From the outset one thing must be made abundantly clear: anyone visiting from the motherland should be welcomed with open arms by our community and treated to our famous Greek-Melburnian …

My late uncle Stathis was my first ever contact with Karagiozis. Possessed of a deep, rumbling voice, he would insert of all the great Greek shadow puppet play hero’s catchphrases …

There is a section in the walls of the castle of Ioannina that locals always approach with conflicted feelings of awe and horror. For in a now fenced-off cave within …

As my great-grandmother would cook in the kitchen, she would point to the dish she was preparing and say: «Αυτά μας τα μάθνεσκαν οι Αούτσες» (These were taught to us …

They found Stella dead in her living room, slumped over her armchair, in the afternoon. She had been dead for less than a day. When the police took her body …

The last free Greek territory to succumb to the Ottomans was the Principality of Theodoro, in the Crimea in 1475. Since time immemorial, the lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia, …

The night before my first parelasi (loosely translated as “march” or “parade”), I couldn’t sleep. On the couch by my bed, my mother had laid out the costume my aunt …

“My daughter-in-law keeps on making appointments for me to have a brain scan,” my elderly client tells me, his voice shaking. “I refuse to go. That’s what she did with …

Over the holidays, a mother heard my children and I speaking Greek to each other at the park. Introducing herself, and her child who spoke perfect Greek with an Athenian …

The other day a friend was relating an experience he had in the 1980s. A university student, on his days off, he would assist his mother who was a cleaner, …