RICHARD PINE

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LATEST ARTICLE

Several disputes and debates about Greece’s borders send me back one century to 1919, when Eleftherios Venizelos addressed very similar issues in the context of the Peace Conference following the First World War.


ARCHIVE
04.05.2020 / 18:08

It is the silence which makes life so different. The silence in the village. The silence in the town. The silence in the city. It bewilders and it disorients. It seems that life is suspended, unreal, immaterial. Everything that should “happen” normally isn’t “happening” at all.


01.04.2020 / 15:23

The death in February of Greek writer Alki Zei, at the age of 97, closes not only a life of distinguished authorship but also a period of Greek history which is about to come under review.


24.02.2020 / 08:13

Unlike Greece, Ireland had its civil war immediately after the war of independence in 1922. 


27.01.2020 / 16:40

What does “Europe” mean, and what does it mean to be a “European”? In the 1970s and 80s I was a consultant to the Council of Europe, at a time when it was limited to the “democratic” states of Western Europe and, believe it or not, Turkey.


20.12.2019 / 19:31

What do the Prespes agreement, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Boris Johnson have in common? They are all involved with nationalism, populism, lies, half-truths and illegality.


28.11.2019 / 17:30

In AD 41 Roman senators and their associates assassinated the emperor Caligula after a disastrous four-year reign marked by his egomania, grandiose building projects and incomprehensible foreign policy.


17.10.2019 / 17:04

There is often a very thin line between the real and the imagined, like an invisible border on the ground between two countries, two regions, two villages. No checkpoints, no barbed wire, no customs inspection. Just the feeling that something has subtly changed.


27.09.2019 / 18:22

Very few of us can be present when history is made, when a new work makes such a deep impression that it is clear to everyone that a classic has been born. The world premiere of Dimitra Trypani’s “Amiliti/The Silent One” in Paxos on September 9 was such an occasion, a defining moment in Greek, and international, music-drama.


13.09.2019 / 12:15

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech was a call for commitment and responsibility: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” It doesn’t matter whether “your country” is a nation-state or a colony or a dependency.



19.07.2019 / 20:41

There are silent truths and there are silent lies. Silent truths are usually so self-evident (“night follows day”) that we don’t need to articulate them. Lies of silence are more potent. 


28.06.2019 / 19:29

“When you’ve always believed that society is built on trustworthy foundations, it’s very hard to accept the fact that this isn’t actually the case.” Are these the words of a modern-day Greek politician? Sociologist? Journalist? No: They were written by the Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir in the wake of her country’s economic collapse.


16.05.2019 / 20:58

On April 18, during a riot in Derry, the second city of Northern Ireland, a 29-year-old journalist, Lyra McKee, was shot dead, probably by a paramilitary republican.


28.04.2019 / 22:59

The Greek proverb is: To cut down an olive tree is like killing a man. If so, then last month a mass murderer committed a chainsaw massacre to make way for four holiday apartments.