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Keywords: Kalamata

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Some like it hot

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 July 2023
    6 Comments

    With Southern Europe's relentless heatwave leading to ensuing wildfires and loss of life, what is the future of this region under such environmental duress? And how can individuals and communities respond to the urgent and pervasive threat of climate change?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The problem of power

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 July 2023
    7 Comments

    As Greece casts its votes and recalls the struggles of its past, what does it mean to heed the lessons of Acton, Curran to safeguard a democracy? In an era where geopolitical power shifts and liberty often seems under siege, what does it mean for a citizenry to answer the call of 'eternal vigilance'?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The exile of place and time

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 16 June 2022
    5 Comments

    Writers are not only preoccupied, among other things, with the concept of place, but also with the matter of time and its passing. Novelist L.P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Cretan Nikos Kazantzakis considered that ‘the face of Greece is a palimpsest bearing twelve successive inscriptions,’ and he went on to list them, from the 1930s, when he wrote these words, to the Stone Age.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Remembering revolution

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 March 2021
    9 Comments

    In normal times this month would be one of great celebration in Greece and throughout the diaspora, for 25 March marks 200 years since the Greeks rose in revolt against the Ottoman Turks. But not this year: student parades have been banned, while military ones will go ahead with strict safety measures in place.

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  • RELIGION

    New year epiphany in a burning world

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 January 2020
    7 Comments

    This New Year saw me becoming a Twitter tragic so that I could keep up with the news of disastrous fires in Australia, and fires of a different sort in the Middle East. It all seemed too much. On the day after Epiphany, a major feast day in the Orthodox Church, I found myself outside Kalamata's Church of the Archangels, and went in to light a candle.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Coming and going in Greece and Australia

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 28 March 2019
    9 Comments

    That leaden weight in my chest is back. My self-diagnosis is heartache, and once upon a time I thought I'd get to the stage at which this heaviness would leave me for good, but I know now that this is never going to happen, at least not as long as I am engaged in my back-and-forth movements between Greece and Australia.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Waking up to homelessness

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 19 October 2018
    11 Comments

    In London of the 1990s, I observed people sleeping under bridges, on doorsteps, in cardboard boxes. How they survived the winters, I never knew, and I suppose many didn't. Since the beginning of Greece's financial crisis in 2008 and the influx of refugees from the Middle East, similar scenes can now be seen in Athens.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An old poet scales the age barrier

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 June 2018
    12 Comments

    An old man boarded the bus, seating himself next to me and behind the boys. He was unshaven, and his jeans had seen better days. He sat quietly for a few minutes, observing the scene, and then he tapped the nearest boy on the shoulder. 'I'm impressed by your enthusiasm, and it so happens I've written a poem about that subject. Here it is.'

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Remembering Palestine from Greece

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 May 2018
    7 Comments

    A little over 77 years ago, Allied forces fighting in northern Greece were overwhelmed by German strength. In Kalamata, for years now there has been a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial close to the waterfront. It occurs days before the Nakba, the remembrance of Palestinian displacement that this year marked 70 years.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Greek village rides the rise and fall of plastic

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 09 March 2018
    7 Comments

    Yiayia Aphrodite always practised frugality. She cut old dresses into strips and wove cotton rugs out of them, and used matches twice if she could. When plastic bags came into supermarkets, she immediately made use of them: I think every house in the neighbourhood received presents of circular blue and orange bathmats and doormats.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kindness is still everything

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 05 September 2017
    20 Comments

    The old grey mare she ain't what she used to be: so the song says. Well, I'm definitely grey, but thought I was trotting along satisfactorily on the sands of time until about a month ago, when I was calmly crossing a Kalamata street. I remember stepping on to the pavement, and then nothing more until a passerby was helping me up and dabbing rather ineffectually at my face and shirtfront. There was blood everywhere.

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  • EDUCATION

    Christmas encounter with an unremembered student

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 December 2016
    9 Comments

    I have no idea how many students I've taught in two countries. I remember, usually, the high achievers and their troublesome and often troubled opposites, but most are a blur: the human memory has its limits. On the other hand I think I can name all the teachers I ever had: this, of course, is much easier to do. There was more evidence of this today. I was in the Kalamata post office, waiting my turn and clutching a fistful of cards bound for Australia, when a bearded young man asked me a question.

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