Greece is currently subdivided into 13 Regions (‘Περιφέρειες’), 54 Prefectures (‘Νομαρχίες’) and 1034 Municipalities (‘Δήμοι’). This was the result of a major administrative reorganization in 1996, called the “Kapodistrias” plan. Initially some, but not all, Prefectures were further subdivided into Provinces (‘Επαρχίες’), but the latter were abolished after a couple of years. Municipalities were...
Read more →Oh my, I’ve gone all philosophical an moralistic on you in my last post. Never mind, let’s blame it on the weather. Or something. The thing that brought this along was a memory flash that I had, from a period some 50 years ago. I was in my first year at primary school in...
Read more →Everybody’s been talking about snow on the Intahrnet today. A friend from Belgium even sent me an e-mail this morning inquiring about the situation. Quite frankly, I had no idea what they were all talking about. Here, about 1 kilometer north of the archaeological site of Knossós and some 4 kilometers south of the...
Read more →Whoa! Whoa! Enough already! We’ve had no less than 6 rumblings in the underground in the last 2 hours, all in the same area, 3 of them above 6 on the Richter scale. Someone’s throwing a hell of a Valentine party down there! Time LAT LONG Depth KM Mag 12:08:56 36.44 N 22.03 E...
Read more →For weeks now this scandal has been capturing the Greek minds. It seemingly started out as a tabloid-worthy sex affair between aging high-ranking male employer and young female collaborator, something not likely to turn many Greek heads. Then it got uglier. Then more uglier, and morer uglier even. Now the international press has gotten...
Read more →What follows is a story that I was told the Russians tell about us: One day God got up exhausted from governing the planet and so He decided to divide the whole globe into pieces, call all the different nations and give them a piece each, so that from then onwards they would be...
Read more →The Greek authorities are finally going to be cracking down on misbehaving tourists in the Gouves-Chersonissos-Malia area this year. The three resorts, about 40 kilometers east of Iraklio, Crete, are probably the most popular holiday destinations for tourists in Crete, each year attracting hundreds of thousands of youngsters, mainly from Great Britain and the...
Read more →For the year 2008 the Greek government has implemented phases 2 and 3 of the planned tax reform program that the conservative ND (Nea Demokratia) party has initiated when they came to power in 2004. You might think of Greece as a poor country. You’d be wrong. As a matter of fact, Greece is...
Read more →Most of you probably know that I have been a big Apple fan for decades. My first interest was awoken while I was working at IBM in Brussels (1976-1981, big mainframes, big, big mainframes, water-cooled too), when I showed an article about the then popular Apple II to one of our technicians for whom...
Read more →I told you that I was trying to entice Aretússa to write down the little stories that she keeps telling us so that I could publish them on my weblog. Well, Aretússa didn’t hesitate long. This morning I found the following in my mailbox. Without further ado, and by way of introducing Aretússa, I...
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