The inhabitants of Mandra, in the western part of Attica, Greece, are in shock.
Most international media outlets hardly picked it up as a story; and the few that did, devoted just a few lines to it.
It was smooth sailing for Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias on his one-day working visit to Ankara on Oct. 24. Shortly after his trip, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan confirmed that he would be visiting Greece soon.
When Greek Foreign Minister Nicos Kotzias was in Ankara last week, he met with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
The taxi driver that picked me up from the Beşiktaş pier assured me he knew the address: “Şişli Rum-Orthodox cemetery.” “You mean the big wall, opposite Cevahir Shopping Mall?”
A cartoon on the Sunday, Oct. 15, edition of the well-known Greek Kathimerini was quite sharp, as usual: A boyish looking Greek prime minister standing on his toes and shaking all over introduces himself to an almost twice his size American president who is greeting him with a crushing handshake.
Last June, the renowned Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis conducted a gigantic concert of his music with the participation of about one thousand singers and tens of thousands of spectators at the ancient marble Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.
Since April Greece has been going through the eighth year of an economic crisis that forced most of its citizens to learn to “live with less” and brought havoc into the traditional political spectrum. It pushed mainstream parties to near extinction and gave the mandate to a previously little-known leftist group who now governs with a small rightist, nationalist party, having a slim majority in the parliament.
It was in the middle of a summer night too, it caught people in bed. The date was August 17 and the time was 3:02 a.m.
