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🖼️ EMST won Europe’s Art Museum Award, a rare Athens museum headline involving no marble whatsoever.

🏝 Condé Nast Traveller readers voted Greece the best country in the world, a verdict reached by people who were on holiday at the time and may not have noticed the sidewalks.

🍽️ Michelin is adding Thessaloniki and Santorini, so two places with very strong opinions about food are about to receive unsolicited outside feedback.

🏗️ A new Athens exhibition goes from the kiosk to the Acropolis, and giving the periptero its rightful place in the architectural canon.

🏰 A new 344-page history turns tiny Karytaina into a case study of modern Greece, which is a lot of responsibility for one Arcadian village.

📵 Greece may ban social media for under-15s, turning “give me your phone” into a national policy proposal.

♻️ Brussels put three Greek mining and recycling projects on its strategic list, which is about as close as copper scrap gets to VIP status.

🎉 Boston’s Alpha Omega Council turned 50 with a black-tie gala and 7,000 people at an Argiros concert, which is one way to avoid a sheet cake

🥳 Canberra is getting a full week of Greek food, film, football and Evzones, an unusually lively sentence for Canberra.

🫒 Adelaide is getting a little Athens, so your dinner plans just got complicated.

📖 Greek-language study in South Australia is down 40% in 20 years, so the diaspora is tackling a harder problem than grammar: making kids actually want it.

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The Michelin Guide announced it’s adding Thessaloniki this year. Anyone from there will tell you it should have been been there sooner, and then tell you where to get bougatsa, and then tell you that the place you already go for bougatsa is wrong.

Thessaloniki eats differently from the rest of Greece. For nearly five hundred years it was Ottoman, longer than most of the country, and that’s where the syrup and the slow stews come from. From 1492 it was also the biggest Jewish city in the world for a while, after Spain threw the Sephardim out and the Sultan let them in, and they cooked with eggplant and sesame and left a mark the Holocaust couldn’t fully erase from the kitchens. Then in 1922 the refugees came, from Smyrna and Constantinople and the Black Sea, and that’s bougatsa, the phyllo and cream thing the whole city eats standing up at seven in the morning.

So you have a place where breakfast is pastry, lunch is the main event, and the drink is tsipouro, which comes with small plates you didn’t order but don’t want to send back. Athens has restaurants but it feels like Thessaloniki has kitchens.

Michelin is now showing up with a notebook, but the city has been arguing about the best bougatsa for a hundred years without one.

🏌 October 19, 2026, The 23rd Annual AHI Golf Classic, Fairfax

🎨 October 10, 2026 - February 14, 2027, Alekos Levidis, Benaki Museum, Athens

If you’re Greek and over forty you’ve had Karytaina in your wallet. The back of the old 5,000-drachma note was a stone bridge over a river with a village on a rock behind it. That’s the place. It’s in the mountains of Arcadia about an hour from Tripoli, and the bridge is still there over the Alfeios, with a little chapel built right into one of the arches, because at some point in the 1400s someone decided that was reasonable.

The village is piled up on a crag under a Frankish castle. A crusader baron built the castle in 1254, which tells you something about how long people have thought this spot was worth holding. Kolokotronis used it as his base in the revolution. When things went wrong, and in 1821 they often did, this is where he came back to. There are maybe two hundred people living there now. One square, one plane tree, a couple of tavernas, and the kind of view that makes you understand both the baron and the general.

What’s around it is the point. The Lousios gorge starts here and runs north, and there are monasteries built into the cliff walls, Prodromou especially, which looks like it’s about to fall into the river and has looked that way for centuries. At the bottom of the gorge is ancient Gortys. At the top are Stemnitsa and Dimitsana. You can walk the whole thing in a day, or raft the river in spring, and sleep in Karytaina with the castle over you.

🌉 The bridge: Below the village on the old road. Stand on it, find the chapel in the pier, and compare it to the banknote you remember (if you do).

🏰 The Frankish castle: A short climb from the square. Kolokotronis’s last line of defense, with the whole gorge beneath it.

⛪ Prodromou Monastery, Lousios gorge: Hung off a cliff face and be reached on foot. Go early, dress properly, and expect to be offered a loukoumi.

🫒 Calling all Yiayiades in Greece – Anastasia Miari wants you to be part of her new series

Thin phyllo, a thick semolina custard inside, baked until the top blisters, then cut into squares with two knives at speed and buried in icing sugar and cinnamon. That’s bougatsa, and in Thessaloniki it’s eaten at seven in the morning, standing up, out of a paper box, before coffee. The refugees from Asia Minor brought it in 1922 and the city never gave it back. The custard version is the famous one. There’s a cheese version for people who think they’re too serious for a sweet pastry breakfast (hint, they aren’t).

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🇬🇷 The spirit that fuels the loudest tables in Thessaloniki was first distilled by monks on Mount Athos in the 14th century, from the grape skins left over after winemaking. The north kept tsipouro, the islands took ouzo. The quietest place in Greece made the drink that ends every argument in the north by starting a new one.

That’s it for now. A food guide arrived a hundred years after the food, and a village from the back of a banknote turned out to still be there.

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