He used his olive grove as a track. Over the last two months, unable to practice in the local stadium as he didn’t have a car, Stelios Prassas ran up and down the field with its 96 olive trees and free-range chickens on the plain of Marathon.
SOCIETY
![Left: The Kypseli Municipal Market seen from above. Right: The pre-war ‘Maiden in Ecstasy’ sculpture by Michalis Tombros gracing a fountain. [Dimitris Karaiskos]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/kypseli_combo_web-320x200.jpg)
Pedion tou Areos park to the south, the Tourkovounia hills to the east, Galatsi and Alepotrypa Hill to the north and Patission Street to the west: These form the boundaries of Kypseli, a neighborhood that was part of the countryside until Athens became the capital of Greece in 1834.
![‘Housing has become a commodity and the type of ownership has changed in Greece. It remains to be seen how this alters the human geography in apartment buildings and life in Athens’ neighborhoods,’ says Harokopio University professor of social geography Thomas Maloutas. [Antony Surace]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/flat_web-320x200.jpg)
The Athenian apartment building is a living organism whose evolution reflects broader social and economic shifts, more recently from the decade-long financial crisis, followed by Athens’ emergence as a popular tourism destination, the advent of short-term leasing, the Golden Visa program and the ensuing influx of foreign capital, before the pandemic brought a pause in – though not a halt to – some fascinating developments.
More than 1,100 plastic bottles and cups, 500 aluminum cans, 150 glass bottles and even a tractor wheel and a toilet bowl were collected in just a few hours by volunteer divers last weekend from a small part of the port of the popular Aegean island of Naxos.
It took just a few years for the red palm weevil, which appeared in Greece in 2004 with the mass imports of palm trees for the Olympic Games, to exterminate many species of palms.
![Mustafa Duzgun, an Alevi faith leader known as dede and Ali Yurumez, chairman of an Alevi Association, pose at a cemevi, the Alevi places of worship, in Istanbul, Turkey November 11. [Reuters]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/alevi_reuters-320x200.jpg)
Ali Erdem leads his Alevi community each week in a ceremony filled with symbolic ritual, music and dance, performing in a place of worship that has been thrust into political debate ahead of Turkish elections due by 2023.
![[AMNA]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/quake-2-320x200.jpg)
A new application for mobile phones called Seismicity-NOA released by the Geodynamic Institute of the National Observatory of Athens provides users with timely and reliable information about seismic events in Greece.
![[AP]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/laptop_AP-320x200.jpg)
Aiming to make things easier for expatriate Greeks, the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Digital Governance are drafting a project that will provide them with digital services.
![[Dimitris Papamitsos/PMs Press Office]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/gov-gr_PMs_office-320x200.jpg)
The Digital Governance Ministry announced Thursday it will soon launch new apps that will digitize, among others, consensual divorce, christening certificates, property transfers and telepsychiatry services.
Cosmote has unveiled the first 5G ambulance in Greece, in collaboration with the National Center for Emergency Care (EKAV) and Ericsson.
![[Yiannis Liakos/Intime News]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/christmas_tree_syntagma_2021_intime-320x200.jpg)
Central Syntagma Square in the Greek capital was lit up yesterday afternoon to welcome the Christmas holiday season, amid the coronavirus disease pandemic.
![Ibrahim Rasool, Afghan refugee, formerly a FIFA-licensed futsal referee controls the ball at a makeshift camp housing migrants, in Velika Kladusa, Bosnia, Saturday, Nov 13. [AP]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/AP21326635897719-320x200.jpg)
Ibrahim Rasool loved his job as a soccer referee because of sportsmanship and fair play. But the 33-year-old from Afghanistan says there’s nothing fair about the way the European Union treats people flocking to its borders in search of a better life.
![[AP]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/athens_health_summit_kathimerini-320x200.jpg)
Kathimerini newspaper is organizing a two-day conference on the health and socioeconomic challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
![Father Pahomios, 88, from the Pantokratoros Monastery, receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus disease, at the health centre of Karyes, the administrative centre of the all-male Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, November 16. [Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters]](https://www.ekathimerini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/athos_reuters-320x200.jpg)
In the chapel of a monastery on Greece’s Mount Athos, Father Makarios read the gospel while conducting a liturgy as he waited for his anti-coronavirus vaccination.
They supported each other in the superhuman effort they undertook and came out victorious. Vasso Konstantinopoulou, 25, and Sonia Tsekini, 45, came third and fourth place respectively in the Panhellenic Marathon Championship in Athens last Sunday.
It sounds like fiction but it isn’t. It includes a Greek “independent state” deep in Africa, a Greek “tribe” living in the vast forests, a Cretan revolutionary – dubbed “Jungle Zorbas” – and a Greek Orthodox cleric.
As World Children’s Day is marked Saturday, Greece remains one of the three European Union member-states with the highest risk of children living in poverty or social exclusion, according to UNICEF’s Country Office in Greece.
The international exhibition ‘She’s Gone-(For An Empty Shirt)’ will be inaugurated at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation (MCF) on November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Greek pop star and former winner of the Eurovision song contest Helena Paparizou was on Wednesday named the first goodwill ambassador of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Greece.
A group of respected artists, designers, galleries and fashion houses have donated original pieces to an auction aimed at raising funds to bolster the Greek economy and its entrepreneurial spirit.
Kathimerini speaks to Adrianos Golemis, astronaut Thomas Pesquet’s doctor during his time at the International Space Station.
The American College of Greece (ACG) – Pierce has launched a new kindergarten and elementary school branch, its president, Dr David Horner, told Kathimerini recently.
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