Κοινότητα Αναγνωστών Βιβλίων - readers.gr

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...

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 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. [...]

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...

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...

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...

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...

Since its emergence as an independent nation during the first decades οf the nineteenth century Greece has produced a succession οf poets οf whom any country would be proud. Their poetry has behind it the majestic and awe-inspiring worlds οf ancient Greece and Byzantium, as well as the centuries-old tradition οf folk-song and ballad; and each οf them has drawn upon this background in various ways. At the same time their imaginations have been enriched through contact with other European cultures. It is this fusion οf the local and the cosmopolitan that gives their poetry it...

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...

Travellers, poets, artists, even scholars, still go to Greece iη search of something they feel that nο other Iand quite offers them. Partly nο doubt this is a by-product of the enormous prestige the world of ancient Greece acquired subsequent to the Renaissance; partly , too, it is due to the sheer physical beauty with which Greece presents one at practically every step. Even though the stereotype of classical Greece has now worn thin, and island after island, seashore village after seashore village, are overrun by the Iife-starved fugitives from the industrial wildernesses...

Demetrios Capetanakis was born in Smyrna in 1912, twelve years after the Greek poet, George Seferis, was born in the same city. Seferis himself is reticent about his younger compatriot. Perhaps this is not accidental. Seferis on his own confession had "nο idea about philosophical positions". Capetanakis was a philosopher in the true sense of the word: a lover of wisdom. Before he came to England in 1939 he had received his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University, and had written, in Greek, various philosophical studies, notably , "The struggle of the solitary sou...

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...

Philip Sherrard in his introduction to this collection of his essays writes: "The Greece of the classical heritage and of the romantic philhellene has gone, and anyhow has always been irrelevant to the Greek situation. Greece is not and never has been a lost paradise or a haνen for tourists or an object of study , and those who approach her as if she were any of these will always fail to make any real contact with her. For to achieve this it is not enough to act in the manner of those who singly οr in droves are to be seen pouring exhaustively and exhaustingly over the G...