keywords: Greece
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 28 July 2020
20 Comments
During times of crisis concepts such as power and liberty are often brought into the light and re-examined, and it is a sad fact that during those same times, people in power often try to chip away at liberty, at democracy’s most basic freedoms: several current world leaders immediately spring to mind.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Daniel Sleiman
- 28 July 2020
7 Comments
Erdogan’s announcement in relation to the Hagia Sophia is one that is heavily influenced and panders to his Islamist sentiments and supporters. Hagia Sophia, often touted as the pinnacle of Byzantine church architecture and design, was reverted to a museum in 1935 by the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Kemal Ataturk. Altering its status to a mosque is clearly about propping up Erdogan’s Islamist credentials and base, which have slowly been eroding civil freedoms in the Turkish nation.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 07 July 2020
24 Comments
I think it is not only our duty to look after the aged, but a task that brings its own reward in the form of companionship, expressed wisdom, and guidance as to how to manage life’s testing times. I have always had friends decades older than I, and those friendships have been a privilege.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Gillian Bouras
- 18 May 2020
13 Comments
Nothing in the world is single, as Shelley said, and we have proof of this in the general reaction to COVID-19. That spirit, however, seems to have its limitations. For some politicians are set on dividing people, rather than on uniting them.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 04 May 2020
15 Comments
What turned out to be extraordinary was the familiarity of the subject matter, and the routines that Camus makes the authorities of the plague-ridden Algerian town Oran put in place: the quarantine, the isolation hospitals, the attempts to develop a vaccine, the volunteer health workers, and the way in which funerals were conducted in haste.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Angela Costi
- 14 April 2020
4 Comments
She is sitting on the edge of a mountain in the Annapurna, her face, away from the camera, her gaze, focused on the Lamjung peak, experiencing a moment of peace like many before and many after. The seconds could be hours could be days, the weather could be challenging or kind, she could be alone or surrounded by trekkers. It has taken careful hoarding of time and money to be sitting there framed by sky and snow.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 22 March 2020
15 Comments
I have been bemused to read the result of a recent poll taken in Britain. It suggests that 26 per cent of people feel ‘uncomfortable’ when hearing foreign languages spoken. Me, I feel envious, simply wishing that I was more of a linguist.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 14 February 2020
13 Comments
That’s it. People in mid-life fear death for many reasons, but disappointment must be one of them, for there are always so many things to do, so much in the world to see and to experience, a whole host of people to get to know, various ambitions to be realised, a great number of projects to be finished.
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RELIGION
- 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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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 13 December 2019
5 Comments
Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'.
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EDUCATION
- Gillian Bouras
- 10 December 2019
9 Comments
It's that time again, when exhausted teachers are wondering whether they'll make the distance and finish the school year with their sanity more or less intact. It's also the time when they have to endure snide remarks about 'a really cushy job' and 'all those holidays'. But it's not a cushy job. I know: my brother and I were third-generation teachers.
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RELIGION
- Gillian Bouras
- 15 November 2019
6 Comments
Dad is out watering the garden, but all the front windows are open, so he can hear the piano and his wife and two daughters singing. He often hums along to our repertoire, which is a mixture of Anglo-Celtic songs, Australian numbers — and, memorably, 'Lead, Kindly Light', written by the recently canonised St John Henry Newman.
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