Some people love Greece the way you might love a language you were not born to: imperfectly, seriously and for life. This page is for them.
A welcome for the stranger
Long before hospitality was an industry, it was a duty.
The ancient Greeks called it xenia and placed it under the protection of Zeus. A traveller at the door was given food, shelter and safety before anyone asked his name.
The word that lasts is philoxenia, love of the stranger. You still meet it today: in the plate that arrives at a village table unasked, in the lift offered without fuss, in the host who insists you take the better portion.
We did not invent any of this. We learned it from Greece, and we try to live up to it.
The duty belonged to the host.
It was never a debt owed by the guest.
The words we keep
Greek often says in one word what English needs a whole sentence for. These four guide how we work.
- Φιλότιμο filotimo
The love of honour.
Doing the right thing because it is right, not because anyone is watching. For us, it means checking our facts and giving credit where it is due.
- Μεράκι meraki
Putting something of yourself into the work.
You see it in a thing made by hand or a meal cooked with care. For us, it means doing the research properly, even where nobody would notice a shortcut.
- Παρέα parea
The company you keep, and what it becomes around a long table.
A parea orders together, lingers, argues and laughs, and the company is the evening.
- Νόστος nostos
Homecoming, and the ache for it.
It gave English the word nostalgia. Many people who love Greece know the feeling, including some for whom Greece was never home.
More than a postcard
Greece is often shrunk to a few pictures: the blue dome, the white lane, the sunset. Nobody meant this to happen. It comes from the same images being shared again and again.
What gets lost is the detail. The cheese has a name and a village. The wind is the meltemi. A feast day belongs to a saint and a community before it belongs to a visitor.
Greece is not a museum either. It is a living country, with new buildings beside old ones, chefs who change a recipe and grandmothers who refuse to. We would rather stay curious than nostalgic.
So we hold ourselves to four rules.
- Name the person. Not “a local artisan” when we can give a real name. And spell it correctly.
- Keep quiet places quiet. Some things belong in conversation, not online.
- Honour the seasons. Greece in February is not a lesser Greece. August is only a louder one.
- Tell the truth, even when it is ordinary. Not every taverna is a revelation. Love does not need exaggeration.
Greece does not have to stay the same
to stay Greek.
- some 1,200
- foreigners came, from 1821
- around 400
- never went home
- April 1824
- Byron, at Missolonghi
The philhellenes
There is an old word for friendship with Greece: philhellenism.
During the Greek War of Independence, men and women far beyond Greece took up its cause. Some travelled. Some fought. Some died. Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in April 1824.
Many more never left home. In London, Paris and Geneva, committees wrote, translated, organised and raised money.
Many never saw a battlefield.
They changed how the world understood Greece, and in time what governments were willing to do.
The line did not end with the war. Writers, scholars and travellers kept coming, and many stayed. Patrick Leigh Fermor walked the Mani and wrote it down. Others taught the language, translated the poets or came back every summer for the rest of their lives.
Most of them were never famous. They looked closely, told the truth about what they found and passed it on to someone else.
Friendship with a country still asks something of you: to pay attention, to learn the names and to share what is worth sharing.
You can do that from anywhere.
