Κοινότητα Αναγνωστών Βιβλίων - readers.gr

During this century the Greek world has produced a wealth of poetry that is as astonishing in its scope as it is in its vigour; and this anthology brings together a selection from the works of the five poets who may be said to take pride οf place in substantiating this achievement. Two of them (George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis) are Nobel Laureates, Cavafy is certainly one of the most ubiquitous poets of our times, the oracular grandeur of Angelos Sikelianos companions him with W. Β. Yeats, while Nikos Gatsos, less known outside Greece, is a fine lyrical poet and song writ...

Elder Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991), who was formally glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in November 2013, has long been acknowledged and recognized as a luminary and spiritual guide with the special grace of 'clear sight'. His life was particularly remarkable in that he lived it in both ascetic fastnesses and urban contexts. He left the world for Mount Athos at a young age and joined the Skete of Kavsokalyvia where, for seven years, under the guidance of the Elders Panteleimon and Ioannikios he lived a hesychastic life. It was t...

Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915-2004), essayist, thinker and poet, was arguably Greece’s most significant man of letters in the twentieth century. In the Aegean Notebooks, a record of his observations and reflections while sailing among the Greek islands in the 1970s and 1980s, the special quality of his literary and philosophical gifts, and of the man himself, are vividly present. Along with everything a mariner yearns to bring ashore, all he has felt and experienced at sea with the wake of the boat unfurling behind him, Lorenzatos brings us in addition a lifetime’s learning an...

In spite of the fact that marriage is recognized as a sacrament by the Church, the attitude of Christian thought towards the sexual relationship and its spiritualizing potentialities has been in practice singularly limited and negative. From the start Christian authors have been ill at ease with the whole subject. Sexual activity tended to be seen as a sign of man's sinful and degenerate state and the modern Christian is taught tο distinguish between love in the New Testament sense -agape -and eros, and tο see eros as a debased form of agape, if not actuaIly opposed tο i...

The union of the churches is one of the crucial issues of our time. Yet it is often forgotten that any discussion about it must begin with an understanding of what the Church itself is. Before one can talk of healing the schism, one must know what lies at its root. This book focuses on such central questions. It is a unique and unprecedented contribution to the understanding of the different developments of the two major sections of the Christian Church, the Catholic and the Orthodox. [...]

Dionysius Solomos is the fourth publication iη "The Romiosyni Series", a series concerned with the arts, the traditions, and the history of Greece during the post-Byzantine Ρeriοd. Already published are "The marble threshing floor", "Studies in modern greek poetry" by Philip Sherrard, an assessment of the works of Solomos, Palamas, Cavafis, Sikelianos and Seferis; "The dark crystal", an anthology of modem Greek poetry by Cavafy , Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis and Gatsos, selected and translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; "The isles of Greece and other poems" by Dem...

It is now only too evident that the revolutionary changes in mental outlook that took place in western Christendom some three or four centuries ago, and that produced the modern scientific movement, are the major cause of the crisis in which the world finds itself today. Yet the terrifying consequences of the practical exploration of modern science are usually attributed not to modern science as such -and still less to the mental picture of the universe which it presupposes- but simply to its misapplication and abuse. We are even told, with a naivety that is as inconsequent...

"Loxandra" is the story of a Greek family living in Constantinople (Istanbul) from the mid-18th century up to the beginning of the First World War. It is not biographical as such, and many of the characters are fictional. Others, including the main character of Loxandra, are real. Constantinople was the author's home during the first years of her life and in her book she conveys the historical events, the customs, the spirit of those times when life for the Greeks of Constantinople was relatively untroubled. The real Loxandra was brought up in the Anatolian tradition of lov...

The hillsides of Attica are stony and arid. Over-grazed in the past by goats and sheep, they have few trees and are covered in dense, prickly scrub. Relentless sun and often strong winds prevail for five months of the year, and in the spring and autumn months the miracle of the extraordinary variety and beauty of the Greek flora is revealed to the discerning eye. It was on such a hillside that the English woman Jaqueline Tyrwhitt - Harvard University professor, town planner of international renown and amateur botanist - chose to make a garden. This book is the story of t...

Τhis is the first collection of the essays of George Seferis to be published in English. The selection was made by Seferis himself, drawing upon his prose work written over a period of thirty years. Seferis was a classicist and a humanist, a man of modern sensibility imbued with a deep respect for Mediterranean tradition. He is present iη all these aspects in his essays. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, the citation spoke of "his eminent lyrical writings inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture". Hellenism for Seferis is an end...

This book distils the author's experience, as a young traveller and later an anthropologist, of a way of life which, although seen here in a Greek context, was in its essentials once common throughout the world. Simple archetypal houses, terraced fields and plunging forests, the love of land and family, unceasing labour, a vivid communal life, and a continual drama of jokes and quarrels formed the texture of Greek village life for centuries until the changes of the last decades. The author has shown how the spiritual vision which evolved in these elemental conditions shaped...

Rhigas of Velestino (1757-1798) is one of the great national heroes of modern Greece, for it was he who some thirty years before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 first conceived the possibility of a full-scale national revolution to free Greece from the domination of its Ottoman overlords. His aim was not simply an armed rebellion but a regeneration of his people, through education, literature, propaganda, and social and political awareness. He wrote patriotic stories, poems, scientific lectures; he published detailed maps, translations from French and...

Rembetika, the music which began in the jails and hashish-dens of Greek towns and became the popular bouzouki music of the 30's, 40's and 50's, has many parellels with American blues. Like the blues, the rembetika songs were the soul music of a group of people who felt themselves to be outside the mainstream of society , who developed their own slang and their own forms of expression. "Road to rembetika" is the first book in English to attempt a general survey of the world of the "rembets", who smoked hashish while they played the bouzouki and danced the passionate "zembeki...

Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) is generally recognized as the most important Greek poet between Cavafy and Seferis. This selection, although first published by Princeton University Press nearly twenty years ago, still remains the only collection of his poetry in English in volume form. Both the English and Greek texts of this present edition have been emended. Included here are works from the full range of the poet's career and in his several voices -those of the lyricist, the narrator, the seer. The volume also offers samples of the poet's varied forms, from sonnets to lon...

"The Blind Man with the Lamp", originally published in Greek in 1983, is the first English translation of a complete collection of poetry by Leivaditis. A pioneering book of prose-poems, Leivaditis here gives powerful voice to a post-war generation divested of ideologies and illusions, imbued with the pain of loss and mourning, while endlessly questing for something wholly other, indeed for the holy Other. A substantial introduction by the translator, N. N. Trakakis, situates and reviews the poet and his work within his times with special reference to this present collec...

Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851-1911) lived in the midst of an uncertain age of transition for modern Greece. It was a period of post-Enlightenment turmoil that followed closely on the heels of Greece's War of Independence, when the traditional old ways were being undermined and were fast disappearing under the pressure of the indiscriminate adoption of western mores and ideas. His reflections on and observations of some of the most complex facets of Greek life in both his native island of Skiathos and in urban Athens during this time define the modern Greek experience in a...

Edward Lear first visited Corfu in 1848 and the island seems to have made a deep impression οn him. At all events, he returned in 1855, after further travels in Greece, Albania, Egypt and elsewhere; and for the next years Corfu was to provide him with the nearest he got to at least a winter base until he finally settled at San Remo in 1870. Lear's Corfu years coincide with the last years of the British Protectorate (the Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece in 1864 ); and his letters and journals written οn Corfu, from which the text of this book is composed, form a commentar...

The diary of travels in the island of Crete in 1864 (4 April - 31 May) illustrated by the author's own drawings and paintings in both colour and black and white, with an introduction, notes and appendices by Rowena Fowler.