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🇬🇷 OXI Day went global again, from Melbourne memorials to New York school halls, with the diaspora making sure 1940 does not become somebody else’s history.

🏛️ Greece is restoring the wall the Spartans used at Thermopylae, which was first used to keep out the Thessalians.

🤖 Greeks are building AI companies worth billions abroad; the brain drain has apparently started generating its own brains.

🚜 Greek farmers can now buy tax-free diesel with a QR code, bringing the tractor surprisingly deep into fintech.

🎾 Tsitsipas and Sakkari are reuniting for Greece in Australia, so the country’s two best tennis players will lose to the same opponents at the same time.

🏠 The super-rich are moving to Athens, where €10,000 per square meter has now apparently “died”; condolences to affordability.

🎨 Peter Katsichtis went from a village under Taygetus to 60 paintings at UNESCO in Paris, with a business career inconveniently in between.

📚 Modern Greek at La Trobe has been saved for three years by a donor who first fundraised for Greek studies at age 14; consistency is alive in Melbourne.

👩‍🍳 Melbourne students are digitizing their grandparents’ Greek recipes, finally forcing “add flour until it looks right” and “me to mati” to be quantified.

🥟 Two Greeks are selling hit bao buns inside a former London church (what??).

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

Everyone knows the 300. Greece just announced it is restoring the wall they fought behind at Thermopylae, and every headline says Spartans, Spartans, Spartans. Ok, fair enough. But read Herodotus, our main surviving source for the battle, and there is another number sitting right there.

On the last morning, when Leonidas knew the Persians had come around the mountain behind him, he sent most of the Greek army away and the Spartans stayed. Herodotus says 400 Thebans were kept there against their will, and most surrendered when they got the chance. And 700 men from Thespiae stayed because they wanted to. He says they refused to leave Leonidas, so they stayed and died with him.

Thespiae was a small city in Boeotia. Losing 700 hoplites was catastrophic. The Persians burned the city as they moved south.

Herodotus even gives us names. Their commander was Demophilus, son of Diadromes. The Thespian he singles out for particular bravery was Dithyrambus. When Persian visitors were later taken around the battlefield, they were told the dead Greeks were Spartans and Thespians. And yet, over time, the Thespians mostly disappeared from the popular version of the story.

The Leonidas monument went up in 1955. The Thespians did not get theirs until 1997. It is a bronze Eros, the god associated with their city, shown headless and with one broken wing. It stands only a short distance from Leonidas, and a lot of visitors walk straight past it.

So the last stand was not just 300 Spartans. There were 700 Thespians too.

🇺🇸 Nov. 14–21 2026, | Greektown Week NYC | Brand new citywide Greek week spanning food, music, culture and nightlife; Glykeria and Kostas Ageris open it on Nov. 14. Greektown, New York City

🇬🇧 Through Nov. 7 / Nov. 28 2026 | Hellenic Centre | — Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands runs through Nov. 7; later in the month there’s a talk on Electra and Medea through queer and feminist theory on Nov. 28. Hellenic Centre, London

The problem with visiting the most famous pass in history is that the pass is gone.

In 480 BC, the mountains came down almost to the sea and at its narrowest the road had room for little more than a single cart track. Since then, sediment has pushed the shoreline roughly five kilometers away. So today you get a broad plain, a highway and a statue of Leonidas facing what looks like a field.

The spot that stopped an empire looks a bit like a lay-by. But go anyway. The hot springs that gave Thermopylae its name, the “Hot Gates,” are still there. The water comes out at around 42°C, smells strongly of sulfur and runs below the road, where people still sit in it for free. Across from the Leonidas monument is Kolonos Hill, the low rise where the final fighting took place. Archaeologists excavating there in 1939 found Persian arrowheads and other weapons.

At the top is the epitaph recorded by Herodotus:

“Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that here we lie, obedient to their orders.”

It takes about two minutes to walk up, and there is often nobody else there.

The historical center nearby has a 15-minute 3D film that reconstructs the battle and the landscape.

If you want lunch, Lamia is about twenty minutes away and gets almost none of the attention of the places farther south. Above all of this is Mount Oiti, where Greek myth says Heracles built his own funeral pyre before joining the gods.

Thermopylae is really a half-day stop, but it is a strange one. You are standing in one of the most famous places in Greek history and almost none of what made it famous is immediately visible. The hills are still there but you have to imagine most of the rest.

♨️ The springs: Below the highway near the monument. Warm, sulfurous and free. Bring a towel and do not expect spa facilities.

🪨 Kolonos Hill: A very short walk. Read the epitaph, then turn around and look across the plain at where the sea once was.

🏛️ Thermopylae Historical Information Centre: Small, but useful. The maps make the ancient battlefield much easier to understand.

⚔️ The Thespian monument: The headless bronze near Leonidas. After reading the Cultural Gem, you will know exactly why it is there.

🍮 Craquelin: Athens’ Hidden Gem for Profiteroles and Basque Cheesecake

Trahanas is cracked wheat soaked in soured milk, dried in the sun in late summer, and crumbled into pellets that keep all winter in a jar. Every mountain village in central Greece has a version. The soup takes ten minutes - boil water or stock, pour in the trahanas, stir until it thickens, and drop a lump of feta in at the end so it half melts. Some people add a spoon of tomato (and some people would like to have words with those people). If you grew up abroad you may never have had it, because nobody ships it. Find a Greek grocer, or someone who just came from Greece.

🇬🇷 Molon labe, “come and take them,” is supposed to be Leonidas’s reply when Xerxes demanded his weapons. Herodotus never mentions it. The line first appears in Plutarch more than five centuries later. Did Leonidas say it? Maybe. But the bumper stickers are staying.

That’s it for now. If you went to a parade, a doxology, or a school and clapped for OXI day, you did your part. That's how it survives.

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