The 39th Athens Marathon. The Authentic’ will be held on 12-13 November 2022 by the Hellenic Athletics Federation (SEGAS) with the support & sponsorship of the state as well as the private sector.

This year’s race will accept even more runners than the 2021 race, which was limited due to the pandemic. A total of 15,000 entries will open for the Marathon Race, 15,000 for the 5km Road Race and 12,000 for the 10km Road Race.

For the first time this year, the Universities Night Run will take place on Saturday 12 November, with a participation limit of 3,000 people. All the activities of this race, as well as the international conference that SEGAS is preparing, will be presented in detail in the coming weeks.

This year, the 1,2km Kids’ Race returns to the program of the event, in which 900 children will participate.

Greece has become the top country in the world in improving the business environment over the last few years, a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) found recently.

Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, Greece’s business environment ranking (BER) increased by 16 places, the report says.

“This significant improvement reflects its poor starting point, given a long-delayed recovery from the government debt crisis that began in 2009, but also the impact of a pro-business majority government that has undertaken reforms, cut taxes, and restored confidence in the country,” the EIU adds.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hailed the report's findings, saying that it is very encouraging to see our efforts to reform the economy recognized.

The business environment in Greece was aided by “reforms, tax cuts

Chief economic adviser to the Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Patelis said that the significant improvement reflects its poor starting point, but also the impact of a pro-business majority government that has undertaken reforms, cut taxes, and restored confidence in the country.

The EIU report says the most significant improvements over the past three years since before the ructions caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, are in the business environments of Greece, Qatar, the US, and the UAE. The biggest deteriorations are in Latin America, the lowest-ranking region, as well as in Russia and Ukraine.

To read this article in full, please visit: greekreporter.com

 Ancient Greece was the birthplace of Western civilization and democracy. The information we have about the life of the ancient Greeks, their celebrations, and their religious beliefs has been preserved in a series of ancient texts, which have survived, and today are part of the world's cultural heritage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by: Codico Lab

More than most other populations from the ancient past, the physical appearance of the Greeks, especially those of the Classical period of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, has been a source of fascination for scholars, poets, artists, and political leaders (oftentimes nefariously), for centuries.

To put everyone at ease from the start, evidence strongly suggests that modern Greeks are genetically similar to those who inhabited these lands 2,500 years ago. Thanks to recent DNA studies of ancient human remains, we now know that today’s Greeks share a “genetic overlap” with even earlier populations in the region, being closely related to the Bronze Age Mycenaeans (ca. 1600-1200 BC) and, even further back in time, to the migrant Neolithic farmers who first ventured across the Aegean from Anatolia in the 7th and 6th millennia BC.

It’s safe to say that when we think of the descendants of the ancient Greeks, we needn’t go any further than the modern population. But beyond the typical Mediterranean stereotype of dark hair, brown eyes, and olive skin that we often associate with people of Greek descent, we also know that modern Greeks are quite diverse in appearance, including those with much fairer coloring (blue and green eyes, blond hair and even the occasional redhead), and others who are much darker in complexion.

Ancient Greeks In Art

Minoan frescoes (the art of painting on plastered walls) from the mid-second millennium BC, notably from Crete and Santorini – the famous wall paintings of Thera, for example – make clear distinctions between male and female figures. Tall and slender, with narrow waists and long, dark hair, men are often depicted with reddish-brown skin, while women appear as porcelain white, with piercing kohl-rimmed eyes, and with fuller figures. This artistic convention is similar to the depiction of men and women in ancient Egyptian frescoes. In reality, Minoan women likely applied a foundation of toxic white lead or carbonate to lighten their complexion, a practice that was widely used by aristocratic women in late 16th through 18th century Europe (e.g., Queen Elizabeth I of England).

Finely painted ceramic vessels from the mid-first millennium BC, especially during the later Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 600-323 BC), provide key insight into aspects of everyday life, offering some interesting clues about the physical characteristics of everyday people. Both men and women are usually depicted with low foreheads, thick curly hair, almost always black or dark brown, straight noses, large eyes, and ovoid faces. The bi-chromatic nature of the art (both in black-figure and the later red-figure traditions) makes it difficult to determine skin coloring, but the white-ground technique, developed in Attica ca. 500 BC, gave artists more freedom to express colors. In a similar fashion to earlier Bronze Age art, women often appear as fair-skinned while men often appear in darker hues or completely black.

Human Remains

A recent Harvard University study analyzed the ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of 19 people, including 10 Minoans from Crete (dating from 2900-1700 BC), four Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland (1700-1200 BC), and five individuals from other Bronze Age or early farming (Early Neolithic) communities (5400-1340 BC). It was found that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were closely related to each other, inheriting three-quarters of their DNA from the earlier farmers who had migrated across from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Crucially, the Mycenaeans were found to have as much as 16 percent of their DNA from the Eurasian Steppe and/or Armenia, indicating a genetic divergence from their Minoan cousins. It appears that these northern ancestors didn’t make it as far south as Crete.

When compared to the DNA of modern Greeks, it was found there is a close “genetic overlap” with the ancient Mycenaeans, sharing many of the same ancestral roots but with some additional dilution of the earlier Neolithic ancestry. Remarking on the continuity of the modern population with their Late Bronze Age forebears, co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington in Seattle, said it’s “particularly striking given that the Aegean has been a crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years.” While modern Greeks have acquired further genetic traits from later migrations, it’s no surprise that the genes for dark hair and brown eyes, carried over from the Minoans and Mycenaeans, remain so dominant today.

To read this article in full, please visit: greece-is.com

For the FIRST TIME, the most beloved tenor on the planet, the artist-legend Andrea Bocelli, the man who gave new life to opera, will appear on July 18, 2023 at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, offering a unique opportunity for visitors to enjoy and be enchanted from his voice, his ethos and his temperamental setting.

The singer with the evocative voice, breaking all records for sold-out concerts around the world, the most famous tenor of his generation, and one of the most important artists of all time, returns to Athens on July 18, 2023 to perform in the biggest concert of Greece, until today!

A unique, magical experience for all music lovers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A church bell sounds, the staccato thudding of mallet on plank summons monks to afternoon prayers, and deep voices are raised in communal chant. And high in the great tower of Pantokrator Monastery, a metal library door swings open.

There, deep inside the medieval fortified monastery in the Mount Athos monastic Orthodox Christian community, researchers are for the first time tapping a virtually unknown treasure – thousands of Ottoman-era manuscripts that include the oldest of their kind in the world.

The libraries of the self-governed community, established more than 1,000 years ago on northern Greece’s Athos peninsula, are a repository of rare, centuries-old works in several languages including Greek, Russian and Romanian.

Many have been extensively studied, but not the Ottoman Turkish documents, products of an occupying bureaucracy that ruled northern Greece from the late 14th century – well before the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, fell to the Ottomans in 1453 – until the early 20th when the area became Greek again.

Byzantine scholar Jannis Niehoff-Panagiotidis says it’s impossible to understand Mount Athos’ economy and society under Ottoman rule without consulting these documents, which regulated the monks’ dealings with secular authorities.

“Ottoman was the official language of the state,” he told The Associated Press from the library of the Pantokrator Monastery, one of 20 on the heavily wooded peninsula.

Niehoff-Panagiotidis, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, said the oldest of the roughly 25,000 Ottoman works found in the monastic libraries dates to 1374, or 1371. That’s older than any known in the world, he said, adding that in Istanbul, as the Ottomans renamed Constantinople when they made the city their own capital, the oldest archives only go back to the late 15th century.

And the manuscripts tell a story at odds with the traditional understanding in Greece of Ottoman depredations in the newly-conquered areas, through the confiscation of the Mount Athos monasteries’ rich real estate holdings. Instead, the new rulers took the community under their wing, preserved its autonomy and protected it from external interference.

Nikopoulos said that one of the first actions of Murad II, the Ottoman ruler who conquered Thessaloniki – the closest city to Mount Athos – was to draw up a legal document in 1430 protecting the community.

Another unexpected revelation, Niehoff-Panagiotidis said, was that for roughly the first two centuries of Ottoman rule no effort was made to impose Islamic law on Mount Athos or nearby parts of northern Greece.

To read this article in full, please visit: ekathimerini.com

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greece ranks 6th in the World’s Most Popular Places for Destination Weddings list, according to Google search data analysis recently published by money.co.uk, an online financial product comparison service.

By analyzing Google search data from the last 12 months for ‘wedding in + [destination]’ in nearly every country around the world, experts at money.co.uk discovered that Greece was the most googled wedding destination in Armenia, Brazil, England, Hungary, South Africa, and Wales.

The country ranked 3rd most popular destination to tie the knot in Europe and came in 5th place among South Americans wanting to get married.

The most popular country that the world is googling to get married in is India, as it takes the top spot for 38 countries around the globe including Australia, Canada, Mexico, and the US.

The second-most popular place for a wedding destination is Italy, with 28 countries choosing it as their top nuptial haven including France, Greece, and Sweden.

Wedding destinations sum up approximately $16 billion in annual spending of visitors according to Ampers and Travel while 2022 is set to be the biggest year for weddings since the 80s, the Wedding Academy International says.

To read this article in full, please visit: news.gtp.gr