It was an interesting day yesterday in Fener, the ancient neighborhood of Istanbul on the shores of the Golden Horn. A thick crowd of Orthodox Christians had gathered from the early hours of the morning to celebrate Christmas at the Patriarchal Church of St George. They listened to the Fener Greek Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople delivering a Christmas message for love and peace as he does every year. In a year where wars multiplied in our region and where peace proved to be all the more impossible, the words of a religious leader could be soothing as wishes more than realities.
The Memorandum of Understanding on the delimitation of maritime jurisdiction signed recently between Turkey and Libya has fueled already problematic relations between Turkey and Greece with new tensions. By a strategic move that Ankara sees as a checkmate, Greece must come to grips with a new situation in its southeastern sea area right next to its islands of Crete and the Dodecanese.
Academics, especially those whose field of expertise relates to our life, our future, our safety or our society and how it should be governed; often confuse us more than showing us the right way of thinking.
Even if they don’t pronounce them, most Greeks think about them. Almost all the time. These two words have nested at the back of their minds shrouded in a mist of vague fear and negative anticipation. Even if the subject is totally unrelated, they still bring these two words up in the end, as a conclusion or a cause for anything usually negative that happened or may happen to them and their country. These two words are easy to guess: Turkey and Erdoğan.
When I moved to England in the late ‘70s, the first thing that struck me was the popularity of the royal family. I was there when Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Silver Jubilee in 1977, after 25 years on the throne.
Nov. 17 is something like a difficult test for the new government in Greece. If it passes relatively unscathed, then it can feel safe for the rest of its program. If it is marked with violence, then it has to rethink its policies.
It is true that eating pork chops and drinking beer are among the favorite habits of the Greeks, especially in the form of open-air social gatherings
We had written that last week’s European Council meeting was to be an important one because it was to decide upon issues beyond the European Union’s borders and that the hot potato of the meeting was to be Turkey and its complicated relations with the EU, which boil down to the refugee problem. We were wrong...
These meetings are often boring to the public, or too complicated to understand. Yet, sometimes the meetings of the European Council may have to discuss issues that go beyond the borders of the EU, issues that relate to the rest of the world and take decisions upon them.
