“My ancestor was a product of two distinct worlds, the Christian and the Muslim, the Ottoman and the Byzantine, and such a symbiosis was far from uncommon, though Modern Greece’s national mythology demands…

“We were all Greek citizens, and proud to be: yet we were so different. I was Greek yet American-born and bred; the other three were born in Greece, and in Thrace, specifically. One…

“As the years have passed for me here, and particularly in fractious 2016, I fear that the age of multiple masks, and luminous, colorful ones, is yielding to that of the mono-mask.”—By Alexander…

“My family’s three-year sojourn in London was a great adventure and a linguistic one as well. On one particular occasion, after a long series of management meetings punctuated by British colloquialisms, I threw…

“‘It was more than that, much more,’ Bincho said, pulling on the last tobacco in his cigarette. ‘They had their own ‘civil war’, a Bartolomeski Noc, or St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.’ I looked…

“There’s a saying, in the Balkans: ‘Only an onion skin separates one people from the other.’ We are so similar, one to another, despite perceived differences (though our misperceptions are often strong enough…

“Both of us were now full-on hungry, and hot in the midday Macedonian sun, and we retreated into a stoa, one of the arcaded pedestrian streets which define Europe’s great cities. Here in…

“We sat down, and before anything else appeared, the waiter returned with a small clear glass bottle containing his rakija, nearly a fourth of a liter of it, and it was 10 a.m.! …

“Turning his sparkling Corfiot eyes my way, he said, ‘Alekaki, row me to the shore,’ grinning as he stripped down to his Fruit-of-the-Loom tank top and same-brand tighty-whities: ‘We’re off to steal figs!’”—Alexander…

“In the YouTube era, we bear witness in near real time to what ISIS is doing to our shared history. Culture expressed in stone, a past preserved, simply ‘has to go’ for such…