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🤸 When will Petrounias become a “former gymnast”? Petrounias is world silver medalist again at 35!

🚢 Greece’s newest frigate is open for OXI Day tours, featuring 121 meters of extremely expensive “please don’t touch.”

🏺 Greece is opening the “School of Homer” to visitors, despite there being no evidence Homer ever enrolled.

📵 Greece has passed “give me your phone” into law for everyone under 15.

🇺🇸 A full scholarship will send Greek teenagers to American high school for a year, where they can finally investigate whether the yellow school buses are real.

🍽️ Michelin nearly doubled its Greek list to 62 restaurants; Greece has apparently moved beyond “nice food after the beach.”

🔨 Greece will cover 70% to 95% of eligible renovation costs, suddenly making that permanently shuttered house next door financially interesting.

📦 EasyShop will let Greek businesses sell into 21 European markets and calculate the VAT automatically, and frankly the second part may be the breakthrough.

🏆 South Melbourne became the first second-division team to win the Australia Cup, which is a fairly dramatic way to repay 70 years of Greek community support.

🇦🇺 More than 100 young Greek Australians met the Evzones in Sydney and, for once, the guards were there to answer questions.

🇦🇺 After a 13-year absence, Greek tourism has an Australian office again; Melbourne seems an unusually safe place to test demand

🇬🇷 AHI is taking OXI Day online with a talk on what happened beyond Greece, because the actual story was considerably bigger than one word.

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

The Evzones are in Sydney this week, so this feels like a good time to explain what people are actually looking at when they stand outside Parliament taking photos of a man who refuses to acknowledge them.

The fustanella uses about 30 meters of white cotton and has 400 pleats, which the Presidential Guard says represent the roughly four centuries of Ottoman rule. The tsarouchia are red leather, a pair weighs around three kilos, and each shoe can have up to 60 nails in the sole. That sharp crack when they march is coming from the shoe.

The uniform is still made by hand and can take months to complete. Evzones are paired with a “brother,” usually someone of similar height and build, and they help each other dress because there is simply too much going on here for one person.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier they stand for an hour without speaking or changing expression, whatever the weather and whatever the tourists are doing. If they need help, they signal by striking the butt of the rifle on the ground.

You also have to be at least 1.87 meters tall and go through weeks of training before anyone lets you near the post.

And the pom-poms? Tradition says klephts once hid small blades inside them.

At this point, with three-kilo shoes full of nails, that feels unnecessary.

💃 October 31, 2026 - November 1, 2026, Gold Coast Greek Festival

🎤 November 14, 2026, Nefeli Fasouli: Athens After Dark, Melbourne

When Italy invaded Greece on October 28, 1940, one of its alpine divisions pushed through the Pindos toward Metsovo. The town mattered because it sat on the route between Epirus and Thessaly. They never reached it.

Metsovo is still up there at around 1,150 meters, with stone houses, slate roofs, cold winters and a square that can occupy you for longer than expected. It is a Vlach town, and some older residents still speak Aromanian alongside Greek.

The Averoff name is everywhere. Georgios Averoff was born here, made his fortune in Egypt and later helped finance the restoration of the Panathenaic Stadium. His great-nephew Evangelos came back in the 1950s and planted Cabernet Sauvignon on the mountain, which people thought was a bad idea until it wasn’t. Katogi Averoff is still making wine here.

The food is equally local. Metsovone is the smoked cheese to look for, and this is one of those towns where buying “a little” usually ends badly.

Before the Egnatia motorway, getting through the Katara Pass in winter could be a serious problem. The new road made Metsovo much easier to reach, but the old route is still there above town, and once you see the mountains it is not hard to understand why this place mattered so much in 1940.

Come for a night or two, eat well, drink the red, go up to the gallery, and if the weather is clear, drive toward the pass.

🧀 The cheese shops around the square: Ask for Metsovone and whatever else is local. You will leave with more than planned.

🖼️ Averoff Gallery: A very good collection of Greek painting in a town of a few thousand people.

🏔️ Kalpaki: If you want more of the 1940 history, continue west to the war museum and battlefield area.

Metsovone is the smoked cheese of Metsovo, made from cow’s milk, aged, then hung over a wood fire until the rind goes dark. The way to eat it is the way the tavernas there do: a thick slice in a hot pan, dry, no oil, until it blisters and starts to run, then onto a plate with lemon and black pepper. Nothing else. Bread if you must. It takes four minutes and it’s the best thing that will happen to you in the Pindos

🇬🇷 Nobody really said OXI. The Italian ambassador woke Ioannis Metaxas at three in the morning on October 28, 1940, with an ultimatum: let Italian troops occupy parts of Greece, or it’s war. Metaxas answered in French, the language of diplomacy, and what he’s reported to have said is “Alors, c’est la guerre.” So then, it’s war. The word “oxi” came later that morning, from the newspapers and the crowds in the streets, who shortened a sentence in French to one syllable in Greek and gave the day its name. The prime minister said no in a full sentence. The country said it in one word, and the country’s version stuck.

That’s it for now. We went from the Pindos in 1940 to Evzones in Sydney, stopped for a Michelin star, watched Petrounias refuse to retire, and somehow ended up with three-kilo shoes and a semi-pro soccer team winning a national cup.

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