European Surf Master

Champion Greek athletes earned an olive wreath. That was the entire pecuniary reward they would compete for. If private people and other organisations gave them gifts and sponsors, that was not something institutional to the Olympic Games which included Poetry, but non-institutional gratitude from people and cities represented by those athletes. Your projection of modern consumerism, commodification and hollywood fiction to the work of Homer and folk poetry itself further underlines your total lack of a classical education of any kind.

A Georgian grandfather and a child

Greek City Times published an open letter to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this week. It reads in part: "We did not vanish. Greek people did not disappear after the age of myth. Greek culture was not frozen in classical marble. We are still here. For more than 3,000 continuous years, Greek identity has persisted." The addendum: "Given Hollywood's insistence for minority representation, authenticity and diversity — where are the Greeks, or the Greek Americans in this Greek story?" The film shot in Greece, with Greek funding, across Greek locations. Not one cast member is Greek. Hollywood required diversity for every production except this one.

Turkish tourists flooded the Greek islands because prices there are now 2-3 times cheaper than in Turkey.

People keep calling the Odyssey and ancient Greece “Western heritage” as if they emerged from a western European or even European world. But the modern “West vs East” divide did not even exist yet. Ancient Greeks did not see themselves as “westerners.” They were one civilization among many in the interconnected eastern Mediterranean world alongside Egyptians, Phoenicians, Anatolians, Cypriots, Levantines and Mesopotamians. And the evidence for this is everywhere.