Costas spiliadis biography of william

As the group of culinary aficionados gathers round the stove, food expert Diane Kochilas welcomes them to her home. This homemade cooking course is about tasting, feeling, listening, asking questions and interacting in a relaxed, informal kind of way. «The fast-food and the food industry in general have done a great job in making people afraid to cook, by directing them to convenient and easy foods through intense marketing,» says Kochilas. «During the classes, people come together and by the end of the session, they’ve warmed to each other.» A series of courses focusing on the cuisine of Greece and the broader Mediterranean region which began earlier this month and runs through early June – at a recent session, Kochilas went through the gamut of soup making in the Mediterranean basin – are mostly based on cooking with olive oil and a plethora of the finest ingredients. Signing up are professional chefs and restaurants owners, but for the most part anyone who enjoys cooking and is looking for exciting dishes, dinner solutions and some fun can join. A leading connoisseur of Greek cuisine – Kochilas is a Greek American born and raised in New York City who finally settled in Greece in the early 1990s – she frequently acts as link between Greece and the rest of the world. Besides her weekly restaurant review in the daily Ta Nea, she is a regular contributor to authoritative publications, such as The New York Times and Gourmet magazine. She also frequently returns to the US, teaching Greek food courses at culinary schools while collaborating with the International Olive Oil Council, and lecturing in Argentina, China, Thailand and Japan, among other countries. She is due in Norway and Britain this spring for a series of seminars sponsored by natural Greek food products Gaea. «I enjoy communicating the good things about Greece – and there are lot of these,» she says. «I like teaching people about misunderstandings.» Kochilas educates people through her writing as well.

In Western literature and painting, Kythera has been legendary as a mythic destination. But for the island of Kythera itself, life during the last period of its recent history has been defined by a single, pervasive and continuing phenomenon: emigration. The first big wave of emigration began in the mid-19th century with Smyrna in Asia Minor as a destination. An exodus of emigrants leaving for the USA and Australia (Greeks from Kastellorizo and Kythera are in fact the majority in the Greek communities in Australia) followed at the beginning of the 20th century and another great wave marked the period right after the German occupation. This began a succession whose traces are still felt today in the abandoned or sparsely inhabited areas across the island but also in an awareness, among the locals, of dispersed family lineages. For both those who remained on the island and the offspring of former emigrants who made their way back, family ties and the concept of rootedness must hold a symbolic significance and anything that documents the past, especially old photographs or family relics, is much valued. Set against this background, «The Kythera Photographic Encounters,» a conference on Greek photography recently held on the island, was a distinctive event well suited to the historical context of Kythera. The study of continuity and origin in Greek photography that was part of the conference’s objective echoed the search for continuity that is part of the island’s identity. Particularly so, as the conference was also linked to the preservation and study of the Kytherean photographic archives, another ambitious project undertaken by the conference’s organizers. Apart from the fact that this is one of the few concerted efforts to help advance the study of Greek photography – a neglected field for too long – what also makes this cultural event noteworthy is that it took place due to the enthusiasm of a single man for whom photography and the island of Kythera have becom