“On a personal level, we are all numb. Even younger people are behaving as though they have dementia. We forget the way to familiar destinations, we lose our keys, we mix up words,…

“Thank goodness for the weather. It gives us something to talk about besides politics. This Easter—which fell a week later than what Greeks call ‘Catholic Easter’—we tried to get away from what is…

“Whenever I close my eyes I see olives. We’ve been picking seriously for four days and for a week before that I was selecting the best for eating, begging friends to come and…

  “Athens, where hundreds were dying of starvation on the streets every day in the winter of 1942, may not be the right place to begin. God forbid that such horrors ever occur…

“It’s this uncertainty that’s demolishing us. If we knew what the year was going to cost, we could perhaps cope, but it’s only February and new surprises arrive every week. January’s pensions looked…

“Some ‘experts’ from abroad assure us that life will become much more tenable when we revert to the drachma. Maybe so. But it will take a while. They haven’t realized that almost everything…

“As my father used to say, ‘You cannot get blood out of a stone.’ Austerity programs have been shown to fail. Yes, in turn we do need to reform, and we need to…

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge By Diana Farr Louis “These are the reminiscences of my husband Harilaos, known to some of you as ‘Joy of the People,’ a rough translation of his…

Carrying canvas bags and capacious baskets, we set off to fill them—with rosé wines (for our aperitifs), eight different types of saucisse, for grilling and for nibbling, cheeses, butter, and three loaves of…

“This summer was a time of savoring the familiar, of knowing our corner of Andros so well I can tell instantly when something extraordinary has been added. Like the goat’s skull placed like…