Aiora Press – förlag

Eager to flee the parochialism of her French upbringing, and a painful family past, the young and beautiful Marina falls in love with a seductive Greek sea-captain she meets at the port of Rouen. She follows him to the Aegean island of Syros to begin a new life as a married woman in the home of her formidable mother-in-law. Enchanted by the beauty of her surroundings, and fascinated by her husband's erudite younger brother, she aspires to learn all she can about contemporary Greek culture and live up to the ideals of her classical education. But when disaster upends her husband's shipping business and the comfortable stability of their life together, Marina's world slides into a vicious circle of love, passion, and death. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is an exquisite account of the inner life of the heroine, and the collisions of different cultures and ways of being. In prose that ranges from the lyrical to the tersely realist, Karagatsis weaves a classic tale that is wide-ranging in its literary references, and devastating in its psychological nuance. This modern Greek tragedy has been made into a TV series and a highly acclaimed stage play, enjoying three sold-out seasons in Athens, and an international tour.

Greek philosopher Epicurus defined philosophy as 'a daily business of speech and thought to secure happiness'. He believed happiness to be the goal of human life and thought it could be achieved by pursuing pleasure. However, the Epicurean philosophy was then and still is now often erroneously interpreted as promoting hedonism. Rather, Epicurus considered pleasure to be connected to virtue not excess or sensual self-indulgence. This volume contains Cyril Baileys masterly, classic translations of the most important surviving writing of Epicurus -- the Letter to Menoeceus, the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings -- and offers the contemporary reader a comprehensive overview of Epicurean ethics, his philosophy on what matters in life and how we should live.

Often compared during his lifetime to T.S. Eliot, whose work he translated and introduced to Greece, George Seferis is noted for his spare, laconic, dense and allusive verse in the Modernist idiom of the first half of the twentieth century. At once intensely Greek and a cosmopolitan of his time (he was a career-diplomat as well as a poet), Seferis better than any other writer expresses the dilemma experienced by his countrymen then and now: how to be at once Greek and modern. The translations that make up this volume are the fruit of more than forty years, and many are published here for the first time.

Living on the island of Skiathos in the late nineteenth century, Ma-Hadoula, who may truly be likened to a figure from an ancient tragedy, is made constantly aware of the harsh fate awaiting young girls born into her traditional island community. She revolts against the social conventions of her day and against her God and is led to commit the most hideous of crimes. Against the background of village life and the natural beauty of the island, Papadiamandis explores the psychology and conscience of this woman in a work that is characterized by a moral tension reminiscent of the works of Dostoyevsky. Generally recognized as one of the foremost Greek prose writers of the modern period, Alexandros Papadiamandis holds a special place in the history of modern Greek letters, but also in the heart of the ordinary Greek reader. His novel, The Murderess, is perhaps his finest work and is rightly regarded as a landmark work in modern Greek literature.

The poetry of Odysseus Elytis owes as much to the ancients and Byzantium, as to the surrealists of the 1930s and the architecture of the Cyclades, bringing romantic modernism and structural experimentation to Greece. Collected here are the two speeches Elytis gave on his acceptance of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature, which are still strikingly relevant today. He addresses a hypertrophic and atrophic Europe in moral chaos, with as many coexisting values as languages-and to this he offers the "common language" that is found in poetry, in art, and in their base materials of sense, aesthetic, intuition. Ultimately, his is a powerful ode to beauty amid utilitarianism, and the need for poetry as "the art of approaching that which surpasses us" and "puts us at the threshold of the deepest truth".

Among the many remarkable personalities that emerged in Ancient Greece, none has exerted as lively a fascination as that of Alexander III (356–323 BCE), king of Macedon, most commonly known as Alexander the Great. He was called ‘the Great’ for the breadth of his conquests, the young age at which he accomplished them, and the immeasurable impact they have had on history. This is his life as recounted by the prominent Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch in the first century CE.

A modernist, picaresque epic, Junkermann recounts the life and times of its titular character, a hedonistic Finnish nobleman with a chequered past who serves as a Cossack guard in the Czar’s army, flees the Bolshevik revolution, and seeks his fortune as he travels through Constantinople and finally settles in Greece. Set in the social and political turbulence of the interwar period, Vasily Karlovich Junkermann’s fortunes reflect both the opportunities and dilemmas of the time. An unscrupulous character, he climbs with singular determination to the top of Athens’ social ladder while vacillating between an impossible love for Voula, a young woman engaged to someone else, and his overwhelming attraction to the dangerous Dina. Compared to Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, the novel explores similar themes of society and class; love, marriage, and concepts of value; changing notions of masculinity and honour; and the role of memory and the past. Written with Karagatsis’ characteristic irreverence, humour, and eye for the beauties of the Greek landscape, the novel provides a nuanced portrait of the myth of the self-made man -- from a Greek perspective.

Junkermann’s Swan Song returns to Vasily Karlovich Junkermann at the end of his life. The swaggering adventurer of the first volume—Cossack guard, refugee, social climber, and self-styled conqueror of interwar Athens—now confronts the reckoning of age, disillusionment, and decline. Where Junkermann traced a frenetic rise shaped by appetite, ambition, and desire, this second volume turns inward, offering a darker, more introspective meditation on memory, loss, and mortality. Older and increasingly isolated, Junkermann looks back on a life that now appears at once grand and grotesque, a farce animated by illusions of success, love, and masculine honour that have long since curdled into bitterness and emptiness. As past passions and betrayals resurface, the novel assumes a distinctly Faustian cast, probing the psychic costs of a life spent in pursuit of power and pleasure. Tragic, surreal, and often darkly comic, Junkermann’s Swan Song weaves together psychological depth and Freudian undertones with Karagatsis’s sharp social insight and mordant humour. In its unflinching portrait of a man undone by the very myth that once sustained him, the novel becomes a haunting reflection on the chimera of success and the devastation that follows when its promise proves hollow.

Exiled from Russia after the Revolution, Colonel Liapkin arrives in the provincial Greek city of Larissa carrying little besides the demons and habits of a vanished world. Proud, mysterious, and strangely intriguing, he attempts to fashion a new life at the Farm School outside the city, surrounded as much by the pretensions of teachers, directors, and Larissa’s beau monde as by the earthy pragmatism of the local peasantry. Yet as memories of the old order fade, Liapkin finds himself increasingly unable to adapt to the world around him, master his addictions, or understand who, exactly, he is in this new provincial environment. Drawing on his childhood in Thessaly, Karagatsis, one of the great modern Greek novelists, evokes interwar Greece with striking immediacy: the heat and dust of the plains, the uneasy glamour of provincial society, and a Europe caught between old empires, new ideologies, and the seductive promise of modernity. At once comic and melancholy, sensual and unsparing, Colonel Liapkin is one of the great novels of exile, as compelling today as ever—a timeless portrait of the longing for home and the unsettling possibility that it may no longer exist.

Fey Folk is characteristic of Papadiamandiss work. Its characters are quaint, simple-hearted folk living their humble lives in accordance with centuries-old traditions and customs, delightfully described by Papadiamandis with both reverence and humour. The setting is the hinterland of his native island of Skiathos with its intoxicating vegetation, its hillsides, springs and ravines, where the belief in spirits and the supernatural is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the otherwise God-fearing and devout inhabitants. Generally recognized as one of the foremost Greek prose writers of the modern period, Alexandros Papadiamandis holds a special place in the history of modern Greek letters, but also in the heart of the ordinary Greek reader.

The songs in this book are a sampling of the urban folk songs of Greece during the first half of the 20th century. They are the creative expression of an urban subculture whose members the Greeks commonly called rebetes. These rebetes were people living a marginal and often underworld existence on the fringes of established society, disoriented and struggling to maintain themselves in the developing industrial ports, despised and persecuted by the rest of society. And it is the hardships and suffering of these people, their fruitless dreams, their current loves and their lost loves that these songs are about, and underlying them all, their jaunty, tough will to survive.The appeal of these songs, often compared to the American blues, is that the conflicts they express are not exclusively Greek conflicts, they are everybody's; and they are still unresolved in urban Greece as in urban Anywhere.

Georgios Vizyenos (1849-1896) is one of Greeces best-loved writers. Moskov Selim is set in Thrace, a corner of Europe where Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria meet. Selim is a Muslim name, yet Moskov implies that he is a Russian. Vizyenos fascinating and moving story is set during a time of constant wars between Russians and Turks whose outcome would decide the future of south-east Europe: Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were becoming independent of the Ottoman empire, while Greece was to gain huge territories at the empires expense. Although Istanbul would remain in Turkey, it would no longer be the seat of the Ottoman Sultan, who, as caliph, was the leader of the worlds Muslims. Vizyenos story evokes a time when Greeks and Turks could share each others joys and pains despite the hostile relations between their governments. Listening to the protagonists life story, the narrator of Moskov Selim discovers that this Turk is a kindred spirit, despite the gulf of nationality and religion that separates them.

Vrettakoss poems are firmly rooted in the Greek landscape and coloured by the Greek light, yet their themes and sentiment are ecumenical. His garden, his own heart, are but a microcosm of the entire world, of the whole of humanity, and both contain divine messages that the lens of poetry can help us to perceive.

Andreas Laskaratos (1811-1901), a prominent figure in modern Greek letters, was a writer and poet, a social thinker and, in many ways, a controversialist. A life-long enemy of hypocrisy wherever he found it, on many occasions he turned against politicians, while he ceaselessly fought against corruption and religious prejudice and fanaticism. Much of his writing is savagely satirical, but his Reflections set out calmly, clearly and wittily his uncompromising and finely reasoned beliefs. As the essence of his thought they could be read with profit by present-day politicians and teachers of any nationality, and indeed by everybody with an interest in social and moral questions.

A wealthy count on his deathbed, his libertine nephew, an upstanding young clerk, and a scheming notary who stops at nothing to protect his daughter make The Notary an iconic tale of suspense and intrigue, love and murder. The classic work of Alexandros Rangavis, The Notary, a mystery set on the island of Cephalonia on the eve of the Greek Revolution of 1821, is Modern Greek literatures contribution to the tradition of early crime fiction, alongside E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins.

"Of all existing things, some are in our power, and others are not in our power." So begins the Enchiridion or Manual on the Art of Living of Epictetus, a collection of precepts that together provide a powerful philosophy for daily life. With practical grace and wisdom, the Manual addresses living with integrity, self-management, and personal freedom. The Manual is considered to be the pinnacle of Stoic philosophy, a school of Greek thought originating in the early third century BC, that holds that destructive emotions are the result of errors in judgement and taught an active relationship between individual will and cosmic determinism.

His poetry sings of the beauty of the natural world and offers a vision of the paradise that the world could be, but it is also imbued with a deep and painful awareness of the dark abyss that it threatens to become. For Vrettakos, the poet has a role to play in this struggle to determine the fate of the world. He is the champion of light and truth, the high priest of beauty, whose duty it is to celebrate the world, proclaiming the cosmic message of love as that which cuts paths across the darkness. He knows only too well, however, that the poets voice, like Gods, is seldom heeded. Works translated from Aeschylus; Aesop; Alexander The Great; Anaxagoras; Antisthenes; Aristotle; Aristophanes; Bias of Priene; Chilon of Sparta; Cleobulus of Lindos; Democritus; Demosthenes; Diogenes; Epicurus; Epictetus; Euripides; Heraclitus; Hesiod; Hippocrates; Homer; Isocrates; Menander; Periander; Pindar; Pittacus of Mytilene; Plato; Plutarch; Protagoras; Pythagoras; Socrates; Solon; Sophocles; Thales of Miletus; Theocritus; Thucydides; Xenophon; Zeno Of Citium.

A man is seized from his afternoon drink at the Cafe Sport by two agents of the Regime -- though what exactly he is suspected of we do not know, and neither, apparently, does he. What follows is a journey by car toward Special Branch Headquarters, and the interrogation that undoubtedly awaits him there. With their destination approaching, oppressed and oppressor come face to face with their deepest human feeling, locked in a game of psychological skill. As the plot slowly unravels, so, too, do its main players. Part thriller and part political satire, The Flaw is as powerful today as it was when first published in 1965, foretelling the military dictatorship that would take hold of Greece only two years later. It is the best-known work of Antonis Samarakis and has been translated into more than thirty languages, winning the prestigious 1970 Grand Prix de Litterature Poiliciere in France. This new translation marks the fiftieth anniversary of the novels publication in English.

This illustrated history of paper invites children to jump aboard a paper boat that travels from China to Samarkand, Mexico to Paris, and many stops in between to see how paper was created. Famous Greek children's author Sofia Zarampouka chronicles the unfolding story of papermaking, taking us to meet the people who discovered, invented and designed each new step along the way. With a mix of history and geography, she entertains and informs young readers about the thousand-year journey of paper, from ancient pulp and plant fibre to the book you hold in your hands today. Hop aboard and discover how this ancient invention transformed the world and continues to make our lives more creative and beautiful. Sofia Zarampouka is a beloved author and illustrator of over sixty children's books. Her work has won many national and international awards, and has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.

Like the constellations in the sky, words such as aphrodisiac, hubris, museum, galaxy and mentor each contain within them a story, if only you knew to look closely. This collection retells the myths behind common words and expressions in English, bringing to life the heroes, monsters and gods whose deeds and battles have left a hidden mark on our language. Compiling more than seventy-five myths, the stories in this book feature well-known figures such as Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hercules, Achilles, the Amazons, Medusa and the Minotaur. The entries are supplemented with original illustration reproductions of scenes from ancient pottery, and include translations from Ancient Greek epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Argonautica and Theogony.

Derided and maligned more than any other Greek artist for his innovative and, at the time, often incomprehensible modernist experiments, Engonopoulos is today justifiably regarded as one of the most original artists of his generation and as a unique figure in Greek letters. Though he considered himself first a painter and only afterwards a poet, his poetry is widely read and admired, with many critical studies of his work appearing in recent years and with a growing recognition of its value and of its creative use of the Greek tradition and language. He enriched post-war Greek poetry with a host of poetic expressions, figures and images that have come to constitute part of the Greek poetic consciousness. In both his painting and poetry, he created a peculiarly Greek surrealism, a blending of the Dionysian and Apollonian, though always in keeping with basic surrealist tenets and, as such, his work is an important and original contribution not only to Modern Greek art and poetry but also to modern art and poetry worldwide.

Roïdes' irreverent, witty and delightful novel tells the story of Joan who, according to a popular medieval legend, ascended to the Papal Throne as Pope John VIII. The truth of the legend is of little importance as the book is far more than a historical novel and, in fact, parodies the popular historical romances of the time. In Joan, Roïdes has created one of the most remarkable characters in modern Greek literature and in so doing has assured his place as one of its classic authors.

First published in the 1950s to international acclaim, Margarita Liberaki's allegorical novel, The Other Alexander, speaks to the opposing forces inherent in human nature. This exquisite poetic drama reenacts Greek tragedy in its evocation of a country riven by civil war and a family divided against itself. A tyrannical father leads a double life; he has two families and gives the same first names to both sets of children. In an atmosphere of increasing unease and mistrust, the half-siblings meet, love, hate, and betray one another. Embroiled in absurdity, Liberaki's characters must confront their doubles, as individual and collective identity is called into question in this tale of psychological and political haunting. Hailed by Albert Camus as true poetry, Liberaki's sharp, riveting prose, with its echoes of Kafka, consolidates her place in European literature. Con¬sidered one of Greece's most distinctive voices, Margarita Liberaki is essential reading.

It has been called the "age of revolution". The white heat of it came in the decades either side of the year 1800. But it lasted a full century: from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the great national "unifications" of Germany and Italy during the 1860s. Right in the middle of this long "age of revolution" and, as it turns out, the pivotal point within it, comes the Greek Revolution that broke out in the spring of 1821. Historians have been slow to recognise the key role of the Greek uprising in 1821, and the international recognition of Greece as a sovereign, independent state nine years later, in 1830, in this process that did so much to shape the geopolitics of the European continent, and indeed of much of the world. This little book sets out to explain what happened during these nine years to bring about such far-reaching (and surely unanticipated) consequences, and why the full significance of these events is only now coming to be appreciated, two hundred years later.

Smyrna, September 1922: A young Anatolian Greek is taken prisoner at the end of the Greek-Turkish war and marched off into the interior. He recounts his escape and heart-stopping journey through the familiar landscape of his lost homeland, where his ability to pass as a Muslim Turk reveals the common culture shared by the different communities of the crumbling Ottoman empire. A classic tale of survival in a time of nationalist conflict, A Prisoner of War's Story is a beautifully crafted and pithy narrative. Affirming the common humanity of peoples, it earns its place among Europe's finest anti-war literature of the post-world war I period.

Georgios Vizyenos (1849-1896) is one of Greece's best-loved writers. His stories, written in 1883-4, are set in his native Thrace, a corner of Europe where Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey meet. Each title poses an enigma: Where did Yorgis' grandfather travel on his only journey? What was Yorgis' mother's sin? Who was responsible for his brother's murder? At the end of each story the narrator possesses some knowledge that forces him - and his readers - to revise their earlier assumptions, which were based on incomplete knowledge. Because Vizyenos wants us to experience the difficult transition from ignorance to knowledge, he leaves us in suspense until the very end. Vizyenos' stories evoke a time when individual Greeks and Turks could share each other's joys and pains despite the hostile relations between their governments.

?Happiness is not a comfortable state of well-being, but an energetic and carefully considered endeavour to lead a rich and meaningful life. Few books are so suited to stimulating critical thought about the good life as Aristotle?'s Nicomachean Ethics. What makes the Ethics so appealing is that Aristotle always remains realistic, in spite of his high ideals, and is constantly testing his views against those of others. In Book X of the Ethics, included in this volume, the great philosopher discusses what happiness [eudaimonia] is and how to achieve it. (BILINGUAL EDITION)

Greek folk tales descend from Aesop and Greek antiquity, as well as medieval storytelling in the pivotal south-east Mediterranean world that linked Christianity, Islam and Byzantium. These tales, told by folk narrators throughout Greek-speaking regions up to our times, are wondrous, whimsical stories about doughty youths and frightful monsters, resourceful maidens and animals gifted with human speech. The tales weave substantive motifs, characters, and forms into a rich tapestry capturing the temperament and ethos of the Greek folk psyche. ?The folk tales included in this volume were collected in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. They were found in Greek-speaking lands, including Asia Minor and Cyprus. A few have been borrowed from traditions beyond Greece, while some have come down to us from antiquity, including Aesop-like fables with speaking animal characters.

Cook like a Greek! Savour delightful, nourishing dishes and enjoy a healthy diet, the Mediterranean way! An easy to follow, step by step guide to cooking traditional, delicious and nutritious dishes that have stood the test of time. The Art of Greek Cooking has something for everyone. Whether cooking for every day or for a special occasion, add flavour to life and bring Greece to your plate!