A documentary about the women of the Greek civil war, those of the leftist resistance, and their time on island concentration camps.
9 4 12 (by Stavroula Toska)
The Tsolakoglou [a reference to a wartime Nazi collaborationist in Greece] government has literally wiped out my ability to survive, based on a decent pension which I paid for myself over 35 years with no help from the state.
If one Greek had taken a Kalashnikov into his hands, I might have followed him and done the same but because I am of an age that makes it impossible for me to take strong action on my own, I can find no other solution than to put an end to my life before I start sifting through garbage cans for my food.
I believe that young people with no future will one day take up and hang this country’s traitors in arms in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.
” The suicide note of the 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in Syntagma Square, in protest against the austerity policies hitting Greece. (via mollycrabapple)Amid Economic Strife, Greeks Look to Farming Past - NYTimes.com
Beyond the numbers, the impulse to return to Greece’s rural roots itself represents a telling new tendency since the onset of the crisis — a turning inward, a quiet kind of national pride in response to the overall gloom.
In my ramblings, I move about with the certainty and nonchalance of a longtime resident. Only a single sight gives me pause. On my way home one afternoon, I notice my name on a small poster plastered around a telephone pole — a surreal moment during which I can’t decide if I am misreading while also trying to figure out what I might have done to deserve such notoriety. In my next step, everything is clear again. The poster, white with a gold border, announces Grandfather’s funeral. I bear his name.
On the ninth day after Grandfather’s death, we return to the cemetery. This time, it’s just my aunt, her two daughters, and me. We carry napkins, a few plastic spoons, and a bowl of kollyva: a medley of boiled wheat, raisins, and nuts topped by a layer of sugar. The Eastern Orthodox Church believes that the prayers of the living can help the dead gain God’s grace. That is not why we are here. Since his death, there has simply been an unspoken determination to do everything that we are supposed to. For observing custom and ritual, we have been rewarded with the answers about what to do from one moment to the next, but with little else.
Facing Athens, George Sarrinikolaou
July 2009.
Tears in the Social Fabric: Milk and a bit of bread. (Cheese and olives and you’d make a meal.)
2010: “The milk for the Athenian Municipal Solidarity center is provided by the central food bank, which a supermarket chain started.” from Money Troubles Take Personal Toll in Greece.
1953: My father, in his starving village, was raised on UNICEF milk. When there was no UNICEF milk, the women of the village would mix a little cornstarch with the water used to boil the evening’s wild-grown dandelion greens for supper.
Yiayia on Relationships (by Athenos)
My Yiayia doesn’t care that my boyfriend and I live together, but she does want the priest to bless the apartment. Boyfriend is a principled athiest, but wants an evil eye by the door. Diaspora is confusing.
Six years old, driving around with my dad in his little Volkswagon Jetta —red with black leather seats—, windows down, the sunroof wide open, my favorite song played loud.
Gripped in fascination with a dystopic urban wasteland, bare wires and ambulance sirens, my political consciousness forming with the lyrics.
I’m afraid of all that will be for me but without me.
Sometimes he let me stand on the seat, my arms out the sunroof, hands beating the wind.
A Hard Life
Kalliopi Kalogerou has spent her whole life in the Greek village of Ano Ravenia where she was born in 1900. Simple witness of the century, she lived through Turkish domination and successive occupations linked to different wars. Most of her family stays elsewhere, in Greece or abroad (USA, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria); her shattered family world is representative of the Greek diaspora. The film is exclusively devoted to her life story, told to a young Epirot friend, Eleni Pangratiou-Alexakis, and to her daughter, Evguenia, both of whom have settled in the States. It also constitutes an ordinary yet important testimony on this long and painful page of Greek history (1900-1983).
(Source: youtube.com)
