Tag Archives: Greece

Top Architectural Design: “Hedonistic House” On Aegina Island, Greece

The holiday home located in the area of ​​Agioi Apostoloi in Aegina is organized around a central patio. The dialogue with the natural terrain of the plot as well as the unobstructed visual views of the land were elements crucial to the design.

​The visitor enters from the highest point of the patio from where the movements are distributed around the three living areas of the house – the master bedroom, the guest rooms and the lounge area – and the swimming pool. The morphology of the patio follows the outer sloping terrain and as it gradually descends through a path of terraces and outdoor seating areas leads the visitor to the view.

Its final level, in combination with the airy living room, constitutes an expanded covered balcony to the sea. Its transparent roof bears the pool-observatory. The patio functions as a vital living space of the residence and so does the rooftop swimming pool.

The bedrooms maintain their privacy while at the same time referring to the heart of the whole – the patio and the sea view. The section of the house levels creates an internal microcosm of spaces and movements, constituting a path that can bypass the enclosed spaces and end up outside the plot around the side of the daily activities volume.

The morphology of the complex expresses the function of each individual space housed under it while the selected rough materials set up a direct dialogue with the island’s topos. The individual volumes are embraced by a dynamic curved, unifying outer skin that holds the whole together and forms a characteristically acute, yet silent gesture of a human intervention on the natural landscape.  

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Travel & Culture: Greek Island Of Hydra In 1960’s – “A Theatre For Dreamers” By Novelist Polly Samson

From The Guardian (May 23, 2020):

A Theatre For Dreamers - Polly Samson - April 2020I first went to Hydra six years ago, when it was simply a beautiful Greek island and not a place I went to commune with its ghosts. I don’t think I was even aware that it was the island Leonard Cohen had lived on, and knew nothing of Charmian Clift, George Johnston and the bohemian community they fostered.

Bloomsbury Publishers: 1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.

Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.

Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.

Polly Samson is an English novelist, lyricist and journalist. She is married to musician David Gilmour, and has written the lyrics to many of Gilmour’s works, both as a solo artist and with the group Pink Floyd.

 

Travel & Culture Books: “Mykonos Muse” In The Greek Islands (Assouline)

Mykonos Muse Assouline May 4 2020With such names as ‘Paradise’ and ‘Super Paradise,’ the sands of these shores have captured the imaginations and hearts of industry titans, artists, and party-goers alike from all around the globe, marking it as a stable cosmopolitan destination and as a paramount it haven on the jet-set circuit.

Located in the Cyclades and surrounded by the blue-green water of the Aegean sits whitewashed, windmill-strewn Mykonos, the island of the winds. This ancient island and those surrounding it, mythologized as the bodies of gods felled by Hercules in the time of antiquity, are older than legend and have played host to countless cultures for more than millennia. At forty-square-miles and boasting a population of only ten-thousand, the ‘Ibiza of Greece’ has become prized for gorgeous architecture, welcoming and open-minded locals, and fantastic beaches.

Mykonos Muse Assouline May 4 2020

This book chronicles the culture and society that has defined Mykonos over the past century—from its days as a hideout for such luminaries and elites as Le Corbusier and Antonis Benakis, to its moment as a sanctuary for the gay community,to its predominant party scene—all the while indulging the reader with the ruins and myths hidden there.

Lizy Manola is a Greek photographer. A freelancer, her focus is on documentary photography. For more than fifteen years, she has traveled and shot in distant places, where culture and everyday life preserve their natural authenticity. She has published two books with Assouline, Certain Realities and Ethiopian Highlands. Her work has featured in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and worldwide. She lives and works in Athens and New York. Thirty years ago, she bought a house on Mykonos; she has spent endless summers holidays on the island ever since.

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New Travel Books: “Athens Riviera”, Stéphanie Artarit (Assouline, May 2020)

Athens Riviera Assouline May 25 2020Overlooking the Aegean Sea, a charming string of coastal neighborhoods form the Athens Riviera, a serene escape from the constant activity in the city’s center. A selection of high-end hotels lines the pristine stretch of beaches down to the southernmost point of the Attica Peninsula.

The revamped Four Seasons Astir Palace, with a history of housing foreign dignitaries and film stars of the 1960s, is the most luxurious hotel in Athens, perhaps even in all of Greece. The night club, Island, is bringing back the glamour and excitement of the twentieth century bouzouki clubs reminiscent of names such as Melina Mercouri and Stavros Niarchos.

Athens Riviera Assouline May 25 2020

Athens is experiencing a revival—in art, night life and design. For a metropolis constantly associated with the past, the modern strides in development and culture are sometimes overlooked in favor of the ruins and artifacts from antiquity. When in fact, the juxtaposition only enhances the beauty of both. Athens Riviera puts the old-world beside the new-world and a deeper understanding of this ancient capital emerges. With one foot in the past and one foot in the future; access to both the electricity of city life and the tranquility of a beach side resort, Athens cannot be defined in simple terms. One just has to experience it for themselves.

Stéphanie Artarit began her career as a journalist, and worked as a psychoanalyst for many years in Tokyo. She then went on to write the novel Variations of the Devil in 2013. Today, she divides her time between homes in Athens and the Cycladic island of Antiparos, where she also operates her boutique, Petit Tipota, and represents several French fashion labels in Greece. In 2018, she began her company, The Gang of Style, which specializes in designing in-house boutiques for luxury hotels all over the world.

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Top New Travel Videos: “The Essence Of Athens” In Timelapse By Joerg Daiber

Filmed and Edited by: Joerg Daiber

Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. The heritage of the classical era is still evident by ancient monuments and works of art, the most famous of all being the Parthenon on the Acropolis.

The Essence of Athens Timelapse Tilt Shift Video by Joerg Daiber January 13 2020

The incredible amount of Monuments and tourists in this city make it feel like you are walking through an open air museum at some times in the city center. However it is still an amazing place to visit.

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Top New Travel Videos: “Amazing Amorgos” In Greece” By Joerg Daiber

Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Joerg Daiber

I will never understand why so many people go to such an obvious Insta-tourist-trap like Santorini when there are so many amazing alternatives in Greece. Take Amorgos for instance. It’s the easternmost island in Greece’s Cyclades island group. With a land area of just 121 square kilometers, the island has a population of nearly 2000 people. It’s incredibly beautiful and no mass tourism is spoiling the fun so far.

Amazing Amorgos Greece Timelapse Travel Video by Joerg Daiber 2019

The island was featured in Luc Besson’s film “The Big Blue.” Enjoy this trip around Amorgos and let me know what you think in the comments below. Shot by Joerg Daiber during the Yperia Film Festival in Amorgos.

Website: http://www.spoonfilm.com/

European Travels: Retracing The Ancient Path To The Oracle At Delphi In Greece

From NY Times Travel article by Liz Alderman:

Greece and Delphi Map NYTBut as I stood on the archaic plateau, I was riveted. The broken columns of once-mighty altars rose like spirits in the pure air. A timeworn stadium and a prodigious stone amphitheater reigned silently over the mountain. The Temple of Apollo, where the Oracle dispensed her cryptic prophecies, was ringed with paths trod by truth-seekers who had labored up the steep valley from the Corinthian Gulf.

 

Voyage to the Center of the World NYT Travel

The peaks of Mount Parnassus shimmered on a warm spring afternoon above the temples of ancient Delphi. In a verdant valley below, silver-tipped olive trees stretched to the sea. The sun traced a golden arc in the azure sky. On a flat plateau surrounded by this natural theater, I looked up to find myself standing at the center of the world.

At least, the center of all things as the ancient Greeks knew it. In front of me was a black ovoid stone, known as the omphalos, set on the spot in Greek mythology where two eagles loosed by Zeus crossed paths at the earth’s nexus. It marked Delphi as one of the greatest enigmas of the ancient universe.

Read more by clicking on link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/travel/delphi-ancient-greece-oracle.html