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Day: August 18, 2017

Why do Israelis love Stelios Kazantzidis’ music?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-18 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

I’ll give Stelios Kazantzidis – Wikipedia’s take, but I’m very interested in hearing from Israelis why Greek Levantine-flavoured music, and his in particular, appear to have had such resonance in Israel. In Israel, he was a musical icon. Many of his songs were translated into Hebrew and performed by the country’s leading singers. Yaron Enosh, […]

How different is the modern Greek alphabet from the ancient one? Other than the fact that ancient Greek had only capital letters, does the alphabet also contain letters that modern Greek speakers do not use?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-18 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Writing Systems

In antiquity, every city had its own variant of the Greek alphabet; they varied not only on shape of letter, but also on which letters they used. Athens undertook a spelling reform in 403 BC, under the archonship of Eucleides, which adopted the Milesian variant of the Ionian alphabet, including the letters eta and omega. […]

Are you Greek? And if yes then where in Greece are you from?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-18 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

A far from straightforward question for those of us in the Greek diaspora. My dad does not speak a word of Pontic Greek. But this Pontic revival song, sung by Stelios Kazantzidis towards the end of his life, shook him: stixoi.info: Πατρίδα μ΄ αραεύω σε Five houses have I built; unhoused from all.A refugee from […]