#doukas

This week's newsletter from AthensLive is out:

* Greece allows banning people with disabilities from public transportation 

* Mini reshuffling of the cabinet

The new year kicked off with a highly discriminatory regulation that allows ‘as an exemption’ for public transportation to deny embarkation to disabled people should those in charge deem it is not safe enough - instead of improving transportation to be accessible to all. There has undoubtedly been some improvement since ancient Sparta times when they were throwing disabled babies in the Kaidas Gorge. 

2024 started with a mini cabinet reshuffle. Our “national” Citizen Protection minister is back in place, while the Health Ministry will be headed by someone who had left too bitter memories from the early memoranda years.  

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Just prior to his death by strangulation in the castle of Belgrade, Serbia, Greek visionary Rigas Pheraios is said to have uttered the immortal words: “I have sown a rich seed; the hour is coming when my country will reap its glorious fruits.” Contrary to common belief, the Greek revolution was not the first major uprising against the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. A decade prior to the 1821 declaration of Greek Independence, between 1804 to 1813, the Serbs of the sanjak of Smederevo rose up against their Ottoman oppressors, firstly, to protest against the seizure of power by Janissaries, and then, in search of complete independence. Although the first uprising was crushed brutally, causing up to a quarter of the population to flee across the border into the Austrian Habsburg Empire, a second uprising commencing in 1815, eventually succeeded in securing Serbian autonomy and ultimately independence.

At all stages of the Serbian struggle for freedom, the Serbs were aided by Greek freedom fighters and diplomats. Indeed, the first ever historian of the Serbian Revolution was a Greek, Triantafyllos Doukas, from whom we learn that as early as 1806, the French consul in Thessaloniki reported that “the Turks are very furious against the Greeks because of their communications with the Serbs.” He also reported that a significant number of Greek peasants were arrested by the Ottomans, on suspicion of aiding the Serbian rebels. So important was the Greek contribution to the fight for Serbian freedom, that after the failure of the first Uprising, the Serbian revolutionary leader, Karadjordje fled to Moldavia, where he joined the Philiki Hetaireia, actively supporting preparations for Greek Independence in the Danubian principalities.

He translates from English. He worked, along with Haris Vlavianos, on the erotic poems by e. e. cummings (Patakis, 2014).He has published book reviews in Greek newspapers and literary magazines. Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, German, Serbian, Dutch and Polish.Two poems from the Inner Borders have been set to music by Nikos Platyrachos (Ta Astega, 2015). He has written the lyrics for two songs by Thanos Mikroutsikos, included in the album Stin Omihli ton Kairon (2017).

Yiannis Doukas spoke to Reading Greece* about the main themes his poetry touches upon, noting that “I write about the things I notice, how I distil them, I write about the past, the many ways it survives under and around us, I write about people long gone, as I mirror my existence in theirs, I write about humanity and how it is tested against our times”. He comments on the conversation of poetry with tradition and established norms, “a conjunction of irony an nostalgia”,  as well as on the way technology is combined with poetry, explaining that “the composite sequence of techne and logos, whatever the order, can be understood as a unified system: this is just us and what we are creating”.

The Minister for Agriculture Development in Mitsotakis government was forced to resign and a former deputy finance minister in Karamanlis government, now mayor in the town of Sparta, was expelled from conservative New Democracy on Monday. Reason for the “drastic measures” was a video showing the Minister, the mayor and a bunch of local politicians to laugh their heart out when the mayor said that they had bags of money to distribute to residents of Ilia after the massive forest fires in summer 2007 claimed the lives of 84 people including several fire fighters.

boasts of over gangsters’ means of “handing out cash” to win elections in 2007

“We handed out cash, we changed the course and won the elections,” Mayor Petros Doukas boasted.

At the meeting in Sparta on February 2, they were discussing to pay compensations to farmers who lost crops due to the recent frost.

Mayor Doukas boasted “this is how we won the elections in 2007.”

Doukas by Demetra Georgiou

HTML – Doukas Release Please copy/paste the HTML Code below for Doukas Release HTML Code Title: Doukas Series: Greek Crime Lords #1 Author: Demetra Georgiou Genre: Mafia Romance Release Date: July 22, 2021 They say that crime knows no bounds.Doukas Tremes and his brothers, the Lords, are one of the most influential and dangerous crime families in Greece. In their world, everything revolves…