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- 🌀Greece Lights The Olympic Flame + Ikaria
🌀Greece Lights The Olympic Flame + Ikaria
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Hi Greek Talkers!
Happy Thanksgiving week to those celebrating—may your turkey be moist, and your relatives ask you fewer questions about your life choices than they did last year.
After your responses to our reader survey, The Greek Talk made a donation to Ecogenia, a Greek non-profit working on environmental conservation and education across Greece. We are spotlighting them properly in this issue because supporting organizations that actually matter is the whole point of having a community like this.
Re: the Athens 5K, there's an info section at the end of this newsletter.
This week: Greece lights the Olympic flame for Milano Cortina 2026 (because we own that ceremony forever), Ikaria continues operating on its own space-time continuum, and Yorgos Lanthimos is back making European film awards uncomfortable with his nominations.
Let’s dive in. ☕🤿🇬🇷
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🇬🇷 WHAT’S NEW IN GREECE
🔥 The Olympic flame gets lit in Olympia on November 26 for Milano Cortina 2026. Watch it live here.
🎬 Yorgos Lanthimos' 'Bugonia' lands him in the race for Europe's top directing prize; he keeps making critics uneasy and they keep nominating him.
tovima.gr
More news from Greece
🎨 Andreas Angelidakis will represent Greece at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Greek contemporary art gets its moment at the world's most prestigious art exhibition.
🏃 Olympic medalist Petros Gaidatzis will be first torchbearer for Milano Cortina 2026. Greek athlete carrying Greek flame for Italian Winter Olympics—the international relay no one expected.
✈️ Bonus destinations unlocked: Thessaloniki, Peloponnese, and "new" Greek destinations are pulling tourists away from the island circuit.
🚂 Historic Peloponnese Railway Station gets immediate protection works. Greece finally treating its 19th-century infrastructure like the heritage it actually is.
🎵 Panigyri-bound: Ikaria releases new folk music collection "Dyósme mou triklone dyósme." The island where people forget to die also remembers to preserve its musical traditions.
📱 Greece goes digital to tackle rising alcohol and tobacco use among minors. Tech solutions meet "good luck enforcing this."
💰 Greek household wealth surges beyond €1 trillion when it was "broke" a decade ago. Hmmm.
🚗 Athens and Thessaloniki to test AI road safety cameras. It will be AI that will finally notice that you “just stopped for a second” on the crosswalk.
🏥 PureHealth acquires majority stake in Hellenic Healthcare Group for $2.3 billion. Greek healthcare assets attracting Gulf investment at scale.
☀️ Greece to hit its 2030 solar power goal already next year. Achieving climate targets early while other countries are still "studying feasibility."
🌎️ WHAT’S NEW OUTSIDE OF GREECE
🎶 Natassa Bofiliou and Giannis Haroulis bring a century of Greek music to global audiences. Dates and tickets here.
More news from outside of Greece
📚 Athens Academy elects professor John O. Iatrides as corresponding member. Academic honor for Greek scholarship contributions that won't make headlines but matters to those who know.
💼 Capital Link hosts 27th Annual "Invest in Greece" Forum in NYC, December 8. PowerPoint meets πατροπαράδοτο optimism.
👩 Inaugural forum to spotlight Women of the Greek Diaspora in Australia. Greek-Australian women finally getting the recognition they've earned while everyone focused on the men.
🎓 Hellenic Classical Charter School celebrates 20 years. Two decades of teaching American kids Greek classics, mythology, and how to properly pronounce "gyro."
🎤 Second edition of Greek Youth Diaspora Symposium coming November 25-28. Young diaspora Greeks gathering to discuss identity, heritage, and whether they should move back.
🎭 Hellenic Art Theatre to premiere new comedy 'Uncle Costa and Parthena.' Diaspora theater doing what it does best: mining Greek family dynamics for laughs.
🚗 Rhode Island celebrates first-in-the-nation Greek Heritage license plate. Greek-Americans can now broadcast their heritage at traffic lights and DMV offices statewide.
Got a burning question about Greek culture, diaspora life, or that family tradition nobody can explain?
💌 Send it to [email protected] - your question might become next week's featured Q&A.
🇬🇷 💙 TOGETHER WITH ECOGENIA
This Thanksgiving, we're thankful for yiayia's recipes and for Ecogenia—a nonprofit training young Greeks in environmental conservation and community service. Think AmeriCorps, but Hellenic: participants restore trails, protect ecosystems, and running programs across Greece that combine youth development with tangible conservation work. This proves that Greeks can organize something other than a panigíri when the planet depends on it.
The Greek Talk just donated to their year-end campaign (through GivingTuesday, Dec 2). We're supporting them because they represent practical problem-solving: young people getting trained, nature getting protected, nobody waiting for government fixes. If you're feeling thankful and want to support Greeks preserving the trails we hike on vacation, donate here
Every bit funds another restored trail and chips away at the stereotype that Greece's only natural resource is complaining about the heat.
Kalό Thanksgiving, Greek Talkers. Pass the stuffing and pass along this link 🧿
💎 CULTURAL GEMS
🏛️ The Olympic Flame: Greece’s Monopoly On The Olympics
Once every two years, a small crowd gathers among the ruins of Olympia and does something that looks ancient, feels sacred, and is—plot twist—mostly a 20th-century invention with excellent branding. In front of the Temple of Hera, actresses in minimalist “priestess” robes lift a parabolic mirror to the sun, coaxing a flame into life like they’re running the most high-stakes solar cooking demo on earth. That tiny fire is then handed to a Greek athlete, and suddenly your schoolbook “ancient games” become a global content pipeline: torches, relays, selfies, drone shots. The whole thing feels timeless, but the modern lighting ceremony only began in 1936, designed for the Berlin Olympics.
The details, if you zoom in, get deliciously odd. The flame is “pure” because it can only be born from the sun’s rays and that concave mirror—so when it’s cloudy, they discreetly use a backup flame from rehearsal. From Olympia it detours to the grove where the heart of Pierre de Coubertin (yes, his actual heart) is buried, before heading to Athens’ Panathenaic Stadium (the marble stadium where the Marathon finishes) for the handoff to the host nation. And every now and then, reality gate-crashes the script—like this year’s Milano–Cortina ceremony being moved indoors because Olympia is drenched, forcing organizers to light the “eternal” flame from that backup rather than the live sun. The whole production takes about 30 minutes, gets broadcast globally, and Greece gets to remind the world that while other countries might host the Olympics, only Greece can start them.
📆 BEST OF GREEK CALENDAR
🎼 February 9, 2026, The Hellenic Music Ensemble, Emerson Colonial Theater, Boston
🎭️ November 21 - December 7, 2025, "Uncle Costa and Parthena", Greek Theater, Sydney
🧳 TRAVEL NEWS
🏖️ Ikaria: The Island That Forgot to Age
Gialiskari beach Ikaria
Ikaria is that friend who shows up late, steals the party, and somehow lives to 100 anyway. This is the place where Greeks go to slow down, which should tell you something about the pace. It’s all jagged coastlines, deep-blue coves and villages that look like they were arranged by someone who hates straight lines. The beaches are wild in that “no one brought a beach club, thank God” way—Seychelles with its milky blue water and sculpted rocks, Nas with its river-meets-sea drama, Armenistis with just enough infrastructure to find a freddo without ruining the view. It is named after Icarus who flew too close to the sun and crashed into the sea nearby, which feels appropriate for an island that lives by its own rules.
Once you peel yourself off the sunbed/rock, Ikaria quietly flexes: the mountain village of Christos Raches, where shops and cafés famously stay open deep into the night; the lush Raches area with trails that slide from forests to cliffs; monasteries and white chapels perched in places that make you question how anyone got the materials up there; and hot springs at Therma that convince you “this is probably good for you.” Panigyria (local festivals) don’t feel like events so much as endurance marathons set to violin and laouto—long tables, endless food, and lines of people dancing in spirals that seem to go on forever.
Culturally, Ikaria lives in its own time zone—and not just because of Blue Zone longevity articles. There’s a stubborn refusal to rush: coffee that stretches into philosophy, wine poured like it’s tap water, villagers who’ve seen every lifestyle trend come and go and still trust their own version of slow. The history is layered—exiles once sent here by various regimes, shipwreck stories, isolation that bred a particular brand of solidarity—so the island’s famous “we stay up late and live long” isn’t just cute branding, it’s survival turned into style.
🍷 Ask for “ikariotiko” wine or local red at a tiny kafeneio—the wine here is strong, and served in quantities that would alarm a doctor anywhere else, but Ikarians have been drinking it daily and living to 100, so clearly something's working.
🏛️ Kampos thermal springs
🌙 Head to Christos Raches after 11 p.m. and act casual; that’s when the village finally decides it’s “evening,” and suddenly it’s all music, desserts and kids running around like it’s 1993.
💃 If someone casually mentions a panigyri, cancel your plans; arrive at midnight with a “we’ll see what happens” attitude.
 Therma |  Agios Kyrikos |
🆕 OBSESSIONS
🧑🍳 RECIPE OF THE WEEK
SOUFIKO (IKARIAN RATATOUILLE)
blue zones.com
Soufiko is Ikaria's answer to ratatouille—slow-cooked zucchini, potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes in enough olive oil to concern anyone not from a Blue Zone. This is the kind of winter vegetable dish that tastes better the next day, requires minimal effort, and is partly responsible for why Ikarians live to 100 while the rest of us stress about meal prep.
🏃♀️ ATHENS 5K UPDATE
First step: Info session on Zoom where we can talk logistics, answer questions, and we can all collectively decide if this is brilliant or just ambitious enough to be interesting. We are scheduling a few sessions to cover different time zones because apparently Greek Talkers live everywhere. Want in? Just reply to this email with “ATHENS 5K INFO" in the subject line and
Your email
Your time zone
This is happening. November 2026. Marble stadium. Fellow Greek Talkers. Questionable athletic decisions. Let's go.
😂 MYTHIC MEMES
@mythicalmania
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That’s it for now: lighting Olympic flames by ancient ritual (but invented in 1936) and living to 100 on an island that refuses to acknowledge time. Catch you next week for more news, drama and deep dives. 🧿 Stay Greek. [email protected]
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