Category Archives: Greece

Ursula von der Leyen issues Covid vaccine export warning at EU summit

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Commission head reassures leaders she will ban vaccines leaving EU if suppliers fail to deliver again

Ursula von der Leyen has reassured EU leaders she will ban coronavirus vaccines from leaving the EU if suppliers such as AstraZeneca fail to deliver again, as she faced questions over her handling of shortages.

The European commission president’s pledge at a virtual summit came as leaders issued a statement promising to “accelerate the provision of vaccines”, with just 8% of the adult population having received a jab compared with 27% in the UK.

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‘Unique’ petrified tree up to 20m years old found intact in Lesbos

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Discovery of 19.5-metre tree with roots, branches and leaves is unprecedented, say experts

First came the tree, all 19.5 metres of it, with roots and branches and leaves. Then, weeks later, the discovery of 150 fossilised logs, one on top of the other, a short distance away.

Nikolas Zouros, a professor of geology at the University of the Aegean, couldn’t believe his luck. In 25 years of excavating the petrified forest of Lesbos, he had unearthed nothing like it.

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Greece in talks with UK to allow holidays with vaccine passports

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Greek tourism minister says he hopes to ‘dovetail’ with Boris Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown

Greece is in “technical” talks with the UK over allowing Britons carrying a vaccine passport to travel to its tourist hotspots from May despite concerns in Brussels and other EU capitals.

Haris Theoharis, the country’s tourism minister, said he hoped to “dovetail” with Boris Johnson’s roadmap for allowing Britons to travel but refused to be drawn on whether Greece would break with Brussels to establish the scheme.

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Athens accused of ‘downplaying’ risks of lead contamination at Lesbos camp

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Campaign group calls for more testing at Mavrovouni, a temporary facility housing thousands of refugees on the Greek island

The Greek government is “downplaying” the risks of lead contamination in the refugee camp on Lesbos, according to Human Rights Watch.

The group is calling for further comprehensive testing at the Mavrovouni camp after results revealed that one area had particularly high levels of lead contamination.

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Digger review – family tensions are unearthed in slow-burn Greek drama

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A corporate destruction project offers a symbolic backdrop for this poignant drama about a father-son relationship

Its plot featuring a giant mining corporation known as “the monster” tearing up the landscape and causing bitter division among the hard-drinking local populace, this handsomely shot drama could be taking place in rust-belt America. But this is backwoods Greece, where forest rancher Nikitas (Vangelis Mourikis), first seen fending off a landslide caused by the miners’ activities, is fighting a running battle to keep them from despoiling the haven he loves. A motorbike throttle at midnight announces the arrival of his estranged son Johnny (Argyris Pandazaras), whose need to claim his inheritance adds to the pressure on Nikitas to ship out.

Related: Europe in 25 films: the critics’ choice

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Greek students at the barricades in dispute over education bill

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Government accused of taking law and order agenda to new heights with plans for campus police force

Before the sun had risen over Thessaloniki on Wednesday, Stergios Grigoriou and his fellow students had surrounded the Greek metropolis’s main university site and barricaded every entrance to it.

The act of defiance was not a one-off. In a country where protest politics reign large, students are on a mission: to overturn a bill that, in the name of bringing order to unruly universities, foresees the creation of disciplinary councils and a special campus police force. “Our demand is simple. The educational bill has to be withdrawn,” said Grigoriou. “It’s a repressive law that far from serving our needs only serves the fake needs of a conservative few.”

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I crossed the world to see my dying dad – then the pandemic took me on a wild Europe odyssey

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When I tried to return from Jersey to Australia, I had no idea the journey would lead me through 16 cities in nine countries, and take nearly five months

On the morning of 1 July last year, while sitting in my apartment in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, I got the phone call I had dreaded since I moved to Australia.

My dad was dying.

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The Greeks had a word for it … until now, as language is deluged by English terms

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A leading linguist pleads for moderation as a huge outbreak of ‘Greenglish’, much of it Covid-related, spreads

Usually, Professor Georgios Babiniotis would take pride in the fact that the Greek word “pandemic” – previously hardly ever uttered – had become the word on everyone’s lips.

After all, the term that conjures the scourge of our times offers cast-iron proof of the legacy of Europe’s oldest language. Wholly Greek in derivation – pan means all, demos means people – its usage shot up by more than 57,000% last year according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers.

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Greek president praises Sofia Bekatorou for reporting alleged sexual assault

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  • Olympic sailing gold medallist alleges assault occurred in 1998
  • Katerina Sakellaropoulou praises athlete’s ‘brave revelation’

Greece’s president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, has praised the Olympic sailing champion Sofia Bekatorou for dissolving a potential “conspiracy of silence” by reporting a historic allegation of sexual assault by a sports official.

Bekatorou, who won a gold medal at the Athens Games in 2004, told the Greek edition of Marie Claire last month that she suffered the assault in 1998, when she was 21. Sakellaropoulou met Bekatorou on Monday and said her courage offered hope to other women in her situation.

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‘It’s incredible’: why do two convicted Greek neo-Nazis remain at large?

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Christos Pappas, Golden Dawn’s de facto number two, is missing, while MEP Ioannis Lagos has refused to return home

Kostis Papaioannou is by his own admission, a far right junkie. Documenting the twists and turns of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-fascist party whose rise and fall took Europe by storm, gets him “fired up”.

Yet little prepared Papaioannou, who has written several books about the extremists, for his latest endeavour: charting the days when two of the now defunct political force’s convicted leaders would remain at large. “It’s incredible,” said the prominent human rights activist. “Rather than ticking off the days they spend behind bars I’m now calculating their time spent savouring freedom.”

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Greek Orthodox church to defy lockdown by opening for Epiphany

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Holy synod says services will be held at places of worship on Wednesday despite closure rules in Greece

The Greek Orthodox church has announced it will defy government lockdown orders aimed at curbing the spread of coronavirus and open places of worship to mark Epiphany this Wednesday.

After an emergency session of the holy synod, its governing body, senior clerics said they would press ahead as planned and celebrate the baptism of Christ on 6 January.

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Athens’ first official mosque permitted to reopen for Christmas

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Mosque beset by difficulties finally to allow in worshippers thanks to relaxation of Greece’s Covid restrictions

Christmas has been greeted with enthusiasm by Muslim worshippers in Athens after the modern Greek capital’s first official mosque – forced to close only days after its inauguration in November – was told it could reopen for the holiday.

Relaxation of a national lockdown to enable Greek Orthodox faithful to attend mass on Christmas Day means the mosque will also be able to operate.

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‘Please help us’: child refugees running out of time to reach UK before Brexit

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Desperate relatives in Britain plead with Home Office for flexibility as paperwork holdups delay family reunions while deadline looms

The Home Office has said it will not allow a group of stranded refugee children to join their families in the UK if their cases do not make it through the Greek asylum system by 31 December when the EU family reunification programme comes to an end.

Around 20 children who are eligible to join their relatives in the UK under the current family reunification scheme are still waiting for their cases to be completed in Greece, before the UK government ends the programme when it leaves the EU on the 31st December.

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‘A mental health emergency’: no end to trauma for refugees on Lesbos

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Mental health problems are spiralling among adults and children at ‘Moria 2:0’ camp as winter sets in and security tightens

Nadia hasn’t slept. The mother of five spent last night trying to soothe her seven-year-old son, Matin, who is autistic, while heavy rain fell on the family’s tent. He was crying and asking for the noise to stop. “I tried to explain to him that the rain is not in our control,” she says, “but in these moments, you can’t reach him any more.”

The family, originally from Parwan province in Afghanistan, are living in the new refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos that was built in three days, after the fire that razed to the ground parts of the infamous Moria camp.

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‘Zak’s an icon’: the long fight for justice over death of Greek LGBT activist

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Zak Kostopoulos’s family say murder charges must be brought in a case that has exposed deep homophobia

Days after his death in the heart of Athens, the image of Zak Kostopoulos began to appear across the city centre, on buildings and nondescript office blocks, the marble steps of neoclassical mansions, walls and columns.

On Gladstonos street there were also words, some sprayed, some stencilled, some handwritten, but all amounting to the same thing: a memorial to a man who dared to be different.

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Thousands of refugees in mental health crisis after years on Greek islands

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One in three on Aegean isles have contemplated suicide amid EU containment policies, report reveals

Years of entrapment on Aegean islands has resulted in a mental health crisis for thousands of refugees, with one in three contemplating suicide, a report compiled by psychosocial support experts has revealed.

Containment policies pursued by the EU have also spurred ever more people to attempt to end their lives, according to the report released by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on Thursday.

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Greece faces legal action over alleged expulsion of Syrian to Turkey

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Man with right to asylum in Germany allegedly stripped of papers and expelled in ‘refugee pushback’ while searching for 11-year-old brother

In the latest allegation that Greek authorities are illegally expelling refugees , lawyers will this week file a case at the UN human rights committee on behalf of a Syrian man living in Germany, who says he was picked up and sent to Turkey while he searched for his brother in Greece.

The 26-year-old told the Guardian that he had been detained and forced into a boat to Turkey in November 2016. His papers were confiscated which meant he was not able to return to Germany, where he had been granted asylum, for three years.

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Father faces criminal charge over son’s death in migrant boat tragedy

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Afghan asylum seeker accused of endangering six-year-old’s life after family tried to reach Greek island of Samos from Turkey

The father of a six-year-old who died trying to reach the Greek island of Samos from the Turkish coast has been charged by Greek authorities with endangering his son’s life.

Abdul*, 25, from Afghanistan, faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty. The cause of his son’s death has not been confirmed.

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Erdoğan met by protests from Turkish Cypriots during visit

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‘Provocative’ trip to northern Cyprus angers residents as well as the south and Greece

Turkey’s president has been greeted with protests from Turkish Cypriots denouncing Ankara’s overt meddling in their domestic affairs as he visited northern Cyprus.

In a rare display of opposition for a leader whose tolerance for critics is notoriously low, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was met by demonstrators as he flew into the territory for celebrations marking its unilateral declaration of independence 37 years ago.

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‘It’s bittersweet’: reopened Varosha highlights ongoing division in Cyprus

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Tourists can return to crumbling resort in northern Cyprus – but Turkey’s involvement has caused anger

Pavlos Iakovou was 17 when he met his wife, Tuolla, at the Edelweiss cafe in Famagusta, the fashionable Cypriot holiday resort where his family owned a hotel. Last week, the couple returned to some of their old haunts in the abandoned quarter of Varosha, or Maraş in Turkish, for the first time in 46 years.

Sealed off as a militarised zone and untouched since 1974, when Turkey invaded following a Greek coup, the decaying slice of 1970s glamour is now open again to visitors – Greek Cypriots included.

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