🥇 Ourania Nomikou and Panagiotis Dimopoulos won world triathlon gold in Pontevedra on day one, both in the 35 to 39 age category, an age at which most Greeks consider the walk to the car a cardio event.

⚽ Greece beat Germany for the first time EVER! Ok now the team can take a couple days off.

🏛️ Mieza is re-emerging, where Aristotle taught Alexander and the group project had geopolitical consequences and became an empire.

✈ Aegean is Europe's best regional airline for its 15th year - does any other airline even bother to apply anymore?

🏠 Fivefold transfer tax for foreign home buyers, coming 2027. Greeks and the diaspora are exempt, so for once the fine print is on our side.

🎵 The Greek National Opera is staging a Kazantzakis tribute in New York. For a man whose gravestone reads "I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free," we think he would skip the reception.

🧠 Rebrain Greece goes to Germany in November. The pitch is sun, family, and a growing economy and the counter-pitch is a German salary. It'll be a close game, unlike Sunday's :-)

🍽 Mavs in Melbourne won best family dining in Victoria and Tasmania, in a category Greek restaurants have an unfair advantage in, since "family dining" is the only kind they've ever offered.

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

Archaeologists at Mieza are uncovering more of the royal complex where Aristotle is believed to have taught the teenage Alexander the Great. They’ve found mosaic floors, large halls and a colonnade nearly 200 meters long. Earlier work at the site also turned up four writing styluses (!).

Aristotle was born in Stagira in 384 BC and seems to have been interested in almost everything: logic, politics, ethics, poetry, biology, physics, memory, dreams, weather, animals. He spent about twenty years at Plato’s Academy in Athens, but while Plato was interested in ideal forms, Aristotle kept looking at the actual world.

He studied animals, opened eggs at different stages to watch chicks develop, described octopus camouflage and tried to classify living things. He also thought the heart was responsible for thought and the brain mostly existed to cool the blood, so this was clearly not an entirely undefeated intellectual career.

Then Philip II hired him to teach his son, when Alexander was about thirteen. We know very little about what Aristotle taught him, or how much influence he had on the man Alexander became, but it is still a remarkable pairing: Aristotle teaching Alexander in a quiet corner of Macedonia before either had become as famous as history intended.

Most of Aristotle’s writing has disappeared, but what survived was enough. Arabic scholars later called him “The First Teacher,” while medieval European writers often referred to him simply as “The Philosopher,” assuming everyone knew who they meant.

And now Mieza is coming back out of the ground, giving us a little more of the place where the two of them once sat and talked.

The four styluses are a nice detail, but archaeologists still cannot tell us who held them. Of course, give tour guides and souvenir shops just a bit of time…

💃 October 1-3, 2026, Houston Greek Festival, Houston, TX

💃 October 2-4, 2026, Mid Cities Greek FoodFest, Euless, TX

🎶 October 15, 2026, Nikos Kazantzakis: An Odyssey in Music, Greek National opera, Carnegie Hall

🎭 October 16, 2026, Sophocles Philoctetes, Princeton University

Naousa sits on the slopes of Mount Vermio, about 90 kilometers from Thessaloniki, and all the recent attention around ancient Mieza gives you a very good reason to go.

A few kilometers outside town, at Isvoria, is the site traditionally identified as Aristotle’s school. There are springs, plane trees, caves and the remains of an Ionic stoa. Aristotle is believed to have taught Alexander and other young Macedonian nobles here. You can walk through it for free, and for somewhere attached to two of the most famous names in ancient history, it remains remarkably low-key.

Naousa itself has water everywhere. The Arapitsa cuts through town, with bridges and waterfalls along the way, then leads back to its springs at Agios Nikolaos, about three kilometers out. Huge plane trees, walking paths, tavernas, and local trout. It is where people from Naousa go on a Sunday.

The river also carries a much darker piece of the town’s history. During the destruction of Naousa in 1822, women and children died at the falls at Stoubanos rather than be captured. In 1955, the Greek state officially gave Naousa the title “Heroic City.”

Then there is the wine. Naousa is Xinomavro country. The name means roughly “acid-black,” which tells you something about the grape before you drink it. It makes structured, tannic reds that can age for years, and the Naousa PDO dates back to 1971. Kir-Yianni, Dalamara and plenty of smaller producers are scattered around the area. The town’s wine museum occupies an old Boutari building constructed in 1908 as an organized winery.

And in winter, 3-5 Pigadia is 17 kilometers up the mountain. It has ten downhill runs, including Philippos, one of the harder black pistes in Greece, plus a serious artificial-snow system.

So yes, you can spend the morning with Aristotle, drink Xinomavro with lunch and end up on a ski slope the next day - that’s a pretty good weekend.

🏛️ The School of Aristotle at Isvoria
Go in the morning and walk around the Nymphaion, springs and plane trees.

🍷 Kir-Yianni or Dalamara
Book ahead and taste Xinomavro where it is grown. If they have older vintages open, even better.

🎭 Genitsaroi and Boules
If you happen to be there during Carnival, don’t miss it. The masked processions, music and dances are one of Naousa’s defining traditions and are still performed according to a very specific local ritual.

🎿 3-5 Pigadia — Seventeen kilometers up. The steepest piste in Greece, and a chalet at the bottom for the people who came to watch.

Veria is famous for ravani (or revani), a semolina cake soaked so thoroughly in syrup that restraint is no longer part of the conversation. Semolina, yogurt, eggs, sugar, lemon syrup, baked flat in a tray and dropped in lemon syrup while it is still hot. Serve it cold with Greek coffee and pretend two pieces was the original plan.

🇬🇷 According to Plutarch, Alexander carried Aristotle’s edition of the Iliad on campaign and kept it under his pillow beside a dagger. Later, after capturing Darius’s possessions, he chose a particularly valuable casket to store the book.

That’s it for now. We started with Aristotle, ended up drinking Xinomavro in Naousa, and somewhere in between Greece beat Germany and went looking for its emigrants in Munich.

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