Author Archives
Alexander Billinis
The Eloquence of Humble Architecture: Homes Lost …and Refuge Gained
It only really struck me when I moved to Greece, that the legacy of the population exchange, and the scar of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, is everywhere in Greece. Its legacy and wounds are simply…
Modern Greece And Greeks …in Whose Image?
Many Greeks and foreigners consider today’s Hellas to be the resurrection of a lost ancient polity, Classical Greece. The Greece that emerged from Ottoman rule after a chaotic, heroic yet haphazard war of independence received…
Should diaspora Greeks be allowed to vote in Greece?
While passionate about being Greek, the gap between the homeland and the diaspora can be vast. How much does a third-generation Greek American know about issues in Greece to make an informed voting choice?
Rhodes Riches: An NGO Model for Greece
In the course of living and writing in Serbia, I had the great fortune to be invited by Rhodes International Culture and Heritage Society (Rhodes RICHES), a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Rhodes, to the…
My Favorite Greek Road Trips: Athens to Nafplion
When we lived in Athens several years ago, just before the cracks in the Greek pavement were beginning to appear, one of our favorite things to do on the weekends was to get out of…
Skopje (FYROM) 2014
In choosing the title, “Skopje 2014,” I am referring not to the costly, kitsch Vegas-on-the-Vardar reconstruction of downtown Skopje, but rather the state of the Slav Macedonian state in 2014. This country is in existential…
What, now the Hagia Sophia too?
It was not three months ago, when writing to express my outrage at the conversion of Trabzon’s Hagia Sophia Cathedral-Museum into a mosque, that I wondered out loud if Sultan Erdogan’s next move would be…
Rigas Pheraios: My Kind of Hero
I “met” him rather early in life, through his immortal words of the Thourios Ymnos, drummed into our heads by our Greek School Teacher in anticipation of the March 25th Celebration. In the Pantheon of…
A Partisan Chat: Alexis Parnis
“You see, I still live like a partisan,” as he showed me his house on the slopes of Mt. Hymettus, in the rapidly suburbanized and gentrified suburb of Peania, outside Athens. The modest house with…
Balkans: End of the First Balkan War
The Treaty of London, signed by the belligerents in May 1913, ended the First Balkan War. The Balkan League had crushed the Ottoman Empire and sent the borders of Turkey in Europe to the Chatalja…
Xanthi Redux
Thrace always draws me, its beauty, mystery, and somehow its remoteness and foreignness from the “Heart of Greece” captivates me. Last year, visiting relatives in Kavala, with a zippy car and no obligations my destination…
Ghosts of Smyrna in Izmir
There is something about travel to our lost homelands that creates spectral yearnings in me. I have had the great fortune to visit and to experience nearly every country bordering Greece, or where the Byzantine…
