Browse Books

Gail Holst

Road to Rembetika

Road to Rembetika, an introduction to the urban 'blues' of Greece, the 'rembetika', and its milieu, was first published over 30 years ago and has since been reprinted many times in both English and Greek. Interest in rembetika music continues unabated and it now has its aficionados all over the world as well as in Greece. This present book is the fourth edition which has been revised and re-typeset and has a new introduction by the author Gail Holst. more

Angelos Sikelianos

Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems

A selection of poems by one of Greece’s major, yet relatively little known, twentieth-century poets in bilingual format. more

Juliet du Boulay

Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village

This book distils the author's experience, as a young traveller and later an anthropologist, of a way of life which, although seen here in a Greek context, was in its essentials once common throughout the world. Simple archetypal houses, terraced fields and plunging forest, the love of land and family, unceasing labour, a vivid communal life, ... more

Saint Porphyrios

Wounded by Love

Saint Porphyrios, who was formally glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in November 2013, was among a number of extraordinary spiritual elders within the Eastern Orthodox Church who lived and exercised their ancient ministry in Greece in the twentieth century. This book records in his own words, with a freshness and immediacy unusual in similar hagiographic writings, the remarkable details of his life and his counsels on many aspects of living a spiritual life. more

C. P. Cavafy, Odysseus Elytis, Nikos Gatsos, George Seferis & Angelos Sikelianos

A Greek Quintet

During the last hundred and more years the Greek world has produced a wealth of poetry that is as astonishing in its scope as it is in its vigour, and this anthology brings together a selection from the works of the five poets who may be said to take pride of place in substantiating this achievement. Two of them, George Seferis and Odyss... more

Alexandros Papadiamandis

The Boundless Garden

This is the first volume of the selected short stories in English translation of Greece's most significant yet relatively unknown prose-writer, Alexandros Papadiamandis. He has been compared to Dostoyevsky and Hardy and, sharing with them similar qualities in the great European tradition of story telling, he explores the souls of men and women as they succumb to or struggle against the power of evil. His reflections on and observations of Greek life define the modern Greek experience in a way unattained by any of his contemporaries. more

George Seferis

On the Greek Style

This is the first and still the only collection of the essays of the Nobel Prize Laureate George Seferis (1900–1971) to be published in English; the essays were selected by Seferis himself, drawing upon his prose work written over a period of thirty years. Seferis was a classicist and a humanist, a man of modern sensibility imbue... more

Zissimos Lorenzatos

The Drama of Quality

A selection of essays on Greek literature and tradition by the greatly esteemed Greek writer and critic, Zissimos Lorentzatos, which also includes a substantial and sympathetic study of Ezra Pound that has been described as ‘the jewel of the collection’.

more

Terence Spencer

Fair Greece Sad Relic

A classic study of philhellenism as expressed by those who visited and wrote about Greece from the 16th to the 19th centuries. more

Alexandros Papadiamandis

Love in the Snow

'Love in the Snow', written in 1896, is one of Papadiamandis's most poignant tales. Zissimos Lorenzatos writes in his introductory note to this short story: 'The snow which covers the hero in 'Love in the Snow', set on the island of Skiathos, birthplace of Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851–1911), runs parallel, one cou... more

Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

Making a Garden on a Greek Hillside

A revised edition of this now classic book about gardening in Greece, an essential read for all water-conscious people who live in similar Mediterranean climates, is now available. more

Philip Sherrard

The Sacred in Life and Art

We are becoming increasingly aware that the forms of our life and art — of our modern civilization generally — have over the last few centuries been characterized by the progressive loss of precisely that sense which gives virtually all other civilizations and cultures of the world their undying luster and significance: the sense o... more

Juliet du Boulay

Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village

Winner of the 2010 Runciman Award

more

Philip Sherrard

The Greek East and the Latin West

The division of Christendom into the Greek East and the Latin West has its origins far back in history, but its consequences still affect Europe, and thus western civilization. Philip Sherrard's classic study seeks to indicate both the fundamental character and some of the consequences of this division. He points especially to the underlying m... more

Philip Sherrard

Human Image: World Image

This challenging and thought-provoking book argues that only an integral and sacred cosmology, rooted in Revelation, illumined through the spiritual intellect, and grounded in the the experience of Divine Immanence, may intuit a true and adequate image of the world, a knowledge and vision that mankind needs to recover if it is to avoid ecological catastrophe. more

Edward Lear

Edward Lear:The Corfu Years

Edward Lear first visited Corfu in 1848 and the island seems then to have made a deep impression on him. At all events, he returned in 1855, after further travels in Greece, Albania, Egypt and elsewhere, and for the next years Corfu was to provide him with the nearest he got to a winter base until, in 1870, he finally settled at San Remo. ... more

Philip Sherrard

Christianity and Eros

In spite of the fact that marriage is recognized as a sacrament by the Church, the attitude of Christian thought towards the sexual relationship and its spiritualizing potentialities has been in practice singularly limited and negative. From the start, Christian authors have been ill at ease with the whole subject. Sexual activity tended to be... more

The Pursuit of Greece

Travellers, poets, artists, even scholars, still go to Greece in search of something they feel that no other land quite offers them. Partly no doubt this is a by-product of the enormous prestige the world of ancient Greece acquired subsequent to the Renaissance; partly, too, it is due to the sheer physical beauty with which Greece presents one... more

C. M. Woodhouse

Rhigas Velestinlis

Rhigas of Velestino (1757-1798), or Rhigas Pheraios as he is more popularly known, is one of the great national heroes of modern Greece, for it was he who some thirty years before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 first conceived the possibility of a full-scale national revolution to free Greece from the domination of its O... more

Demetrios Capetanakis

The Isles of Greece & Other Poems

This monograph contains the seventeen short poems written by the young Greek philosopher Demetrios Capetankis before his death in London, in 1944, at the age of 32. more

Romilly Jenkins

Dionysius Solomos

Dionysius Solomos (17987–1857) has been called by many the ‘father of modern Greek poetry’ in that it was he who, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, rebaptized Greek poetry in the ancestral springs of inspiration and language and gave it an orientation that has been followed by such major poets as Palamas, Sike... more

Barbro Noel-Baker

An Isle of Greece

This is the story of Edward Noel, a young cousin of Lady Byron, his family and his home at Achmetaga, an estate on the Greek island of Euboea (Evia), which he bought from the Turks in 1832. Edward Noel had been educated at the agricultural school of Hofwyl near Bern in Switzerland which had been founded by Emanuel von Fellenberg, ... more

Philip Sherrard

Church, Papacy, and Schism

Despite the valiant efforts of modern proponents of ecumenicalism, the union of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches continues to be one of the crucial and thorny issues of our times. Yet it is often forgotten that any discussion about it must begin with an understanding of what the Church itself is. Before one can talk of healin... more

Hieromonk Gregorios

The Divine Liturgy

The Divine Liturgy was first published in Greece in 1982 (by the theological journal ‘Synaxi’) since when it has been continuously in print and there have been four new editions. From 1993 it has been published by the Cell of St John the Theologian, Koutloumousiou Monastery, Mount Athos. This translation into English has bee... more

Vassa Solomou Xanthaki

The Marriage

Vassa Solomou Xanthaki’s novella The Marriage is considered to be a small classic of Greek literature, a work that is distinguished by the immediacy and freshness of its language while retaining a deep sensibility to traditional life in rural Greece. First published in 1975, it has been reprinted in Greek numerous times and is inc... more

Alexandros Papadiamandis

The Murderess

A new translation of Papadiamandis's classic work, published to mark the centenary of his death. more

Zissimos Lorenzatos

Aegean Notebooks

Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915–2004), essayist, thinker and poet, was arguably Greece's most significant man of letters in the twentieth century. In the Aegean Notebooks, a record of his observations and reflections while sailing among the Greek islands in the 1970s and 1980s, the special quality of his literary and philosophical gif... more

George Seferis & Philip Sherrard

This Dialectic of Blood and Light

‘ . . . this dialectic of blood and light
which is the history of your people . . . ’

Sherrard to Seferis, 20 March 1950

more

Edward Lear

Edward Lear: The Cretan Journal

When Edward Lear set off from Corfu for Crete in April 1864, it was in no very optimistic frame of mind. For the last nine years Corfu had been his winter home but after half a century of British rule the island had been ceded to Greece and Lear felt obliged to move. His livelihood required an immediate expedition to new scenes and he probably... more

Tasos Leivaditis

The Blind Man with the Lamp

Tasos Leivaditis (1922–1988) is one of the unacknowledged greats of Modern Greek literature. Not only is he unacknowledged in the English-speaking world, largely because nearly all of his writing remains untranslated, but he also has limited recognition within modern Greek literary circles, where he is often overshadowed by twentieth-cen... more

Alexandros Papadiamandis

Around the Lagoon: Reminiscences to a Friend

‘Around the Lagoon’ is one of Papadiamandis’s most finely crafted and densely written stories. Unusually, it is written in the second person and addressed to a ‘friend‘, who can be seen as the narrator’s younger self. The narrator evokes his childhood experiences of unrequited love and betrayed friendship am... more

Graham Speake

Mount Athos

In this second edition of his acclaimed study of Mount Athos (for which he was awarded the 2002 Criticos Prize) the author takes the opportunity to revise and update his text and also to add a completely new chapter documenting the changes that have occurred in the twelve years since its first publication. The renewal that took place in the l... more

Athanasios N. Papathanasiou

A Hesychast from the Holy Mountain in the Heart of a City

Elder Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906–1991), who was formally glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in November 2013, has long been acknowledged and recognized as a luminary and spiritual guide with the special grace of ‘clear sight’. His life was particularly remarkable in that he lived it in both ascetic fast... more

Philip Sherrard

The Rape of Man and Nature

The growing threat of ecological disaster weighs heavily on people’s minds. In this book, first published nearly thirty years ago but still acutely relevant, Philip Sherrard traces the crisis back to what he believes is its true origin: the incremental replacement of a participatory and sacramental understanding of creation with the more detac... more

Lambros Kamperidis

The Rider The Steed The Dragon

Peris Ieremiadis (1939–2007) was born in Athens and studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He lived and worked in Paris for several years, returning to Greece in 1972, and thereafter was based mainly in Athens where his work was regularly exhibited in various galleries. His renowned series of works on Saint George, which ... more

Hieromonk Gregorios

The Orthodox Faith, Worship, and Life

This new English publication of the Cell of St John the Theologian, Koutloumousiou Monastery, Mount Athos, has been translated from their 2012 Geek edition which was written to help those who are seeking for a closer understanding of the faith, worship and life of the Orthodox Church. The first part on faith includes sections on the Triune God, creati... more

Maria Iordanidou

Loxandra

Loxandra of ‘big arched feet and slim ankles‘, of ‘big hands like those of a patriarch...hands for kissing, fingers long and shapely, made to bless and to smell of mahlepi and incense, hands made for giving’, was born, it is said, in the times of Abdül-Medjid I, the 31st Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who reigned from 18... more

The Boundless Garden: Vol. II

The stories included in this second volume of Alexandros Papadiamandis’s literary work were written during the years 1894–1902, a period regarded as his most creative. As the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth, in these stories we are presented with an unrivalled gallery of authentic individuals who are emerging out of a... more

Alexandros Papadiamandis

The Boundless Garden: Volume II

Ilias Venezis

Land of Aeolia

This present translation brings one of the most beloved works of modern Greek literature to readers of English for the first time in its entirety. Land of Aeolia tells the story of the author’s childhood summers in Anatolia before World War I, before the Greek genocide, the Greco-Turkish war, the author’s captivity by the Turks, and be... more

Gail Holst-Warhaft

Nisiotika

Dance! dance! enjoy your youth because you won't find it again in this world. Let the dancing go on, this earth will eat us, this earth will eat us, let the dancing go on. Whoever has a good heart and often celebrates, they're the only ones who enjoy this false world. This ea... more

Marcus Plested

The Master Builder

Demetrios Koutroubis (1921–83) was a wholly remarkable figure: one of the greatest, but also one of the least well known, Orthodox theologians of the modern era. Variously described as a lay staretz, a monk of the world, and a latterday Socrates, Koutroubis is a figure who deserves much more attention than he has hitherto been affor... more