MPJ

I was very young when I visited Olympus for the first time. It happened during our early vacation in the region back then in the eighties of the previous century. I vividly remember there was a dangerous dirt road with not much room for two vehicles to pass by, ending near one of the mounting homes with an embedded small tavern, which can really print on its portfolio, that was built on the top of gods' heavenly entrances. For some fairly strange reasons, Coca-Cola and Souvlaki on the tavern's terrace felt really tasty, just as the pure and clean water from the water stream just next to it. Unfortunately, and despite all of my efforts, I couldn't see or find anything divine, out of worldly items, or even a glowing, shiny rock. There were no gods whatsoever. Or naked muses. Or beasts with snakes instead of hair. Or horses with wings. Or mighty heroes. Nothing. Well, I was only 10 years old. What did I know.. Maybe that pair of hawks we saw flying around the highest rock acro...

The age of this blog is both old, in a sense of fast maturing of internet and IT technology in general, but also very young if we are counting human age in old fashion way. When we first visited Thassos island dozen of years before, internet and social sharing technology were about to enter their unstable teenage years, so to speak. It was the time when I bought my first digital camera, HP PhotoSmart C850 with it's state of the art optics and digital technology from the time. Pictures from Thassos back then in the summer of 2003 were probably my first attempt to take more artistic landscapes from our Greece vacations and today is perhaps the time to compare both what changes in photography gadgets and also with Thassos itself after full 12 years. Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post - half of them shown above, all taken with HP Photosmart C850 with 4 megap...

If I am going to give a thought or two about ancient Atlantis, its mysterious people and all the conspiracy theories behind it, there is no doubt that I'll first think of the origin of the story. Classical Greece and Plato. One of the most famous scholars from BC. In his own time, Plato was definitely the top Greek philosopher from ancient Athens, who lived in fourth century before Christ and dedicated his entire scholarly life to philosophical research and development of modern society and politics. The method he used in his publications were dialogues, very popular way of expressing scientific thoughts at the time. Plato's dialogues, in which he never took the role as one of participants, were often the front story accompanied with narration, but in some of them he even excluded narrator and presented his work in pure novel-style with his characters carrying the story all the way. In regards of today's title, two dialogues are especially interested - Timaeus and Cri...

The road this summer took us approximately 700km south to the Greek second large island of Evia (Εύβοια). Starting from this year we decided to leave Macedonian Greece and start spending our vacations and visiting other regions of the country and this southern part of the Balkans. Our vacation resort was located only about 100km from the spot where famous 'Battle of Thermopylae' took place and where in late summer of 480 BC, king Leonidas of Sparta confronted large army of Persian Empire lead by Xerxes the Great, who was trying to occupy ancient Greece in Persian second attempt. The Greeks was vastly outnumbered and faced with imminent collapse after the betrayal during the second day of battle, Leonidas dismissed majority of his army and in the most famous last stand, remained to guard the narrow pass of Thermopylae only with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. We all know what happened next. At least many of you saw the movie and although it was diverted from the re...

Long ago I started to experience that one extremely memorable dream. One of those that doesn't fade out with first morning sunshine. Instead, it was regularly popping the surface of my mind making me wondering if these vivid images, haunting me every now and again, were just product of my imagination or perhaps there was something more hidden beneath. In the dream I wander the narrow streets of an unknown city one after another and after a while I stumble to the big square with large monumental building decorated with dark reddish bricks with no signs or any familiar markings I can recognize. I was always wondering where all these colorful images originated from and somehow always had that feeling that I am probably missing an important link to fully understand the whole picture. Recently this final link suddenly appeared and during our vacation last week I accidentally found my dream site and all missing pieces finally placed together forming a memory almost 40 years old. Someh...