The songs in this book are a sampling of the urban folk songs of Greece during the first half of the 20th century. They are the creative expression of an urban subculture whose members the Greeks commonly called rebetes. These rebetes were people living a marginal and often underworld existence on the fringes of established society, disoriented and struggling to maintain themselves in the developing industrial ports, despised and persecuted by the rest of society. And it is the hardships and suffering of these people, their fruitless dreams, their current loves and their lost loves that these songs are about, and underlying them all, their jaunty, tough will to survive. The appeal of these songs, often compared to the American blues, is that the conflicts they express are not exclusively Greek conflicts, they are everybody's; and they are still unresolved - in urban Greece as in urban Anywhere.

Rebetika: Songs from the Old Greek Underworld (Greek Edition)

Arts & Photography

Sara Schneider

Katharine Butterworth

Music

Aiora Press

De-stress, relax, chill out with the Greek colouring book! Take coloured pencils, felt-tips, or crayons and choose your colours for gorgeous Greek vistas: the Acropolis, Santorini and other islands, Delphi, ancient monuments and theatres, and, of course, Grecian urns. Enjoy Colouring Greece ! Panagiotis Stavropoulos (b. 1962) is a painter and iconographer. He studied painting and engraving at the Gerrit Rietvelt Academy in Amsterdam, and has painted icons and frescoes in churches around Greece. From 1996 to 2014 he lived on the island of Tinos, where he focused mainly on sculpture. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Athens and Tinos. Panagiotis has also participated in several group exhibitions, and his artwork features on numerous covers of the Modern Greek Classics series of Aiora Press.

Colouring Greece

Panagiotis Stavropoulos

A wealthy count on his deathbed, his libertine nephew, an upstanding young clerk, and a scheming notary who stops at nothing to protect his daughter make The Notary an iconic tale of suspense and intrigue, love and murder. The classic work of Alexandros Rangavis, The Notary, a mystery set on the island of Cephalonia on the eve of the Greek Revolution of 1821, is Modern Greek literature's contribution to the tradition of early crime fiction, alongside E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (1809-1892) was a Greek man of letters, poet and statesman. Born in Constantinople in 1809 to a Greek Phanariot family, he was raised in Bucharest and Odessa, and attended military school in Munich. Following his return to Greece, Rangavis served at the Ministry of Education, helped organize the founding of the first university of modern Greece in 1834 and was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1856. Rangavis is the author of the first History of Modern Greek Literature (1877). He also wrote numerous plays and novels, and translated Dante, Schiller, Lessing, Goethe and Shakespeare into Greek.

The Notary

Literature & Fiction

Rangavis, Alexandros

Literary

Pythagoras wrote nothing down during the course of his life, not even the theorem attributed to him. And yet his knowledge and wisdom changed the world, and have survived through the ages to benefit us today. The essence of Pythagoras' teachings is contained in the Golden Verses, seventy-one verses as guidelines on how to live. Functioning as admonitions, they link the human with the divine element and determine the point at which both elements converge to reveal how we might ourselves attain this supreme virtue in our everyday lives. Bilingual edition VERSES 9-12 9 Things being thus, accustom yourself to master these: 10 the belly above all and sleep, lechery 11 and anger; nor ever perform shameful acts either with others 12 or alone; and more than all others feel shame for yourself.

The Golden Verses (Pocket Greek Library)

Pythagoras, Theodora

Health, Fitness & Dieting

'Of all existing things, some are in our power, and others are not in our power.' So begins the Enchiridion or Manual on the Art of Living of Epictetus, a collection of precepts that together provide a powerful philosophy for daily life. With practical grace and wisdom, the Manual addresses living with integrity, self-management, and personal freedom. The Manual is considered to be the pinnacle of Stoic philosophy, a school of Greek thought originating in the early third century BC, that holds that destructive emotions are the result of errors in judgement and taught an active relationship between individual will and cosmic determinism. Epictetus (ca 55 AD-135 AD) was a Greek-speaking Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave in the Greek city of Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey) and, after receiving his freedom, lived and taught in Rome until an imperial edict banned all philosophers from the Italian peninsula. Epictetus then established a school of philosophy in Nicopolis in northwestern Greece. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in the eight-volume Discourses and the Manual.

Manual on the Art of Living (Pocket Greek Library)

Politics & Social Sciences

Epictetus, Tristan K.

Philosophy

A man is seized from his afternoon drink at the Café Sport by two agents of the Regime - though what exactly he is suspected of we do not know, and neither, apparently, does he.\nWhat follows is a journey by car toward Special Branch headquarters, and the interrogation that undoubtedly awaits him there. With their destination approaching, oppressed and oppressor come face to face with their deepest human feeling, locked in a game of psychological skill. As the plot slowly unravels, so, too, do its main players.

The The Flaw

Samarakis Antonis

Eager to flee the parochialism of her French upbringing, and a painful family past, the young and beautiful Marina falls in love with a seductive Greek sea-captain she meets at the port of Rouen. She follows him to the Aegean island of Syros to begin a new life as a married woman in the home of her formidable mother-in-law. Enchanted by the beauty of her surroundings, and fascinated by her husbands erudite younger brother, she aspires to learn all she can about contemporary Greek culture and live up to the ideals of her classical education. But when disaster upends her husbands shipping business and the comfortable stability of their life together, Marinas world slides into a vicious circle of love, passion, and death. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is an exquisite account of the inner life of the heroine, and the collisions of different cultures and ways of being. In prose that ranges from the lyrical to the tersely realist, Karagatsis weaves a classic tale that is wide-ranging in its literary references, and devastating in its psychological nuance. This modern Greek tragedy has been made into a TV series and a highly acclaimed stage play, enjoying three sold-out seasons in Athens, and an international tour.

The Great Chimera

Karagatsis, M.

Derided and maligned more than any other Greek artist for his innovative and, at the time, often incomprehensible modernist experiments, Engonopoulos is today justifiably regarded as one of the most original artists of his generation and as a unique figure in Greek letters. Though he considered himself first a painter and only afterwards a poet, his poetry is widely read and admired, with many critical studies of his work appearing in recent years and with a growing recognition of its value and of its creative use of the Greek tradition and language. He enriched post-war Greek poetry with a host of poetic expressions, figures and images that have come to constitute part of the Greek poetic consciousness. In both his painting and poetry, he created a peculiarly Greek surrealism, a blending of the Dionysian and Apollonian, though always in keeping with basic surrealist tenets and, as such, his work is an important and original contribution not only to Modern Greek art and poetry but also to modern art and poetry worldwide.

Cafes and Comets After Midnight and Other Poems

Engonopoulos, Nikos

Poetry

Pope Joan

Emmanuel Roides

First published in the 1950s to international acclaim, Margarita Liberaki's allegorical novel, The Other Alexander, speaks to the opposing forces inherent in human nature. This exquisite poetic drama reenacts Greek tragedy in its evocation of a country riven by civil war and a family divided against itself. A tyrannical father leads a double life; he has two families and gives the same first names to both sets of children. In an atmosphere of increasing unease and mistrust, the half-siblings meet, love, hate, and betray one another. Embroiled in absurdity, Liberaki's characters must confront their doubles, as individual and collective identity is called into question in this tale of psychological and political haunting. Hailed by Albert Camus as true poetry, Liberaki's sharp, riveting prose, with its echoes of Kafka, consolidates her place in European literature. Considered one of Greece's most distinctive voices, Margarita Liberaki is essential reading.

The Other Alexander

Margarita Liberaki

Contemporary

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