Author Archives
Alexander Billinis
Retsina: A Quick Tribute to a Greek Blonde
My first introduction to retsina came in the form of Krasosoupia. My grandfather, a hearty mountaineer from the hills above Patras, would occasionally dip older bread into wine and give me a nibble. This form…
Silent Empire Builders – Greeks and Serbs in the Russian and Austrian Empires
History favors the headlines rather than the fine print. Not unlike social media today, what is usually remembered are the posts and tweets rather than the long, complicated, but often far more rewarding reads. In…
The Greek Sailor: A Savvy Technocrat With A Heritage Over The Millennia
The story of Greek sailors is one of the oldest Greek narratives. One of the first classics of literature chronicled the travels of one Odysseus. We have the far-flung Classical Greek colonies all across the…
An Orthodox Oasis in the Blue Ridge Mountains: The Diakonia Center
In a clearing by a lake, a Byzantine metropolitan church straight from Mystra leaves you transfixed. This is in the Upstate Mountains of South Carolina, rather than the foothills of the Pindus, or Tayegetos, or…
The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji and the Greek Revolution
Few events could have been more important in the road to Greek national agency than this treaty in 1774 which ended the Russo-Turkish War. The war itself had been devastating for Greeks, but the peace…
Graffiti over Marble – A Profile of Greece in Crisis
In terms of geography, Greece is a small country, about the size and population of Illinois. In terms of history, culture, and complexity, Greece is vast, a continent really. It is therefore difficult to write…
How Hydra Got its Name, and other Riddles of a Glorious Island
It is hard not to fall in love with Hydra. We Hydriots are, of course, biased, yet the island’s graphic beauty, sharp light, and proud history, seasoned with the imprimatur of artists and celebrities, make…
Primary Sources, And Their Power: The Greek Genocide In American Naval War Diaries
Savvas Koktzoglou is a retired mechanical engineer, a Greek American from Chicago, Illinois. He is a native of Drama, in Greece’s province of Macedonia, a child of Pontic Greeks from the Black Sea who settled…
The Hydriot And The Argentine Navy
Quite close to the Hydra Museum and its Merchant Marine Academy, there are a series of commemorative plaques and statues. Waiting for the fast hydrofoil that would take me once again away from Hydra, after…
Fireships: An Asymmetric Weapon That Helped Liberate Greece
I try not to make parallels to the Ancients when talking about Modern Greece; it is a cliché too worn, a dividend too often presented for payment. And yet, allow me a bit of hypocrisy…
A Chat with the Director of the Historical Archives-Museum of Hydra
Hydra itself is a living museum. Few are the places where time seems to have stopped, and the visitor can walk the streets of a place—in this case, a breathtakingly beautiful one—and have essentially the…
Hydra 200 Years ago… in 1820
As this article goes to (digital) press, time travel is still not a possibility, and to recreate the past, even as a historian depending on documents, is still, in part, an act of fiction. The…
