.....preface.....
Dear Visitor
Thank you for coming to this site. It is an honour and a surprise to have the frenzied thoughts of my wanderings in Greece expressed on the internet.
I sincerely appreciate the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web, in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find the site useful or amusing.
When I was young my family instilled the need to restrain my natural boisterousness whenever we had visitors in our home or made acquaintance with people we had never met before, and this reserved behaviour became prevalent even into my teenage years and certainly didn't help me break the ice when in the company of strangers.
Until I went to Greece that is.
There's no such thing as ice in Greece, well not the snooty type, and particularly not amongst the village community, instead they shower strangers with warm hospitality and sincere conviviality.
So you can understand, dear visitor, how grateful and carefree I felt to be able to breathe again once in the company of such generous, brave, hard-working and uncomplicated people.
This is a personal site, full of personal opinion and therefore open to debate.
Thank you for coming to this site. It is an honour and a surprise to have the frenzied thoughts of my wanderings in Greece expressed on the internet.
I sincerely appreciate the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web, in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find the site useful or amusing.
When I was young my family instilled the need to restrain my natural boisterousness whenever we had visitors in our home or made acquaintance with people we had never met before, and this reserved behaviour became prevalent even into my teenage years and certainly didn't help me break the ice when in the company of strangers.
Until I went to Greece that is.
There's no such thing as ice in Greece, well not the snooty type, and particularly not amongst the village community, instead they shower strangers with warm hospitality and sincere conviviality.
So you can understand, dear visitor, how grateful and carefree I felt to be able to breathe again once in the company of such generous, brave, hard-working and uncomplicated people.
This is a personal site, full of personal opinion and therefore open to debate.
May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like or disagree with, dip into it here and there, and perhaps you will find a passage or even a page that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from beginning to end, in any case I thank you for your interest in this wordy collection of gossip, humour, favourite imagery, and muffled hopes and fantasies - an interest which indicates to my thinking a rather reckless though rather touching generosity on your part.
Grecofilia is just another word used to describe a consciousness,
an intuition, truly beautiful and pleasant,
that comes with the realisation
that comes with the realisation
that there is an absolute interdependence between all things,
and therefore probably best expressed with a smile.
It introduced itself to me on my first visit to the home of art and thought, the land of Socrates, Plato, Kazantzakis, Seferis...in the responsibility I was given by the taxi driver with a great heart who agreed to wait while I, a complete stranger in his country, disappeared into a busy street to search for somewhere to exchange sterling for drachmas so I could pay my fare.
In that single crystal moment I realised I was home.
It introduced itself to me on my first visit to the home of art and thought, the land of Socrates, Plato, Kazantzakis, Seferis...in the responsibility I was given by the taxi driver with a great heart who agreed to wait while I, a complete stranger in his country, disappeared into a busy street to search for somewhere to exchange sterling for drachmas so I could pay my fare.
In that single crystal moment I realised I was home.
A member of the family. And, as we all know, in Greece it's all about family. I felt included wherever I went, people gave me things and told me things and I began to write them down. More discoveries were kept in notebooks, jotters, scraps of paper, memory and postcards that I sent to myself as I stumbled over the islands of the Aegean.
What you have before you is more of a well-spring than a website - in that it's just the beginning.
Dear Visitor, please forgive me, if I am wasting your time.
What you have before you is more of a well-spring than a website - in that it's just the beginning.
Dear Visitor, please forgive me, if I am wasting your time.
Tony Brown