1.
Vehicle registration plates of Greece
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Greek vehicle registration plates are composed of three letters and four digits per plate. The letters represent the district that issues the plates while the numbers begin from 1000 to 9999, similar plates with digits beginning from 1 to 999 are issued for motorcycles which exceed 50 cc. With the exception of Athens and Thessaloniki, all districts are represented by the first 2 letters, the final letter in the sequence changes in Greek alphabetical order after 9,000 issued plates. For example, Patras plates are ΑΧΑ-1000, where ΑΧ represents the Achaia prefecture of which Patras is the capital, when ΑΧΑ-9999 is reached the plates turn to ΑΧΒ-1000 and this continues until ΑΧΧ is finished. Only the letters from the intersection between the Latin and Greek alphabets by glyph appearance are used, namely Α, Β, Ε, Ζ, Η, Ι, Κ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Ρ, Τ, Υ, Χ. This is because Greece is a party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. The rule applies in a way in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Combinations used for residents are L-NNNN and are limited. Until 2003, taxis used L-NNNN, the plate was aligned with the prefecture, when number plates were introduced to Greece, they were numbered and in the late 1950s the system was L-NNN and LL-NNN. The letters were Greek letters and Latin letters, respectively, in 1956, the system was NNNNNN. In 1972, they became lettered and the system was LL-NNNN while trucks used L-NNNN, in 1983, the system was LLL-NNNN and the first two letters are prefecture letters. In 2004, the euroband was added, the first 2 of 3 letters of a licence plate usually represent the prefecture where the car was registered. Π. — Disabled in war ΔΟΚ — Test plates ΔΣ — Corps Diplomatique or foreign delegation Ε. Α. or ΕΛ. ΑΣ. — Hellenic Police ΛΣ — Coast Guard ΞΑ — Foreign missions ΕΣ — Hellenic Army ΠΑ — Hellenic Air Force ΠΝ — Hellenic Navy ΠΣ — Fire Guard ΠΚ — President of the Government, i. e
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.
Basketball
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Basketball is a non-contact team sport played on a rectangular court by two teams of five players each. The objective is to shoot a ball through a hoop 18 inches in diameter and 10 feet high that is mounted to a backboard at each end of the court. The game was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a team can score a field goal by shooting the ball through the basket being defended by the opposition team during regular play. A field goal scores three points for the team if the player shoots from behind the three-point line. A team can also score via free throws, which are worth one point, the team with the most points at the end of the game wins, but additional time is mandated when the score is tied at the end of regulation. The ball can be advanced on the court by passing it to a teammate and it is a violation to lift, or drag, ones pivot foot without dribbling the ball, to carry it, or to hold the ball with both hands then resume dribbling. The game has many techniques for displaying skill—ball-handling, shooting, passing, dribbling, dunking, shot-blocking. The point guard directs the on court action of the team, implementing the coachs game plan, Basketball is one of the worlds most popular and widely viewed sports. Outside North America, the top clubs from national leagues qualify to continental championships such as the Euroleague, the FIBA Basketball World Cup attracts the top national teams from around the world. Each continent hosts regional competitions for teams, like EuroBasket. The FIBA Womens Basketball World Cup features the top womens basketball teams from continental championships. The main North American league is the WNBA, whereas the EuroLeague Women has been dominated by teams from the Russian Womens Basketball Premier League, in early December 1891, Canadian Dr. He sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied, after rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot elevated track. Basketball was originally played with a soccer ball and these laces could cause bounce passes and dribbling to be unpredictable. Eventually a lace-free ball construction method was invented, and this change to the game was endorsed by Naismith, dribbling was not part of the original game except for the bounce pass to teammates. Passing the ball was the means of ball movement. Dribbling was eventually introduced but limited by the shape of early balls. Dribbling only became a part of the game around the 1950s
4.
Cholargos
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Cholargos - alternate name, Holargos - is a suburb of Athens, Greece, located northeast of the city center and about 6 kilometers away from Syntagma Square. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Papagou-Cholargos, of which it is the seat, the municipal unit has an area of 3.950 km2. The main thoroughfare is Mesogeion Avenue, which connects Cholargos with central Athens, Cholargos was the name of a deme of ancient Attica. The most prominent citizen of ancient Cholargos was Pericles, Cholargos was part of the community of Chalandri until 1933, when it became a separate community. It became a municipality in 1963, Cholargos is twinned with, Aveiro, Portugal The headquarters of the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks are in Cholargos. List of settlements in Attica Official website
5.
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
6.
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
7.
Football
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Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal. Unqualified, the football is understood to refer to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears. Sports commonly called football in certain places include, association football, gridiron football, Australian rules football, rugby football and these different variations of football are known as football codes. Various forms of football can be identified in history, often as popular peasant games, contemporary codes of football can be traced back to the codification of these games at English public schools during the nineteenth century. The expanse of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread to areas of British influence outside of the directly controlled Empire, in 1888, The Football League was founded in England, becoming the first of many professional football competitions. During the twentieth century, several of the kinds of football grew to become some of the most popular team sports in the world. They tend to use throwing and running as the ways of moving the ball. Body tackling is a skill, and games typically involve short passages of play of 5–90 seconds. Association football, Australian rules football and Gaelic football tend to use kicking to move the ball around the pitch, body tackles are less central to the game, and players are freer to move around the field. Common rules among the sports include, Two teams of usually between 11 and 18 players, some variations that have fewer players are also popular, a clearly defined area in which to play the game. Scoring goals or points by moving the ball to an opposing teams end of the field and either into a goal area, goals or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts. The goal or line being defended by the opposing team, players being required to move the ball—depending on the code—by kicking, carrying, or hand-passing the ball. Players using only their body to move the ball, in all codes, common skills include passing, tackling, evasion of tackles, catching and kicking. In most codes, there are rules restricting the movement of players offside, there are conflicting explanations of the origin of the word football. It is widely assumed that the word refers to the action of the foot kicking a ball. There is an explanation, which is that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe. There is no evidence for either explanation. The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played ball games
8.
Dimitri Kitsikis
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Dimitri Kitsikis is a Greek Turkologist, Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics. He has also published poetry in French and Greek and he has been named one of the three top geopolitical thinkers worldwide, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mackinder and Dimitri Kitsikis. While pursuing his studies in Paris, he worked from 1960 to 1962 as a research assistant at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He derives his origin from a notable Greek-Orthodox family of intellectuals and he holds both French and Canadian citizenships, in addition to his Greek citizenship. His father, Nicolas Kitsikis, rector of the Polytechnic School in Athens, the most famous engineer of Greece, was a senator. His uncle, Konstantinos Kitsikis, an architect, Nicolas younger brother, was also a professor at the Athens Polytechnic School. His mother, Beata Kitsikis née Petychakis, was born in Herakleion, Crete, from a wealthy Cretan family and Greek Italian nobles from Trieste of mixed Roman Catholic and Orthodox origin. Her father, Emmanuel Petychakis founded a production plant in Cairo, Egypt. He stayed in France for 23 years with his British wife Anne Hubbard, the daughter of a chief justice and he was expelled from the French University for his active participation as a Maoist in the French student revolt of May 1968. Since 1958, Dimitri Kitsikis had traveled to the P. R. of China where he became a committed Maoist and he was then promoted to associate and later to full professor, after being invited to Canada in 1970 by the University of Ottawa. He is an admirer of the Byzantine Empire, Kitsikis is thus a Panhellen, a cosmopolitan Greek, holding Greek citizenship, in addition to French and Canadian ones. Believing in the collaboration of religious communities, as in the system of the Ottoman Empire, he worked closely with Shia Muslims in Iran, Jews in Israel. His elder son Nicolas has been a Vaishnav since 1984 and lives with his Hindu wife in the Vaishnav community of Gainesville, since the 1970s he has taught Chinese and Turkish history, political ideologies and geopolitics at a number of universities in the West. He also taught at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where he had as a student, Kitsikis is considered to have had a decisive influence, on Davutoğlus geopolitical theory. Later, he taught at Bilkent University in Ankara and Gediz University in Izmir and became one of the closest friends and advisers of the President of the Turkish Republic, Turgut Özal. In Greece, he was resident researcher at the National Institute of Social Studies and taught at Deree College and he is a public figure in Greece and had been a close friend and advisor of Greek Premier Konstantinos Karamanlis senior in the 1960s and 1970s. Dimitri Kitsikis was honoured by the Greek State in 2006, the latter established and financed the “Dimitri Kitsikis Public Foundation and Library” in Athens. His books in Turkish became best sellers in Turkey and were praised by the Prime Minister of Turkey and he kept close ties with Prime Ministers Konstantinos Karamanlis senior of Greece and Turgut Özal of Turkey as well as the Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping
9.
Kaisariani
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Kaisariani is a suburban town and a municipality in the eastern part of the Athens agglomeration, Greece. Kaisariani is located about 3 km southeast of Athens city centre, the municipality has an area of 7.841 km2. Towards the east the municipality extends to the forested Hymettus mountain, the built-up area of Kaisariani is continuous with that of Athens and the suburb Vyronas to the southwest. The main thoroughfare is Ethnikis Antistasis Avenue, which connects Kaisariani with central Athens, the town was founded in 1922 as a refugee camp for refugees driven from Asia Minor, most of whom coming from Smyrna. Formerly part of the city of Athens, Kaisariani was created as a municipality in 1933, the name was derived from Kaisareia, the historical capital city of Cappadocia, Asia Minor. Kaisariani has its own Greek A2 League basketball team, named Near East Kaisariani, the team plays in the Near East Indoor Arena
10.
Giannis Antetokounmpo
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Giannis Antetokounmpo is a Greek professional basketball player for the Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association. He stands at 6 ft 11 in, and while he plays the small forward position. During the 2015–16 season, he began to shine as the Bucks primary playmaker, the son of immigrants from Nigeria, Antetokounmpo was born in Athens, Greece on December 6,1994. Three years earlier, his parents had moved from Lagos, Nigeria, to Greece, leaving behind their first born son, Francis, even though Antetokounmpo and three of his four brothers were born in Greece, they did not automatically qualify to receive full Greek citizenship. For the first 18 years of his life, Antetokounmpo had no papers, neither from Nigeria, Antetokounmpo grew up in the Athens neighborhood of Sepolia. Like many other immigrants to Greece, his parents struggled to find work, Antetokounmpo and his older brother, Thanasis, helped out by hawking items such as watches, bags and sunglasses. In 2007, Antetokounmpo started playing basketball and by 2009 was playing competitively for the squad of Filathlitikos. In 2012, Antetokounmpo joined the squad of Filathlitikos and played for them in Greeces second-tier basketball league. In December 2012, just days after turning 18, Antetokounmpo signed a deal with Spanish club CAI Zaragoza. A number of other major European clubs had been interested in adding him as well, including Barcelona and Efes, with the contract starting with the 2013–14 season, he decided to stay with the Filathlitikos for the remainder of the 2012–13 season. During the 2012–13 Greek A2 League season, Antetokounmpo shot 46. 4% from the field,31. 3% from three-point range, over 26 games, he averaged 9.5 points,5.0 rebounds,1.4 assists and 1.0 blocks per game. He was also selected by the coaches as a participant in the 2013 Greek League All-Star Game. Even though he was not actually selected as an all-star, the coaches let him play in the game as a treat for the fans, on April 28,2013, Antetokounmpo officially made himself eligible for the 2013 NBA draft. He fulfilled his draft projections as a pick by being selected 15th overall by the Milwaukee Bucks. On July 30,2013, he signed his rookie contract with the Bucks. Antetokounmpo averaged 6.8 points,4.4 rebounds,1.9 assists,0.8 steals and he scored in double figures 23 times and grabbed 10+ rebounds twice, with both efforts resulting in double-doubles. He finished the season with 61 total blocks, which led all NBA rookies and was the seventh-most by a Bucks rookie in franchise history. He was selected to participate in the Rising Stars Challenge at NBA All-Star Weekend in New Orleans, at the seasons end, he was named to the 2013–14 NBA All-Rookie second team
11.
Royal Society of Canada
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The primary objective of the RSC is to promote learning and research in the arts, the humanities and the sciences. In the late 1870s, the Governor General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne, determined that Canada required a cultural institution to promote scientific research. Since that time, succeeding Governors General have remained involved with the affairs of the Society, in 1882 the Royal Society of Canada was founded with the personal patronage of the Marquis of Lorne. A year later, in 1883, the Society was incorporated by a statute of the Parliament of Canada, like their counterparts, membership to the RSC was limited and by election. Initially, the RSC was divided into four sections, each of 20 Fellows and these sections were, Littérature française, Histoire, Archéologie, English Literature, History, Archaeology, Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Sciences, and Geological and Biological Sciences. The founding Fellows of the RSC included Sir Sandford Fleming, the originator of the system of Standard Time. The Fellows of the RSC were nominated by a directed by the Principal of McGill University, Sir John William Dawson. These two men served as the first and second Presidents of the Society, as Canadian scholarship and research increased, the RSC also grew. Within three decades the fellowship of the RSC doubled in number, after several phases of restructuring, the RSC evolved its contemporary organization. In 2010, His Excellency the Right Honourable David Lloyd Johnston, presently, the fellowship comprises four categories, Regularly Elected Fellows, Specially Elected Fellows, Foreign Fellows and Honorary Fellows. Each year, approximately 80 people are elected to the fellowship, election to fellowship in the Society is the highest accolade available to scientists, artists and scholars in Canada. Once inducted into the Society, anglophone Fellows may use the post-nominal FRSC, the RSC is composed of three bilingual Academies, including a broad range of scholarly disciplines and artistic fields. Academy I is the Academy of Arts and Humanities, Academy II is the Academy of Social Sciences. There are two divisions of Academy II, an anglophone division – Social Sciences, and a francophone division – Sciences sociales, Academy III is the Academy of Science. There are four divisions of Academy III, - Applied Sciences and Engineering, - Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, - Life Sciences. The Society is dedicated to making its members’ varied knowledge available to the public, the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the RSC was established in 2014 to represent emerging generation of intellectual leaders in Canada. It elects 80-100 members each year, who showed high level of accomplishments at early stage of their careers, at the time of election, members of the College must have received PhD or equivalent degree within past 15 years. Nomination of candidates for the College follows similar procedures as nomination for the Fellows of RSC, the RSC officially began the Institutional Member Programme in 2004
Zografou
