include Sibylla, Daedalus in Crete, Christ in Rome, The Death of Digenis, The Dithyramb of the Rose, although occasionally his grandiloquence blunts the poetic effect of his work, some of Sikelianos finer lyrics are among the best in Western literature. Sikelianos was born in Lefkada where he spent his childhood, in 1900, he registered to the Athens Law School but never graduated. In the course of the years he traveled extensively and devoted himself to poetry. In 1907, he married the AmericanEva Palmer in America, the moved to Athens in 1908. He also befriended fellow writer Nikos Kazantzakis, and in 1914 they spent forty days on Mount Athos, visiting most of the monasteries there, the following year they embarked on a pilgrimage through Greece. The two writers were kindred spirits, but also different in their respective views on life. Sikelianos was a man of the world, full of optimism, Kazantzakis was the taciturn and reclusive counterpart who was doubt-ridden, and had, as he himself admitted, a tendency to focus on the skull behind the face. Together, however, they shared the mutual concern of attempting to refine, in May 1927, with the support of his wife, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, Sikelianos held the Delphic Festival as part of his general effort towards a revival of the Delphic Idea. Sikelianos believed that the principles which had shaped classical civilisation, if reexamined, could offer spiritual independence, the event consisted of athletic contests a concert of Byzantine music, an exhibition of folk art as well as a performance of Prometheus Bound. The Delphic Festivals were acclaimed by critics and despite a lack of state assistance, the revival was then permanently abandoned due to the excessive organization costs. In honor of the memory of Angelos and Eva Sikelianos, the European Cultural Centre of Delphi bought and restored their house in Delphi, Eva Palmer left for the United States, and Sikelianos married Anna Karamani. During the German occupation, he became a source of inspiration to the Greek people, especially through his speech and it was he who composed the letter which was spearheaded by Archbishop Damaskinos to save the lives of Greek Jews by appealing directly to the Germans. The letter was signed by many prominent Greek citizens in defense of the Jews who were being persecuted, there is no similar document of protest against Nazi occupiers during World War II that has come to light in any other European country. In 1949, he was a Nobel Prize for Literature candidate, Sikelianos suffered from a chronic disease for several years, he died accidentally on June 19,1951 in Athens from inadvertently drinking Lysol after having requested Nujol. He was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens, Sikelianos published his poetic work in three volumes in 1946 and 1947. The collections title was Lyric Life and he left, however, several poems unpublished
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Yannis Tsarouchis
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Yannis Tsarouchis was a Greek painter. Born in Piraeus, he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and he was also a student of Photios Kontoglou, who introduced him to Byzantine iconography, while he also studied popular architecture and dressing customs. Together with Dimitris Pikionis, Kontoglou and Angeliki Hatzimichali he led the movement for the introduction of Greek tradition in painting, from 1935 to 1936 he visited Istanbul, Paris and Italy. He came in contact with the Renaissance art and Impressionism and he discovered the works of Theophilos Hatzimihail and met influential artists such as Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti. He returned to Greece in 1936 and two later he produced his first personal exhibition in Athens. He later fought in the Greco-Italian War in 1940, in 1949, he and other artists, including Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Yannis Moralis, Nikos Nikolaou, Nikos Engonopoulos and Panayiotis Tetsis, established the Armos art group. In 1951 he had exhibitions in Paris and London, in 1958 he participated in the Venice Biennale. In 1967 he moved to Paris and he filled his canvases with images of vulnerable men and strong women. In 1982 the Yannis Tsarouchis Museum in Maroussi, Athens, was inaugurated, the Museum is actually hosted in the house of the artist. There is also the Tsarouchis Foundation and he died in Athens in 1989. Adaptation of the Greek Wikipedia article, Tsarouchis Paintings Tsarouchis Foundation Biography and selected Works Interview Documentary video and Interview Documerntary video with the artist
22.
Axis occupation of Greece
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The occupation of Greece by the Axis Powers began in April 1941 after Nazi Germany invaded Greece to assist its ally, Fascist Italy, which had been at war with Greece since October 1940. Following the conquest of Crete, all of Greece was occupied by June 1941, the occupation in the mainland lasted until Germany and its ally Bulgaria were forced to withdraw under Allied pressure in early October 1944. However, German garrisons remained in control of Crete and some other Aegean islands until after the end of World War II in Europe, surrendering these islands in May, Nazi Germany was forced to an intervention on its allys behalf in southern Europe. As result, the Greek government went into exile, and an Axis collaborationist puppet government was established in the country, other regions of the country were given to Germanys partners, Italy and Bulgaria. The occupation ruined the Greek economy and brought about terrible hardships for the Greek civilian population, much of Greece was subjected to enormous destruction of its industry, infrastructure, ports, roads, railways and bridges, forests and other natural resources and loss of civilian life. Over 40,000 civilians died in Athens alone from starvation, tens of thousands more died because of reprisals by Nazis, at the same time the Greek Resistance, one of the most effective resistance movements in Occupied Europe, was formed. These resistance groups launched attacks against the occupying powers, fought against the collaborationist Security Battalions. By late 1943 the resistance began to fight amongst themselves. When liberation of the came in October 1944, Greece was in a state of extreme political polarization. In the early morning hours of 28 October 1940, Italian Ambassador Emmanuel Grazzi awoke Greek Premier Ioannis Metaxas, Metaxas rejected the ultimatum and Italian forces invaded Greek territory from Italian-occupied Albania less than three hours later. The Hellenic Army proved to be an opponent, and successfully exploited the mountainous terrain of Epirus. The Hellenic forces counterattacked and forced the Italians to retreat, by mid-December, the Greeks had occupied nearly one-quarter of Albania, before Italian reinforcements and the harsh winter stemmed the Greek advance. In March 1941, a major Italian counterattack failed, fifteen of the 21 Greek divisions were deployed against the Italians, so only six divisions were facing the attack from German troops in the Metaxas Line during the first days of April. Greece received help from British Commonwealth troops, moved from Libya on the orders of Winston Churchill, on 6 April 1941, Germany came to the aid of Italy and invaded Greece through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Greek and British Commonwealth troops fought back but were overwhelmed, the Bulgarians occupied territory between the Strymon River and a line of demarcation running through Alexandroupoli and Svilengrad west of the Evros River. The Greek capital Athens fell on 27 April, and by 1 June, after the capture of Crete, after the invasion King George II fled, first to Crete and then to Cairo. A nominally right-wing Greek government ruled from Athens, but it was a puppet of the occupiers, the occupation of Greece was divided among Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. German forces occupied the most strategically important areas, namely Athens, Thessaloniki with Central Macedonia and several Aegean Islands, initially, the German zone was ruled by the ambassador Günther Altenburg of the German Foreign Office and Field Marshal Wilhelm List
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Greek Resistance
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The rise of resistance movements in Greece was precipitated by the invasion and occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany from 1941–44. Italy led the way with its invasion from Albania in 1940. Despite that some in the left-wing resistance claimed the government to be illegitimate, the Germans set up a Greek collaborationist government, headed by General Georgios Tsolakoglou, before entering Athens. Some high-profile officers of the pre-war Greek regime served the Germans in various posts, the first wider resistance movements occurred in northern Greece, where the Bulgarians annexed Greek territories. The first mass uprising occurred around the town of Drama in eastern Macedonia, the Bulgarian authorities had initiated large-scale Bulgarization policies, causing the Greek populations reaction. During the night of 28–29 September 1941 the people of Drama and this badly-organized revolt was suppressed by the Bulgarian Army, which retaliated executing over three thousand people in Drama alone. An estimated fifteen thousand Greeks were killed by the Bulgarian occupational army during the few weeks. The town of Doxato and the village of Choristi are officially considered today Martyr Cities, however, these harsh actions, together with the plundering of Greeces natural resources by the Germans, turned Greeks more against the occupiers. The lack of a government and the inactivity of the established political class created a power vacuum. Most officers and citizens who wanted to continue the fight fled to the British-controlled Middle East, and this situation resulted in the creation of several new groupings, where the pre-war establishment was largely absent, which assumed the role of resisting the occupation powers. The first major group to be founded was the National Liberation Front. By 1944 EAM became a movement with more than 1,800,000 members, EAM was organized by the Communist Party of Greece and other smaller parties, but all major political parties refused to participate either in EAM or in any other resistance movement. On February 16,1942, EAM gave permission to a communist veteran, although its foundation was announced in late 1941, there were no military acts until 1942, when the Greek Peoples Liberation Army, the armed forces of EAM, was born. Greece is a country, with a long tradition in andartiko, dating back to the days of the klephts of the Ottoman period. In the 1940s, the countryside was poor, the network not very well developed. National and Social Liberation also formed a corps, named after the famous 5/42 Evzone Regiment, under Col. Dimitrios Psarros. Until the summer of 1942, the authorities had been little troubled by the armed Resistance. The Italians in particular, in control of most of the countryside, from that point, however, the Resistance gained pace, with EAM/ELAS in particular expanding rapidly
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National Liberation Front (Greece)
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The National Liberation Front was the main movement of the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Its main driving force was the Communist Party of Greece, but its membership throughout the Occupation period included several other leftist and republican groups. The organisation reached its peak after Liberation in late 1944, when it controlled most of the country and this marked the beginning of its gradual decline and the open persecution of its members and leading eventually to the outbreak of the Greek Civil War. During the Metaxas Regime, the Communist Party of Greece was outlawed and its hierarchy and organisation suffered heavy blows from Metaxas efficient security forces, and more than 2,000 Communists were imprisoned or sent to internal exile. With the German invasion and occupation of the country in April–May 1941, several hundred members were able to escape and their first task was to reform the Party, along with subsidiary groups like the National Solidarity welfare organization May 28. The Communists were committed to a Popular Front tactic, and tried to engage other parties from the left, however, these efforts proved largely fruitless. On 16 July however, the National Workers Liberation Front was established, at the ΚΚΕs 7th Plenum, the establishment of ΕΑΜ was decided, despite the refusal of mainstream politicians to participate. ΕΑΜs charter called for the liberation of the Nation from foreign yoke, furthermore, the ΚΚΕs well-organized structure and its experience with the conditions and necessities of underground struggle were crucial to ΕΑΜs success. Georgios Siantos was appointed as the leader, since Nikolaos Zachariadis. On 10 October, ΕΑΜ published its manifesto, and announced itself, during the autumn of 1941, its influence expanded throughout Greece, either through pre-existing Communist cells or through the spontaneous actions of local peoples committees. Following Communist practice, ΕΑΜ took care to set up a system with which to engage. One of the successes of ΕΑΜ was the mobilization against the plans of the Germans. In the event, only 16,000 Greeks went to Germany, ΕΑΜ even carried out elections to the PEEAs parliament, the National Council, in April, where for the first time in Greek electoral history, women were allowed to vote. In these elections is estimated that 1,000,000 people voted, in the territories it controlled, ΕΑΜ implemented its own political concept, known as laokratia, based upon based upon self-administration, involvement of new categories and popular courts. At the same time, the mechanisms of the order created by ΕΑΜ were often employed to eliminate political opponents. After Liberation in October 1944, the tensions between ΕΑΜ and right-wing, nationalist or western-oriented republican forces, which were supported by Great Britain, originally, as agreed at the Lebanon conference, ΕΑΜ participated in the government of national unity under George Papandreou with 6 ministers. Due to disagreements regarding the disarmament of ELAS and the formation of an army, on 1 December. ΕΑΜ organized a demonstration in Athens on December 3,1944 against British interference, the exact details of what happened have been debated ever since, but gendarmes opened fire on the crowd, resulting in 25 dead protesters and 148 wounded
25.
Tennessee Williams
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Thomas Lanier Tennessee Williams III was an American playwright. Along with Eugene ONeill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama, after years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie, closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and his later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Long Days Journey into Night, much of Williams most acclaimed work was adapted for the cinema. He also wrote stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, of English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry and his father was an alcoholic traveling shoe salesman who spent much of his time away from home. Williams early childhood was spent in the parsonage there, Williams had two siblings, sister Rose Isabel Williams and brother Walter Dakin Williams. As a small child Williams suffered from a case of diphtheria which nearly ended his life, leaving him weak, at least in part as a result of his illness, he was less robust as a child than his father wished. Cornelius Williams, a descendant of hearty East Tennessee pioneer stock, had a violent temper and was a man prone to use his fists. He regarded his sons effeminacy with disdain, and his mother Edwina, locked in an unhappy marriage, many critics and historians note that Williams found inspiration for much of his writing in his own dysfunctional family. When Williams was eight years old, his father was promoted to a job at the office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis. He attended Soldan High School, a setting he referred to in his play The Glass Menagerie, Later he studied at University City High School. At age 16, Williams won third prize for an essay published in Smart Set entitled, a year later, his short story The Vengeance of Nitocris was published in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales. That same year he first visited Europe with his grandfather, from 1929 to 1931, he attended the University of Missouri, in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes. Williams found his classes boring, however, and was distracted by his love for a girl. He was soon entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests and his first submitted play was Beauty Is the Word, followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning. As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, at University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers
26.
A Streetcar Named Desire
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A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. The play opened on Broadway on December 3,1947, and closed on December 17,1949, the Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter. The London production opened in 1949 with Bonar Colleano, Vivien Leigh, the drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often regarded as among the finest plays of the 20th century, and is considered by many to be one of Williams greatest. Blanche is in her thirties, and with no money, she has nowhere else to go, Blanche tells Stella that she has taken a leave of absence from her English teaching position because of her nerves. Blanche laments the shabbiness of her sister’s two-room flat and she finds Stanley loud and rough, eventually referring to him as common. Stanley, in return, does not care for Blanches manners, Stanley later questions Blanche about her earlier marriage. Blanche had married when she was young, but her husband died, leaving her widowed. The memory of her dead husband causes Blanche some obvious distress, Stanley, worried that he has been cheated out of an inheritance, demands to know what happened to Belle Reve, once a large plantation and the DuBois family home. Blanche hands over all the documents pertaining to Belle Reve, while looking at the papers, Stanley notices a bundle of letters that Blanche emotionally proclaims are personal love letters from her dead husband. For a moment, Stanley seems caught off guard over her proclaimed feelings, afterwards, he informs Blanche that Stella is going to have a baby. The night after Blanche’s arrival, during one of Stanley’s poker parties, Blanche meets Mitch and his courteous manner sets him apart from the other men. Their chat becomes flirtatious and friendly, and Blanche easily charms him, suddenly becoming upset over multiple interruptions, Stanley explodes in a drunken rage and strikes Stella. Blanche and Stella take refuge with the neighbor, Eunice. When Stanley recovers, he cries out from the courtyard below for Stella to come back by calling her name until she comes down. After Stella returns to Stanley, Blanche and Mitch sit at the bottom of the steps in the courtyard, Blanche is bewildered that Stella would go back with him after such violence. The next morning, Blanche rushes to Stella and describes Stanley as an animal, though Stella assures Blanche that she. Stanley overhears the conversation but keeps silent, when Stanley comes in, Stella hugs and kisses him, letting Blanche know that her low opinion of Stanley does not matter. As the weeks pass, Blanche and Stanley continue to not get along, Blanche has hope in Mitch, and tells Stella that she wants to go away with him and not be anyone’s problem
27.
Karolos Koun
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Karolos Koun was an Ottoman-born Greek theater director, widely known for his lively staging of ancient Greek plays. Koun was born in Bursa, present day Turkey, as an Ottoman Empire citizen to a Greek mother and he was educated in Ottoman Turkey until the end of high school. He graduated from Robert College in İstanbul and then went to Sorbonne for his university education, as his familys economic situation worsened, he couldnt continue his education. He had been praised all over Europe for his bawdy, colorful stagings of the 5th century BC political comedies of Aristophanes, in 1942, he founded the experimental Art Theater and its drama school. Koun gave premieres in Athens of works by avant-garde European playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, in 1962, Kouns production of The Birds by Aristophanes won first prize at an international festival at Paris. He worked with famed actress Melina Mercouri and she played Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire which was staged by Kouns Art Theater. Other playwrights that Koun introduced to Greek audiences include Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca and he stayed politically active all his life which had a direct impact on his not having financial security in his life. His theater was responsible for training the golden generation of Greek movie actors, karolos Koun died on February 14,1987, after suffering a heart attack, aged 79
28.
Rebetiko
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Rebetiko briefly can be described as the urban popular song of the Greeks, especially the poorest, from the late 19th century to the 1950s. The word rebetiko is a form derived from the Greek word rebetis. The word rebetis is today construed to mean a person who embodies aspects of character, dress, behavior, morals, the word is closely related, but not identical in meaning, to the word mangas, which means strong guy that needs correction. The earliest source of the word to date is to be found in a Greek-Latin dictionary published in Leyden, Holland in 1614 where the word ῥεμπιτός is defined as a wanderer, blind, misguided, etc. The melodies of most rebetiko songs are often considered to follow one or more dromoi (Greek for roads or routes. The names of the dromoi are derived in all but a few cases from the names of various Turkish modes, furthermore, rebetika has come to be played on instruments tuned in equal temperament, in direct conflict with the more complex pitch divisions of the makam system. During the later period of the rebetiko revival there has been a cultural entente between Greek and Turkish musicians, mostly of the younger generations. This portion of the repertoire was played almost exclusively on the instruments of Smyrneika/Ottoman café music, such as kanonaki, santouri, politikí lyra, tsimbalo. The scales used in music are the traditional western major and minor scales, such as a series of eastern makams. Some of them include rast, uşşâk, hijaz, saba, most rebetiko songs are based on traditional Greek or Anatolian dance rhythms. Most common are, Syrtos, a name for many Greek dances, Zeibekiko. There is one component within the tradition which is common to many musical styles within Eastern musical spheres. This is the freely improvised unmeasured prelude, within a given dromos/makam and this is known in Greek as taxim or taximi after the Arabic word usually transliterated as taqsim or taksim. The first rebetiko songs to be recorded, as mentioned above, were mostly in Ottoman/Smyrna style and it is a view of the studio of the Athens luthier Leonidas Gailas, whom the artist describes as Fabricatore di bossuchi. The drawing clearly shows a number of bouzouki-like instruments, despite this evidence, we still know nothing of the early history of instruments association with what came to be called rebetiko. This recording, reissued for the first time in 2013, reveals a folk melodic style never recorded before or since, the first recording to feature the instrument clearly in a recognisable somewhat more modern melodic role, was made in 1929, in New York. Three years later the first true bouzouki solo was recorded by Ioannis Halikias, also in New York, in Greece the bouzouki had been allowed into a studio for the very first time a few months previously, in October 1931. The amateur bouzouki player Konstandinos Kalamaras accompanied a professional Byzantine singer, Konstandinos Vorgias, and these recordings marked the real beginning of the bouzoukis recorded career in Greece, a career which continues unbroken to the present day
29.
Piraeus
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Piraeus is a port city in the region of Attica, Greece. Piraeus is located within the Athens urban area,12 kilometres southwest from its city center, the municipality of Piraeus and several other suburban municipalities within the regional unit of Piraeus form the greater Piraeus area, with a total population of 448,997. Piraeus has a recorded history, dating to ancient Greece. During the Golden Age of Athens the Long Walls were constructed to connect Athens with Piraeus, the port of Piraeus is the chief port in Greece, the largest passenger port in Europe and the second largest in the world, servicing about 20 million passengers annually. With a throughput of 1.4 million TEUs, Piraeus is placed among the top ten ports in container traffic in Europe, the city hosted events in both the 1896 and 2004 Summer Olympics held in Athens. The University of Piraeus is one of the largest universities in Greece, Piraeus, which roughly means the place over the passage, has been inhabited since the 26th century BC. Consequently, it was called the Halipedon, meaning the salt field, through the centuries, the area was increasingly silted and flooding ceased, and thus by early classical times the land passage was made safe. In the late 6th century BC, the area caught attention due to its advantages, in 511 BC, the hill of Munichia was fortified by Hippias and four years later Piraeus became a deme of Attica by Cleisthenes. The Athenian fleet played a role in the battle of Salamis against the Persians in 480 BC. From then on Piraeus was permanently used as the navy base, the citys fortification was farther reinforced later by the construction of the Long Walls under Cimon and Pericles, with which Piraeus was connected to Athens. Meanwhile, Piraeus was rebuilt to the grid plan of architect Hippodamus of Miletus, known as the Hippodamian plan. As a result, Piraeus flourished and became a port of high security and great commercial activity, during the Peloponnesian War, Piraeus suffered its first setback. In the second year of the war, the first cases of the Athens plague were recorded in Piraeus, in 404 BC, the Spartan fleet under Lysander blockaded Piraeus and subsequently Athens surrendered to the Spartans, putting an end to the Delian League and the war itself. As a result, the tattered and unfortified port city was not able to compete with prosperous Rhodes, the destruction was completed in 395 AD by the Goths under Alaric I. Piraeus was led to a period of decline which lasted for fifteen centuries. During the Byzantine period the harbour of Piraeus was occasionally used for the Byzantine fleet and it was also called Porto Drako by Greeks, drako meaning not just dragon, but any monster. When Piraeus was taken by the Ottoman Empire in 1456, it known as Aslan Liman. The Piraeus Lion itself was looted in 1687 by Francesco Morosini during his expedition against Athens and was carried to the Venetian Arsenal, a copy of the lion statue is on display at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus
30.
Anatolia
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Anatolia, in geography known as Asia Minor, Asian Turkey, Anatolian peninsula, or Anatolian plateau, is the westernmost protrusion of Asia, which makes up the majority of modern-day Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Black Sea to the Armenian Highlands, thus, traditionally Anatolia is the territory that comprises approximately the western two-thirds of the Asian part of Turkey. The Turkification of Anatolia began under the Seljuk Empire in the late 11th century, however, various non-Turkic languages continue to be spoken by minorities in Anatolia today, including Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian, Arabic, Laz, Georgian, and Greek. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line running from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea. This traditional geographical definition is used, for example, in the latest edition of Merriam-Websters Geographical Dictionary, under this definition, Anatolia is bounded to the east by the Armenian Highlands, and the Euphrates before that river bends to the southeast to enter Mesopotamia. To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Syria, the first name the Greeks used for the Anatolian peninsula was Ἀσία, presumably after the name of the Assuwa league in western Anatolia. As the name of Asia came to be extended to areas east of the Mediterranean. The name Anatolia derives from the Greek ἀνατολή meaning “the East” or more literally “sunrise”, the precise reference of this term has varied over time, perhaps originally referring to the Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies on the west coast of Asia Minor. In the Byzantine Empire, the Anatolic Theme was a theme covering the western, the modern Turkish form of Anatolia is Anadolu, which again derives from the Greek name Aνατολή. The Russian male name Anatoly and the French Anatole share the same linguistic origin, in English the name of Turkey for ancient Anatolia first appeared c. It is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia, which was used by the Europeans to define the Seljuk controlled parts of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert. Human habitation in Anatolia dates back to the Paleolithic, neolithic Anatolia has been proposed as the homeland of the Indo-European language family, although linguists tend to favour a later origin in the steppes north of the Black Sea. However, it is clear that the Anatolian languages, the oldest branch of Indo-European, have spoken in Anatolia since at least the 19th century BC. The earliest historical records of Anatolia stem from the southeast of the region and are from the Mesopotamian-based Akkadian Empire during the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 24th century BC, scholars generally believe the earliest indigenous populations of Anatolia were the Hattians and Hurrians. The region was famous for exporting raw materials, and areas of Hattian-, one of the numerous cuneiform records dated circa 20th century BC, found in Anatolia at the Assyrian colony of Kanesh, uses an advanced system of trading computations and credit lines. They were speakers of an Indo-European language, the Hittite language, originating from Nesa, they conquered Hattusa in the 18th century BC, imposing themselves over Hattian- and Hurrian-speaking populations. According to the most widely accepted Kurgan theory on the Proto-Indo-European homeland, however, the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script, invented in Mesopotamia
31.
Markos Vamvakaris
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Márkos Vamvakáris, was a rebetiko musician. He is universally referred to by writers and fans simply by his first name. The great significance of Vamvakaris for the rebetiko is also reflected by his nickname, Vamvakaris was born on 10 May 1905 in Ano Syros, Syros, Greece. His family belonged to the sizeable Roman Catholic community of the island, the Francosyrians, at the age of twelve, in the false belief that he was wanted by the police, Vamvakaris fled Syros for the port of Piraeus. He worked as a stevedore, a miner, a shoe-polisher, a paperboy, a butcher. He heard a bouzouki player playing, and vowed that if he did not learn to play the instrument in six months he would chop off his own hand with a cleaver and he learned bouzouki, becoming an innovative virtuoso player, and began to write songs of his own. They were extremely popular, and Markos made many recordings, spyros Peristeris, a well-educated musician and repertory manager and orchestra leader for several recording companies, persuaded Vamvakaris to record his songs sung with his own voice. Vamvakaris recorded his first rebetiko disc, Narchósouna re magka mou in 1932, among other songs in that period, he wrote the classic love song Frankosyriani. After the liberation of Greece from the occupation of Nazi Germany, difficult times persisted and he also suffered badly with arthritis in his hands which crippled his bouzouki playing, and from asthma that hampered his singing. Vamvakaris died on 8 February 1972 at the age of 66, Markos composing style was utterly simple, minimal orchestration, melodic lines stripped of any embellishment, and lyrics as devoid of ornamentation as possible. His strophic masterpiece Your eyelashes shine is an example of his art. Your eyes, sister, make my little heart crack, search till youre blind, you wont find another like me. As the years pass, his contribution to Greek music emerges. All other Greek composers, of his time and afterwards, revere him as their master teacher, Markos may be heard on many of the anthology CDs listed in the rebetiko discography. CDs of his own which may be available in English language countries include, Markos Vamvakaris Bouzouki Pioneer, Rembetika 5-Master of Rembetika 1932-193 Jsp Records,2010. Crossroads,2010 Stavros Xarchakos and Nikos Gatsos wrote a song called Gramma sto Marko Vamvakari, sung by George Dalaras, also, Thodoros Derveniotis and Kostas Virvos wrote Markos, sung by Kaiti Abavi. Zervas, in Greek with English subtitles
32.
Lied
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Lied originally denoted in classical music the setting of German poems to music, beginning in the late-fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. It later came especially to refer to settings of Romantic poetry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples include settings by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, among English speakers, however, Lied is often used interchangeably with art song to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages. The poems that have made into Lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love. Typically, Lieder are arranged for a singer and piano. Some of the most famous examples of Lieder are Schuberts Der Tod und das Mädchen, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Schubert and Schumann are most closely associated with this genre, mainly developed in the Romantic era. For German-speakers, the term Lied has a long history ranging from twelfth-century troubadour songs via folk songs, the word Lied for song first came into general use in German during the early fifteenth century, largely displacing the earlier word Gesang. The poet and composer Oswald von Wolkenstein is sometimes claimed as the creator of the Lied, because of his innovations in combining words and music. The late-fourteenth-century composer known as the Monk of Salzburg wrote six two-part Lieder which are older still, in Germany, the great age of song came in the nineteenth century. Schubert wrote over 600 songs, some of them in sequences or song cycles that relate an adventure of the rather than the body. The tradition was continued by Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf, and on into the 20th century by Strauss, Mahler, partisans of atonal music, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, composed Lieder in their own style. England too had a flowering of song, more closely associated, however, with folk songs than with art songs, as represented by Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Ivor Gurney, and Gerald Finzi. At the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century, alphons Diepenbrock and Henk Badings composed Dutch, German, English, and French songs, as well as songs in Latin for choirs. Böker-Heil, Norbert, David Fallows, John H. Baron, James Parsons, Eric Sams, Graham Johnson, grove Music Online, edited by Deane L. Root. Oxford University Press, accessed December 26,2016, a Multitude of Voices, The Lied at Mid Century. In The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, edited by James Parsons, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press. The Circulation of the Lied, The Double Life of an Art Form, in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, edited by James Parsons, 301–14. Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, the Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham
33.
Michael Cacoyannis
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Michael Cacoyannis was a Greek Cypriot filmmaker, best known for his 1964 film Zorba the Greek. He directed the 1983 Broadway revival of the based on the film. Much of his work was rooted in classical texts, especially those of the Greek tragedian Euripides and he was nominated for an Academy Award five times, a record for any Cypriot film artist. He received Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film nominations for Zorba the Greek, Cacoyannis was born in 1921 in Limassol, Cyprus. His father, Sir Panayotis Loizou Cacoyannis, had been knighted in 1936 by the United Kingdom government for services in Cyprus. In 1939, he was sent by his father to London to become a lawyer and he graduated from law school and joined the BBC World Service, soon taking charge of its new Cyprus Service. His deputy was Beba Clerides, sister of the RAF fighter pilot and future President of Cyprus, after having trouble finding a directing job in the British film industry, Cacoyannis moved to Greece, and in 1953 he made his first film, Windfall in Athens. He was offered the chance to direct Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in the film Reflections in a Golden Eye, between 1959 and 1967, he was in a relationship with Yael Dayan, a progressive Israeli politician and author. Cacoyannis translated some of Shakespeares plays Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Hamlet into Greek, Michael Cacoyannis died on 25 July 2011 in Athens, aged 90. From Stella to Iphigenia, The Woman-Centered Films of Michael Cacoyannis, Films and Filming, July 1960, p.5. Mihalis Kakogiannis at the Internet Movie Database Obituary of Michael Cacoyannis, The Daily Telegraph,25 July, 2011]
34.
Stella (1955 film)
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Stella is a 1955 Greek film is a retelling of Carmen featuring Melina Mercouri. The film was directed by the Greek Cypriot Michael Cacoyannis and written by Cacoyannis, the music was composed by Manos Hadjidakis and Vassilis Tsitsanis. Stella was originally intended to be a play with the title Stella with the Red Gloves. It has been claimed that story was the perfect vehicle for the thirty-five-year-old Mercouris film debut. Indeed, it was the hit that Melina Mercouri needed, the film sparked great controversy, and although it was initially rejected by Greek critics, it is now considered one of the five greatest Greek films. At the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was screened, Melina met Jules Dassin, her husband, mentor. He helped her to major roles in such films as Topkapi, Never on Sunday, Phaedra. Summer, which have major international successes. The story of a independent and uncompromising young woman. Stella, a singer at Paradise nightclub, lives a guiltless. Her innate independence and assertive nature lead her to numerous passionate love affairs, while with Aleko, son of a wealthy family, she decides, as is her habit, to break up before the relationship wears off. Once she meets Miltos, a soccer player, she seems to change. At first, she avoids his advances, but, later, however, she can only be with him on her own terms. No matter how much she loves him, she values her freedom. Things turn complicated when she is called to choose and she repeatedly rejects Miltos marriage proposals. When Miltos finally forces her to accept the idea of marriage, Stella does not appear in church, Miltos kills her with a dagger at end of the film. It has been said that the story of Stellas forced marriage symbolises the forces that are trying to impose their will on Greece
35.
Melina Mercouri
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Maria Amalia Mercouri, known professionally as Melina Mercouri, was a Greek actress, singer and politician. Mercouri was born to a cavalry officer and member of the Greek parliament, Stamatis Mercouris. When she completed her education, she attended the National Theatres Drama School. Mercouris first husband was a landowner, Panos Harokopos. As an actress, Mercouri made her debut in Stella and met international success with her performances in Never on Sunday, Phaedra, Topkapi. She won the award for Best Actress at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and she was nominated for an Academy Award, a Tony Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two BAFTA Awards. A political activist during the Greek military junta of 1967–1974, Mercouri became a member of the Hellenic Parliament in 1977, in 1983, Mercouri proposed the programme of the European Capital of Culture, which was established by the European Union in 1985. Mercouri was an advocate for the return to Athens of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Parthenon. After her graduation, Mercouri joined the National Theatre of Greece, in 1949, she had her first major success in the theatre playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams and staged by Karolos Kouns Art Theatre. Until 1950, she worked in the same theatre in other plays by Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller. In 1953, Mercouri received the Marika Kotopouli Prize, Mercouri returned to Greece in 1955. At the Kotopouli-Rex Theatre, Mercouri starred in Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Mercouris first movie was the Greek language film Stella, directed by Zorba the Greek director Michael Cacoyannis. The film received praise at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Their first professional pairing was 1957s He Who Must Die, other films by Dassin and featuring Mercouri followed, such as The Law. Mercouri became well-known to international audiences when she starred in Never on Sunday, in which Dassin was the director and co-star. For this film, she earned the Best Actress Award at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Mercouri worked with directors as Joseph Losey, Vittorio De Sica, Ronald Neame, Carl Foreman, Norman Jewison. Mercouri continued her career in the Greek production of Tennessee Williamss Sweet Bird of Youth
36.
Nana Mouskouri
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Nana Mouskouri, born Iōánna Moúschouri is a Greek singer, considered to be one of the best-selling music artists in the world. Nana Mouskouri became well-known throughout Europe for the song ‘’The White Rose of Athens’’ and it became her first record to sell over one million copies. Later in 1963 she represented Luxembourg at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song ‘’À force de prier‘’ and her friendship with the composer Michel Legrand led to the recording by Nana of the theme song of the Oscar-nominated film - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. From 1968 to 1976, she hosted her own TV show produced by BBC - ‘’Presenting Nana Mouskouri‘’ and her popularity as a multilingual television personality and distinctive image, owing to the unusual-for-the-time signature black-rimmed glasses, turned Nana Mouskouri into an international star. Nana Mouskouri become a spokesperson for UNICEF in 1993 and was elected to the European Parliament as a Greek deputy from 1994 to 1999, in 2015 she was awarded with the Echo Music Prize for Outstanding achievements by the German music association Deutsche Phono-Akademie. Nana Mouskouris family lived in Chania, Crete, where her father, Constantine, worked as a film projectionist in a cinema, her mother, Alice. When Mouskouri was three, her moved to Athens. Mouskouris family sent her and her older sister Eugenía to the Athens Conservatoire, although Mouskouri had displayed exceptional musical talent from age six, Jenny initially appeared to be the more gifted sibling. Financially unable to support both girls studies, the parents asked their tutor which one should continue, the tutor conceded that Jenny had the better voice, but Nana was the one with the true inner need to sing. Mouskouris childhood was marked by the German Nazi occupation of Greece and her father became part of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Athens. Mouskouri began singing lessons at age 12, as a child, she listened to radio broadcasts of singers such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf. In 1950, she was accepted at the Conservatoire and she studied classical music with an emphasis on singing opera. After eight years at the Conservatoire, Mouskouri was encouraged by her friends to experiment with jazz music and she began singing with her friends jazz group at night. Mouskouri subsequently left the Conservatoire and began performing at the Zaki club in Athens and she began singing jazz in nightclubs with a bias towards Ella Fitzgerald repertoire. In 1957, she recorded her first song, Fascination, in both Greek and English for Odeon/EMI Greece, by 1958 while still performing at the Zaki, she met Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. Hadjidakis was impressed by Nana’s voice and offered to write songs for her, in 1959 Mouskouri performed Hadjidakis Kapou Iparchi I Agapi Mou at the inaugural Greek Song Festival. The song won first prize, and Mouskouri began to be noticed, at the 1960 Greek Song Festival, she performed two more Hadjidakis compositions, Timōría and Kyparissáki. Both these songs tied for first prize, Mouskouri performed Kostas Yannidis composition, Xypna Agapi Mou, at the Mediterranean Song Festival, held in Barcelona that year
37.
Jules Dassin
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Julius Jules Dassin was an American film director, producer, writer and actor. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France, Dassin was born in Middletown, Connecticut, one of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a barber. His family was of Ukrainian and Polish-Jewish extraction, Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 and he started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnicks early death. Dassin quickly became known for his noir films Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves Highway. Dassins most influential film was Rififi, a work in the heist film genre. It inspired later heist films, such as Oceans Eleven, another piece it inspired was Dassins own heist film Topkapi, filmed in France and Istanbul, Turkey with Melina Mercouri and Oscar winner Peter Ustinov. Dassin said Darryl F. Zanuck in 1948 called him into his office to him he would be blacklisted. Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood during the production of Night and the City and he was not allowed on the studio property to edit or oversee the musical score for the film. He also had trouble finding work abroad, as U. S. distribution companies blacklisted the U. S. distribution of any European film associated with artists blacklisted in Hollywood. In 1952, after Dassin had been out of work for two years, actress Bette Davis hired him to direct her in the Broadway revue Twos Company, the show closed early, however, and Dassin left for Europe. Dassin did not work as a director again until Rififi in 1954. Most of Dassins films in the following the blacklist are European productions. Jules Dassin was married twice, In 1937 he married Béatrice Launer, a New York–born, Jewish–American violinist and they married in 1937 and divorced in 1962. Their children were Joseph Ira Dassin, better known as Joe Dassin, a popular French singer in the 1970s, songwriter Richelle Rickie Dassin, and actress–singer Julie Dassin. In May 1955 he met Melina Mercouri, Greek actress and former wife of Panos Harokopos, at the Cannes Film Festival, at about the same time, he discovered the literary works of Nikos Kazantzakis, these two elements created a bond with Greece. He divorced Launer in 1962 and married Mercouri in 1966, they remained married until Mercouris death in 1994, the couple had to leave Greece after the colonels coup in 1967
38.
Academy Awards
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The various category winners are awarded a copy of a golden statuette, officially called the Academy Award of Merit, which has become commonly known by its nickname Oscar. The awards, first presented in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, are overseen by AMPAS, the awards ceremony was first broadcast on radio in 1930 and televised for the first time in 1953. It is now live in more than 200 countries and can be streamed live online. The Academy Awards ceremony is the oldest worldwide entertainment awards ceremony and its equivalents – the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, and the Grammy Awards for music and recording – are modeled after the Academy Awards. The 89th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the best films of 2016, were held on February 26,2017, at the Dolby Theatre, in Los Angeles, the ceremony was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and was broadcast on ABC. A total of 3,048 Oscars have been awarded from the inception of the award through the 88th, the first Academy Awards presentation was held on May 16,1929, at a private dinner function at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with an audience of about 270 people. The post-awards party was held at the Mayfair Hotel, the cost of guest tickets for that nights ceremony was $5. Fifteen statuettes were awarded, honoring artists, directors and other participants in the industry of the time. The ceremony ran for 15 minutes, winners were announced to media three months earlier, however, that was changed for the second ceremony in 1930. Since then, for the rest of the first decade, the results were given to newspapers for publication at 11,00 pm on the night of the awards. The first Best Actor awarded was Emil Jannings, for his performances in The Last Command and he had to return to Europe before the ceremony, so the Academy agreed to give him the prize earlier, this made him the first Academy Award winner in history. With the fourth ceremony, however, the system changed, for the first six ceremonies, the eligibility period spanned two calendar years. At the 29th ceremony, held on March 27,1957, until then, foreign-language films had been honored with the Special Achievement Award. The 74th Academy Awards, held in 2002, presented the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, since 1973, all Academy Awards ceremonies always end with the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Academy also awards Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, see also § Awards of Merit categories The best known award is the Academy Award of Merit, more popularly known as the Oscar statuette. The five spokes represent the branches of the Academy, Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers. The model for the statuette is said to be Mexican actor Emilio El Indio Fernández, sculptor George Stanley sculpted Cedric Gibbons design. The statuettes presented at the ceremonies were gold-plated solid bronze
39.
Aristophanes
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Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete and these, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy and his second play, The Babylonians, was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. In my opinion, he says through the Chorus in that play, less is known about Aristophanes than about his plays. In fact, his plays are the source of information about him. It was conventional in Old Comedy for the Chorus to speak on behalf of the author during a called the parabasis. However, these facts relate almost entirely to his career as a dramatist, Aristophanes claimed to be writing for a clever and discerning audience, yet he also declared that other times would judge the audience according to its reception of his plays. He sometimes boasts of his originality as a dramatist yet his plays consistently espouse opposition to new influences in Athenian society. He caricatured leading figures in the arts, in politics, such caricatures seem to imply that Aristophanes was an old-fashioned conservative, yet that view of him leads to contradictions. It has been argued that Aristophanes produced plays mainly to entertain the audience, an elaborate series of lotteries, designed to prevent prejudice and corruption, reduced the voting judges at the City Dionysia to just five in number. These judges probably reflected the mood of the audiences yet there is uncertainty about the composition of those audiences. The theatres were certainly huge, with seating for at least 10000 at the Theatre of Dionysus, the conservative views expressed in the plays might therefore reflect the attitudes of the dominant group in an unrepresentative audience. The production process might also have influenced the views expressed in the plays, throughout most of Aristophanes career, the Chorus was essential to a plays success and it was recruited and funded by a choregus, a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons. Thus the political conservatism of the plays may reflect the views of the wealthiest section of Athenian society, when Aristophanes first play The Banqueters was produced, Athens was an ambitious, imperial power and the Peloponnesian War was only in its fourth year. His plays often express pride in the achievement of the older generation yet they are not jingoistic, the plays are particularly scathing in criticism of war profiteers, among whom populists such as Cleon figure prominently. However it is whether he led or merely responded to changes in audience expectations. Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play The Banqueters and he won first prize there with his next play, The Babylonians. Some influential citizens, notably Cleon, reviled the play as slander against the polis, Cleon also seems to have had no real power to limit or control Aristophanes, the caricatures of him continued up to and even beyond his death
40.
The Birds (play)
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The Birds is a comedy by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed in 414 BC at the City Dionysia where it won second prize and it has been acclaimed by modern critics as a perfectly realized fantasy remarkable for its mimicry of birds and for the gaiety of its songs. In spite of that, the play has many references to Athenian political and social life. It is the longest of Aristophanes surviving plays and yet it is a conventional example of Old Comedy. The play begins with two middle-aged men stumbling across a hillside wilderness, guided by a pet crow and a pet jackdaw, just then a very large and fearsome bird emerges from a camouflaged bower, demanding to know what they are up to and accusing them of being bird-catchers. He turns out to be the Hoopoes servant and they appease him and he returns indoors to fetch his master. Moments later the Hoopoe himself appears—a not very convincing bird who attributes his lack of feathers to a case of moulting. The Hoopoe likes the idea and he agrees to help implement it and he calls to his wife, the Nightingale, and bids her to begin her celestial music. These soon begin to appear and each of them is identified by name on arrival, four of them dance together while the rest form into a Chorus. On discovering the presence of men, the newly arrived birds fly into a fit of alarm and outrage, the birds are completely won over and urge the Athenians to lead them in their war against the usurping gods. The clever one then introduces himself as Pisthetaerus and his companion is introduced as Euelpides and they retire to the Hoopoes bower to chew on a magical root that will transform them into birds. Meanwhile, the Nightingale emerges from her place and reveals herself as an enchantingly feminine figure. It cites some of the benefits the audience derives from birds, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides emerge from the Hoopoes bower laughing at each others unconvincing resemblance to a bird. Pisthetaerus chases off all these intruders and then retires indoors to finish the religious service, the birds of the Chorus step forward for another parabasis. They promulgate laws forbidding crimes against their kind and they end by advising the festival judges to award them first place or risk getting defecated on, a second messenger then arrives with news that one of the Olympian gods has sneaked through the defenses. A hunt is organized, the goddess Iris is detected and cornered, after being interrogated and insulted by Pisthetaerus, she is allowed to fly off to her father Zeus to complain about her treatment. Hardly has she gone when a messenger arrives, declaring that men in their multitudes are now flocking to join the new city-in-the-sky. Another set of unwelcome visitors arrives as advertised, singing because inspired by the new city, One is a rebellious youth who exults in the notion that here at last he has permission to beat up his father
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Brenda Lee
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Brenda Lee is an American performer and the top-charting solo female vocalist of the 1960s. She sang rockabilly, pop and country music, and had 47 US chart hits during the 1960s, and is ranked fourth in that decade surpassed only by Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Ray Charles. She is perhaps best known in the United States for her 1960 hit Im Sorry, and 1958s Rockin Around the Christmas Tree and she is a member of the Rock and Roll, Country Music and Rockabilly Halls of Fame. She is also a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Brenda currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Brenda Lee was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11,1944, to parents Annie Grace, Lee was born in the charity ward of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. She weighed 4 pounds 11 ounces at birth, Lee attended grade schools wherever her father found work, primarily between Atlanta and Augusta. Her family was poor, often living hand-to-mouth, as a child, she shared a bed with her brother and sister in a series of three-room houses without running water. Life centered around her parents finding work, their family, and the Baptist church, Lees father was a farmers son in Georgias red-clay belt. Standing 5 ft 7 inches, he was an excellent left-handed pitcher and her mother came from an under-educated working class family in Greene County, Georgia. Though her family did not have indoor plumbing until after her fathers death, by the time she was two, she could whistle the melody of songs she heard on the radio. Both her mother and sister remembered taking her repeatedly to a candy store before she turned three, one of them would stand her on the counter and she would earn candy or coins for singing. Lees voice, pretty face and stage presence won her wider attention from the time she was five years old, at age six, she won a local singing contest sponsored by local elementary schools. The reward was an appearance on an Atlanta radio show, Starmakers Revue. Her father died in 1953, and by the time she turned ten, she was the breadwinner of her family through singing at events and on local radio. In 1955, Grayce Tarpley was remarried to Buell Jay Rainwater, who moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio, Lee performed with Skinner at the record shop on two Saturday programs broadcast over Newport, Kentucky radio station WNOP. The family soon returned to Georgia, however, this time to Augusta, an Augusta disc jockey persuaded Foley to hear her sing before the show. Foley was as transfixed as everyone else who heard the voice coming from the tiny girl and immediately agreed to let her perform Jambalaya on stage that night. Foley later recounted the moments following her introduction, The audience erupted in applause, on March 31,1955, the 10-year-old made her network debut on Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri
