sifnos

this and many other pics you found on my new calenders
with titel
sifnos
and
windows of your dreams
come and have a look
www.redbubble.com/people/sirhenryb/calendars
www.redbubble.com/people/sirhenryb

new year

wish you all a very god fruitfull new year
henry

sifnos

dear friends we will be on the road again
in march in the salento and in april on sifnos
henry and raija

the port of kamares sifnos

our balcony in april 09

the village ARTEMONAS

the view from our apartment

The lodging house of ONEIRO is located in the interior of the traditional village of Artemonas. You will reach ONEIRO wondering around the traditional narrow paved alleys of the area. Our premises consist of two fully equipped furnished apartments that can provide accommodation for two or four persons. The visitor can sense the calmness and admire the beautiful view to Kastro to the East and the mountain of Prophet Elias to the South. In a small distance from ONEIRO, there is the center of Artemonas where you have access to the local stores and the transportation.
It is also included:

Fully equipped kitchen
Air conditioning
Television
http://www.meropirooms.gr/index_en.html
Artemonas is located 1.5 km north of Apollonia. It is a real jewel of Sifnos, with mansions of neoclassical order, with gardens and flowery courtyards. In the top of the hill two windmills remain in good condition. From up there, the view of Sifnos is panoramic. You can survey the around islands, Kastro, even the port of Kamares. In Artemonas, apart from the well known bakeries, there are also confectioneries and potteries. More...
http://www.morpheas.gr/index_en.html

be

exarchia is everywere

Anarchy in Athens
By: BiodunIginla Athens :
by Biodun Iginla, News Analyst or BBC News and the Economist. Research by Moira Tamayo.

Dec 9th 2008 ATHENS
From Economist.com

Riots in Greece put pressure on the government of Costas Karamanlis
Reuters
GREECE prides itself on the robust quality of its democracy. Despite frustration at the number of traffic-choking demonstrations outside parliament every year—the reported average is two a week—politicians stress that modern Greeks’ enthusiasm for protesting underlines continuity with the golden age of ancient Athens.

Some demonstrations turn violent. Several times a year a group of hooded young men, who style themselves as “anarchists”, bring up the rear of a march. They carry metal bars and petrol bombs and ritual clashes with riot police ensue. Shop windows are smashed and tear gas fills Syntagma Square outside parliament for a few hours.

This week violence erupted on an unprecedented scale after Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old schoolboy, was shot dead by a policeman in Exarchia, a scruffy central district known as the anarchists’ home base, on Saturday December 6th. Shouting insults at passing patrol cars is a Saturday-night ritual for some young Athenians. But the last time police killed a teenager was in 1985. This time protests quickly spilled into main boulevards as anarchists torched cars, broke windows of shops decorated for Christmas and tossed petrol bombs inside. Beyond Athens demonstrators attacked police stations and government offices in a dozen cities.

By the evening of Tuesday, after four days of rioting, a respite still seemed far off. Hundreds of high-school students battled police after the teenager’s funeral in the Faliron suburb, while other protesters threw rocks at those on guard outside parliament. Appeals for calm by Costas Karamanlis, the Conservative prime minister, were ignored. Talks have failed between political leaders who were seeking a consensus to quell the unrest. George Papandreou, the Socialist opposition leader, has told Mr Karamanlis to resign and call a general election. “Effectively there is no government…we claim power,” he said.

Mr Karamanlis looks vulnerable. His New Democracy party controls just 151 seats in the 300-member parliament and trails by 4-5 percentage points in opinion polls. The prime minister’s personal approval rating has stayed ahead of Mr Papandreou’s, but if civil disorder continues for much longer that will probably slide too. Retailers and families that run small businesses are the backbone of support for the Conservatives and they are furious over the failure of police to protect their property. Worse, the latest upheaval comes on top of anger directed towards the government over a series of financial scandals. While demonstrators rampaged outside, a parliamentary committee was hearing evidence this week about an illegal exchange of land by Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. Senior cabinet ministers are alleged to have swindled taxpayers out of an estimated 100m euros ($Xm) while lining their own pockets.

Mr Karamanlis’s biggest mistake has been to ignore social reform, in particular of education, health and policing. As the global economic slowdown starts to have an impact on the country young Greeks see their parents struggling to pay bills. If one cannot afford to study abroad, a Greek university offers poor quality tuition and, unless one's family can pull strings, few opportunities for getting a job afterwards. The unemployment rate for young graduates is 21%, compared with 8% for the whole workforce.

Weak policing has allowed the anarchists to flourish in Exarchia, which has become a haven for drug dealers and racketeers. Protesters have also exploited a constitutional loophole that bans police from entering a university campus. In the past few days demonstrators have regrouped behind barricades at the Athens Polytechnic and picked up fresh supplies of petrol bombs before venturing back on the streets.

Mr Karamanlis’s attempts to abolish “university asylum” two years ago failed because he could not attract the cross-party support needed to change the constitution. Another set of educational reforms collapsed because a majority of academics refused to raise teaching standards and submit themselves to peer reviews. As the demonstrators rampage through laboratories and lecture rooms, the professors, like the politicians, must wish that they had tried harder.

sifnos

sifnos
Windmill Villas Artemonas
is a fascinating complex of residences, built around an old windmill, which is known to the locals as “Spithas’ Windmill”.

According to the marble plate, which is set over its main entrance, it was built in 1854 and it is the biggest of all the windmills of Sifnos (there were 60 on the island).

The building has been listed by the Greek state, and has been completely renovated in 1989. Ever since, it operated as a lodging to let, formed in such a way that, at any time, it can still operate as a windmill, once it has its windmill sails back on.

The windmill was named after its owner, Mr. Kostas Spithas, who will welcome you with his wife Rita, and they will both make your stay in Sifnos unforgettable.

Windmill Villas is situated in the village “Artemonas”, and it consists of the traditional windmill and of seven more lodgings that are built next to it, harmonically incorporated into the environment. All the lodgings have a view of the village of Kastro, of the islands Paros and Antiparos, while you can also see the islands of Folegandros and Sikinos

http://www.en.windmill-villas.gr/facilities.htm

The Athens Photo Festival

http://www.hcp.gr/en/festival.html

The Athens Photo Festival
, scheduled for autumn 2008, is a natural continuation of the International Photography Month in Athens, an event with a twenty-year history that was the major and oldest Greek institution with large-scale events focusing on the art of photography.
During this transitional period, which marks the end of an era, while at the same time giving rise to a new beginning, the festival will introduce its future form and course, transcending the format which for two decades designated that the festival would run in the month of October, and extending its cultural interventions throughout the autumn, with November being the main month for events.
This is a cultural event whose impact is worldwide; it forms part of an international network of photography events, transforming Athens into the centre of the international photography stage. The aim of the festival is to broaden the existing platform for presenting the annual Greek photography output and making contacts with artists from various countries.
Due to its wide-ranging nature, the festival will attempt to become the major artistic event of the autumn. Last year International Photography Month garnered the interest of 40,000 individuals and was widely reported in the press and all media. This year we expect to attract over 50,000 visitors to the Athens Photo Festival O8, a wonderful celebration of photography and culture.
This year’s event will include participations by over 200 artists from Greece and abroad, with exhibitions in over 30 exhibition spaces throughout the city of Athens. Athens Photo Festival 2008 is organised with the support of the Ministry of Culture, the General Secretariat for Youth, the Cultural Organisation of the Municipality of Athens, the Institut Français d’ Athènes and with the collaboration of the Goethe Institut Athen, the Benaki Museum, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Atene, the Hellenic American Union and a large number of cultural organisations and art galleries. The Hellenic Centre for Photography is responsible for the Festival organisation and coordination.
The Athens Photo Festival exhibition programme will include more than 40 solo and group exhibitions, featuring the photographs of more than 200 artists from Greece and overseas.
Exhibition programme theme
The main axis of the exhibitions will converge on the theme of this year’s festival.
Parallel exhibition programme
Exhibitions in galleries and art venues throughout the city will present work by Greek and foreign artists, although their work may not necessarily have any correlation to the main theme. This will function as a conduit to present works of particular artistic interest.
Young Greek Photographers
The Young Greek Photographers 2008 exhibition vibrantly enters its third decade in the field of photography. The aim of this exhibition is to facilitate young artists seeking access to the field of art and presenting their work to the general public.

jorgos dalaras

George Dalaras is one of Greece's biggest contemporary music stars and a living folk legend. Famous early in his career for reviving rembetika—Greek blues music popular from 1917 through 1950—Dalaras's music spans a variety of styles, from laika (popular) to paradosiaka (traditional). By 2002 he had released more than 60 solo recordings and collaborated with a wide variety of international artists, including Sting, flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia, and jazz-fusionist Al di Meola. Throughout Greece, Dalaras is beloved for his political concerns and his commitment to justice; internationally, he won the John F. Kennedy Award for his humanitarian efforts. Although little known outside his native country, Dalaras has performed in some of the world's most esteemed venues, such as the Olympia Theatre in Paris and Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Born in 1950 to a family of musicians, Dalaras grew up in the gritty Athenian port city of Piraeus. His grandfather, who lived in Thessaly (a remote region of northern Greece), played Byzantine music on the violi, a kind of fiddle. "All the men in the family—my grandfather had eleven children—became musicians," Dalaras told Anemona Hartocollis of Newsday. "There were only two or three girls, and they had families, and even some of them produced musicians."

Dalaras's father, Loukas Ntaralas (pronounced "Daralas"), was a well-known bouzouki musician and a performer of rembetika music. Characterized by melancholy harmonies and subversive lyrics about class struggle, love, and betrayal, rembetika was suppressed and censored during times of political unrest. Ntaralas played with the best names in rembetika, including Bambakari, Papayioannis, Tsitsanis, and Keomitis.

As a teenager, Dalaras—who inverted the third and fifth letters of his last name—played guitar and sang and at Piraeus's bouzoukia, or nightclubs, and made his recording debut in 1965 on his father's rendition of "Wry Thorn." Dalaras soon began to cut his own records, releasing his first song, "Prosmoni" (Anticipation), in 1967. The song made indirect reference to Greece's political turbulence, and was instantly banned by authorities of the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 until the mid-1970s.

In 1975, upon the junta's collapse, Dalaras released his first artistic success, Rembetiko, an album credited with reviving Greek underground music. Celebrating the working-class themes characteristic of rembetika, the release was an instant hit and the first platinum record (100,000 copies) in the history of Greek discography. "That was a very special moment for me," Dalaras told Chris Nickson of VH1.com. "When I sang rembetika, which had been both censored and forgotten, I was able to bring it back for the young people. Since then it's had a rebirth that has affected contemporary Greek music."

Since Rembetiko, Dalaras has explored various styles of Greek music. In the 1970s he collaborated with Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, recording 18 Songs of a Bitter Homeland, whose text was based on the poems of Greek lyricist Yiannis Ritsos. Touring with Theodorakis to promote the album, Dalaras also performed his interpretations of the composer's most famous songs. Soon Dalaras was considered a top performer of the country's best composers and songwriters, such as Stavros Kouyoumtzis, Manos Loizos, Lefteris Papadopoulos, and Manos Eleftheriou.

"Paraponemena logia" (Saddened words), Dalaras's 1979 hit, became the theme song for an entire generation of young Greeks. Following that success, in the early 1980s he became the first musician to take modern Greek music from small local clubs to large concert halls and arenas. In another first, Dalarus performed two sold-out shows at the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium of Athens. A live recorded album, Ta tragoudia mou (My songs), sold more than 700,000 copies.

In the mid-1980s Dalaras began performing internationally with a major European tour to Norway, Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Following this, he recorded 1987's Latin, which mixed Greek music with songs from Latin America. The next year Dalaras participated in the Amnesty International Concert at Olympic Stadium, with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Tracy Chapman.

Dalaras is beloved for his political concerns and his commitment to justice; ...
http://www.dalaras.com/dalaraseng.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dalaras

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCjLdatIm3o

http://www.sirhenryb.com/ moore music