🕊 Legendary singer Marinella, the voice that sang Greece's joy, grief, and everything in between for 68 years, died at 87, leaving behind the sort of legacy Greeks don’t describe, but assume that you already understand 💔

🚀 Greece launched its ERMIS satellites via SpaceX, and a student-built nanosatellite from Thessaloniki went up on the same Falcon rocket. Yes, Greece is now in space twice, you heard that right.

🏋️ Pyrros Dimas signed the Olympian's Wall in Lausanne, adding his name to a wall that frankly should have been named after him in the first place.

🌸 Move over ancient ruins and blue beaches - thousands are flocking to Greece's peach blossom fields (sometimes a pink veil over a field in March is enough to break the internet).

📜 Ninety 17th-century Greek proverbs were discovered, confirming that Greeks have been handing out wisdom for centuries, invited or not.

📜 The Kolokotronis Archive has been made publicly accessible, giving everyone a chance to read the personal papers of the Revolution's most important military leader (and discover, like us, that he had handwriting as fierce as his battlefield strategy).

🤿 Greece is opening underwater archaeological sites in Fourni, for travelers who like their ruins with masks and flippers.

💻 Ioannina created a startup hub, making it the only city in Greece where the tech scene and the silversmithing scene could theoretically share a coworking space inside a Byzantine castle.

⚡ Chevron is fast-tracking energy surveys off Crete, which is either the beginning of Greece's energy independence or the beginning of Crete's independence.

🗞 A century of voice: The Greek Herald in Australia is turning 100!

🇬🇷 Canberra will mark Greek National Day with a Carillon tribute and citywide illuminations, enough to make diaspora Greeks misty-eyed before they start explaining their heritage.

🇨🇦 Montreal declared March Hellenic Heritage Month, giving local Greeks 31 fully legitimate days to remind everyone where democracy came from.

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

Researchers just found 90 Greek proverbs from the 1600s that nobody had published before, tied to a manuscript by the scholar Hermodorus Rhegius. The known collection of early modern Greek proverbs just quadrupled. The interesting part is that some of them never really left. Greeks still say versions of “Η καλή μέρα από το πρωί φαίνεται,” “Όποιος είναι έξω από τον χορό πολλά τραγούδια ξέρει,” and “Κοντός ψαλμός αλληλούια”. We just didn’t know we’d been reaching for the same lines for four centuries.

The newly recovered batch also includes a few that deserve another shot, and The Greek Talk would like to nominate one for return to active duty: “Μὲ τὸν μεγαλήτερόν σου σκόρδα μὴ φυτεύῃς.” In plain English: don’t plant garlic with someone bigger than you. We believe it means don’t compete with people wildly outside your weight class, and it is exactly the sort of agricultural wisdom that somehow still applies to modern life, family dynamics, and half the internet.

Four hundred years later, Greek culture remains committed to the same basic insight: human nature is exhausting, so someone may as well turn it into a proverb.

🇬🇷 April 16, 2026, Chicago Greek Independence Day Parade

🇬🇷 April 26, 2026, NYC Greek Independence Day Parade

🇬🇷 April 26, 2026, Boston Greek Independence Day Parade

🎼 May 8, 2026, Mimis Plessas centenary tribute, Sydney

🏛️May 13 - May 15, 2026, "Rethinking Archaic Sculpture" conference, Nafplio

Ioannina sits on Lake Pamvotida in Epirus looking far more mysterious than most Greek cities can pull off. It has a castle, a lake, a car-free island, layers of Byzantine and Ottoman history, and the kind of misty atmosphere that makes half your photos look unintentionally literary. Ali Pasha ruled from here, the island still holds monasteries and his museum, and the city’s silversmithing tradition is so central to local identity that it has its own museum inside the castle. None of this is presented with the frantic energy of a place begging to be discovered. Ioannina simply has the confidence of a city that knows it was important before you arrived and will remain so after you leave.

The beauty of Ioannina is that it gives you history without becoming a museum piece. The university keeps the cafés full, the nights lively, and the city younger than its reputation. The food alone justifies the trip: pies, grilled meats, lake fish, and the sort of long meals that make you understand why Ioannina has never been in a rush to impress anyone. And while most visitors use Ioannina as a base for Zagori or Vikos Gorge, the city itself is the destination people underestimate on the way to somewhere else. That feels especially true now that it’s quietly building a startup scene too — a very Ioannina development, really: one more reason to matter, delivered with minimal noise.

🏝️The Island: Ten minutes by boat from Molos, no cars, monasteries, Ali Pasha, and the pleasant feeling that the city has briefly slipped out of time.

🪙 Silversmithing Museum: Inside the castle, and one of the best ways to understand why Ioannina’s craftsmanship became famous far beyond Epirus. 

🧀The pies: Do not overthink this. Order whatever is fresh and accept that Epirus takes pies more seriously than many countries take policy.

🍷Domaine Glinavos: A very good reminder that Epirus is not only mountains and melancholy.

🏖 Secret beaches in Greece: lesser-known sandy spots to avoid the crowds

Epirus has 178 documented varieties of pie. That's not a typo; a researcher actually counted. Hortopita - wild greens pie - is the one that represents the region best, because it was born from poverty and turned out to be genius. Wild greens collected from the mountains, feta, herbs, olive oil, wrapped in handmade phyllo so thin you can read through it. Every village has its own version and every village is certain theirs is correct. In Ioannina, ordering just one pie at a table is considered a misunderstanding: you order three, minimum, and you don't ask what's in them. The kitchen knows better than you do.

Intrepid has launched three new Women’s Expeditions in Peru, Bhutan and Cambodia – created exclusively for women travellers. Expect immersive adventures that break down barriers and connect you with local communities, from trekking the Peruvian Andes to a women-run tuk tuk tour in Cambodia and a traditional hot stone bath experience at a women-owned farmhouse in Bhutan.

Explore Women’s Expeditions

🇬🇷 🎶 Marinella represented Greece at Eurovision in 1974, the country's first ever entry. But she wasn't supposed to. A Greek rock band called Nostradamos had actually won the national selection to represent Greece. They were disqualified in a scandal, and Marinella was sent as a last-minute replacement. She placed eleventh with "Krasi, Thalassa kai t' Agori Mou" (Wine, Sea, and My Boyfriend).

That’s it for now. Greece stayed busy, history stayed dramatic, and somewhere in the background a Marinella song still feels like it belongs in the room. A final nod to a voice woven into Greek life far beyond the stage.

🧿 Stay Greek. [email protected]