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🎭 Women's Carnival in Preveza brought costumes, chaos, and the energy of Greek women who've been waiting all year for a socially acceptable reason to take over the streets.

🐐 Carnival in Skyros is back with the Yeros, the Korela, and the Frangos, a primal masquerade tradition so old and strange that explaining it to non-Greeks requires a PowerPoint.

🪁 Thessaloniki kite makers upgrading Clean Monday kites with modern technology, addressing everything except the annual father-child argument about who's holding the string wrong.

🏛️ Greece returning a small group of Egyptian antiquities, which is either a generous diplomatic gesture or the most strategically awkward move possible for a country that's been asking Britain for the Parthenon Marbles since 1832.

💰 Greek tourism revenues hit a record €23.6 billion in 2025, a number almost justified by the price of a beach sunbed in Mykonos. Almost.

🌾 Greece first in EU agricultural added value, officially turning every Greek person's unsolicited opinion about olive oil quality into documented fact.

🤍 Culture Ministry to acquire WWII execution photographs - a historically significant photographic record that has never been publicly available until now. Article here and great opinion piece here.

📸 Open call for photo submissions for the US 250th Anniversary "Hellenic Footprints". This is your chance to prove Greeks helped build America with documentation instead of just your uncle's claims.

🎨 "Euclid's Finite to Zeno's Infinite" — Hellenic-American women artists exhibition opens March 4 in New York, combining Greek mathematical philosophy with contemporary art in a title that could double as a philosophy exam question.

🎙️ The Hellenic Initiative launches "ITHAKA: The Journey of Great Hellenes," a new podcast exploring Greek achievement, presumably each episode ending with someone saying "See? We invented everything."

📜 Registrations open for the Certificate of Attainment in Greek Language exams, for diaspora Greeks who want official proof they can do more than order gyro horis kremidia.

💌 Send it to [email protected] - your question might become next week's featured Q&A.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born in Crete in 1541, trained as a Byzantine icon painter, left at 26, studied under Titian in Venice, absorbed Rome, then landed in Toledo, Spain where he spent the rest of his life painting saints with bodies too long, colors too intense, and perspectives too warped for anyone to be comfortable with. Spain called him "El Greco" (The Greek), which was less a term of endearment and more Toledo's way of saying "the weird foreign guy who paints like that." He was considered odd, difficult, and possibly heretical for making religious figures look like they were having spiritual experiences instead of posing for portraits. Critics questioned his eyesight and patrons kept hiring him anyway. He died in Toledo in 1614, was mostly forgotten for three centuries, then got rediscovered by 20th-century modernists who looked at his distorted figures and said "this man invented Expressionism 300 years early and nobody noticed."

Greece claims El Greco as proof that Greek genius thrives internationally when given the chance to leave and Spain claims him as a Spanish master, proof that Toledo's cultural gravity attracted and elevated foreign talent. El Greco himself seemed unbothered by the debate, which is the most artist response possible. He signed his paintings with his Greek name in Greek letters, never learned to write Spanish fluently, and painted Byzantine-influenced figures inside Catholic churches — synthesizing three traditions into something that didn't belong to any of them. "The Burial of Count Orgaz" puts heaven and earth on the same canvas in a way that shouldn't work but does, which is basically the El Greco brand. Both countries now sell his face on magnets in museum gift shops, which is probably the most honest resolution to a 500-year cultural custody battle.

🖼 March 4-31, 2026, Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic-American Women Artists, Consulate General of Greece in New York

🏃 March 30, 2026 - Athens Half Marathon

💃 April 25, 2026,  The Hellenic Social Club, San Francisco

Hydra is two hours by hydrofoil from Piraeus and approximately fifty years from the nearest engine noise. The island banned cars and motorcycles in the 1950s and actually enforced it, which might be the most shocking thing any Greek municipality has ever accomplished. Everything moves by foot, water taxi, or donkey — including your luggage, construction materials, and whatever dignity you had before a donkey carried your suitcase up a stone hill while you sweated behind it. The harbor is a grey-stone amphitheater of 18th-century sea captain mansions rising from a horseshoe-shaped waterfront so photogenic it feels like it's performing for you. Brad Pitt is currently here filming, which either validates Hydra's enduring appeal or just confirms that celebrities and bohemians have been finding this island for 60 years while your travel plans keep defaulting to Mykonos.

The car ban means Hydra moves at walking pace, which is either meditative or maddening depending on how Athenian your nervous system is. Beaches require effort: Vlychos is a 20-minute walk with a taverna reward at the end, Kamini is a small cove with fishing boats and zero pretension, and anything further needs a water taxi. The hike to Profitis Ilias Monastery at 500 meters earns you Saronic Gulf panoramas and the quiet satisfaction of being above everyone who stayed at the harbor drinking freddo. The Historical Archives Museum documents Hydra's improbable past as a tiny island that built a massive merchant fleet and punched well above its weight in the revolution — a backstory so disproportionate to the island's size it feels like overcompensation.

Leonard Cohen bought a house here in 1960 for $1,500, wrote about Greek light and personal darkness, and turned Hydra into a bohemian magnet. But Cohen was just the most famous in a line that includes Henry Miller, Picasso, Chagall, Maria Callas, Sophia Loren (who filmed Boy on a Dolphin here in 1957, the movie that put Hydra on the international map), and the Rolling Stones, who showed up often enough that nobody bothered mentioning it. Before any of them arrived, Hydra had already produced one Greek president, five prime ministers, and Admiral Andreas Miaoulis, whose fleet of 130 ships basically won the naval war of Greek independence - a military contribution so outsized for a tiny island that the Ottomans nicknamed it "Little England." Cohen's $1,500 house would cost you a couple million now, but the island earned it.

🏊 Hydronetta: concrete swimming platform cut into the rocks below town, locals jumping off ledges into deep water, ladder access, afternoon sun, free.

🥾 Profitis Ilias at sunrise: start at 6am, reach the monastery as the sun comes up over the Saronic, return before the heat makes you question your life choices.

Lagana (Clean Monday Bread) Unleavened flatbread eaten on Clean Monday: simple flour, water, olive oil, sesame seeds, no yeast because leavening agents apparently offend Lenten sensibilities. Greeks bake it once a year, eat it enthusiastically for one day, forget about it for 364 days.

🇬🇷 The Marti bracelet (Martis) is the red-and-white thread tied around the wrist on March 1st to protect skin from the spring sun, a tradition so old it predates any reasonable explanation for why a piece of string would accomplish this. You wear it until you see the first swallow of spring, then tie it to a tree. If your yiayia caught you taking it off early, the sun was the least of your problems.

That's it for this week. If you're flying a kite today: the kite doesn't care about your engineering confidence. The wind decides. Kali Sarakosti. 🪁

Catch you next week for more news, drama and deep dives. 🧿 Stay Greek. [email protected]