A richly rewarding narrative about a young painter's love affair with the Greek island of Sifnos When Christian Brechneff first set foot on the Greek island of Sifnos, it was the spring of 1972 and he was a twenty-one-year-old painter searching for artistic inspiration and a quiet place to work. There, this Swiss child of Russian émigrés, adrift and confused about his sexuality, found something extraordinary. In Sifnos, he found a muse, a subject he was to paint for years, and a sanctuary. In The Greek House, Brechneff tells a funny, touching narrative about his relationship to Sifnos, writing with warmth about its unforgettable residents and the house he bought in a hilltop farm village. This is the story of how he fell in love with Greece, and how it became a haven from the complexities of his life in Western Europe and New York. It is the story of his village and of the island during the thirty-odd years he owned the house—from a time when there were barely any roads, to the arrival of the modern world with its tourists and high-speed boats and the euro. And it is the story of the end of the love affair—how the island changed and he changed, how he discovered he had outgrown Sifnos, or couldn't grow there anymore. The Greek House is a celebration of place and an honest narrative of self-discovery. In its pages, a naïve and inexperienced young man comes into his own. Weaving himself into the life of the island, painting it year after year, he finds a place he can call home.

This book provides a comprehensive picture of Venice’s shipping industry from the days of glory to its definitive decline, challenging the accepted hierarchy of the political, economic, and environmental factors impacting the history of the maritime republic.

This textbook offers an up-to-date academic synthesis of the Aegean islands from the earliest Palaeolithic period through to the demise of the Mycenaean civilization in the Late Bronze III period. The book integrates new findings and theoretical approaches whilst, at the same time, allowing readers to contextualize their understanding through engagement with bigger overarching issues and themes, often drawing explicitly on key theoretical concepts and debates. Structured according to chronological periods and with two dedicated chapters on Akrotiri and the debate around the volcanic eruption of Thera, this book is an essential companion for all those interested in the prehistory of the Cyclades and other Aegean islands.

The aim of this book is to offer a fresh approach to the history and archaeology of the Cyclades in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Early Middle Ages in light of current archaeological investigations. It is an attempt to interpret human-environmental interaction in order to read the relationship between islands, settlements, landscapes, and seascapes in the context of the diverse and highly interactive Mediterranean world. It offers an interdisciplinary approach, which combines archaeological evidence, literary sources, and observations of the sites and microlandscapes as a whole, using the advantages offered by the application of new technologies in archaeological research (Geographic Information Systems). The islands of Paros and Naxos are used as case-studies. The author traces how these neighboring insular communities reacted under the same general circumstances pertaining in the Aegean and to what extent the landscape played a role in this process.

This book addresses issues that remain under-researched by feminist historians. They pertain to female economic contribution in specific geographical areas and countries such as Greece, Italy, a number of regions of France, Greek-speaking regions in the Ottoman-ruled Macedonia, and two countries in the Balkans: Romania and Bulgaria. Additionally, it compares and contrasts female economic agency in the above regions which is a field that hitherto lacks thorough study. Polly Thanailaki explores female contribution to the finances of their family and to the economy of their country and how they interlaced in a transnational historical setting, further exploring social norms and trading practices in these regions. The methodology is based on the study of original printed sources such as archives, newspapers, and journals of the period, along with secondary sources of literature. The book addresses the nexus of gender, economy, and society covering a broad spectrum of gender studies, economic history and social history in time and in geographic space.

Two journalists embarking on a year's adventure in Greece just as the country faces economic collapse seems foolhardy—but it's their decision to bring their crazy Jack Russell to a crisis-weary country with zero dog tolerance that tips the plan into actual madnessAfter an Arctic winter, a recession, and a downturn in the newspaper industry, two journalists and their dog embark on an adventure in the wild and beautiful southern Peloponnese. A perfect plan, except for one thing—Greece is deep in economic crisis. And if fiscal failure can't overturn the couple's escapade in rural Greece, perhaps macabre local customs, a scorpion invasion, zero dog-tolerance, health scares, and touchy expats will. This is a humorous and insightful journey through one of the last unspoiled regions of Greece. It is full of encounters with warm-hearted, often eccentric, Greeks who show that this troubled country still has heroes, if not euros. In a hillside village in the Mani, the locals share their lives, their laughter, and their stories, and help chart the couple's own passage back to happiness. They even find a place in their hearts for their Greek nemesis—the local pungent goat cheese. Things really can only get feta.