Category: GREEK DIASPORA

News about Greeks around the world

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joins Greek Independence Day parade in Montreal

MONTREAL — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau returned to his Montreal riding of Papineau on Sunday to join several thousand people at the city’s Greek Independence Day parade.

Trudeau quickly left the head of the procession to shake hands with members of the crowd lining the sidewalk.

He later waved a Greek flag from the sidelines.

The parade, which has been taking place in Montreal for about 40 years, featured brightly-dressed dancers and schoolchildren waving Greek, Quebec and Canadian flags.

One float paid tribute to the Greek island of Lesbos and featured children wearing life jackets worn by refugees.

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office said Trudeau makes a point of attending the event every year since it takes place in his riding.

A day after Trudeau was mobbed by fans in a Halifax farmer’s market, he proved to be equally popular with an enthusiastic Montreal crowd.

John Kountourakis and Aglaia Panopalis ran through the crowds with their two young children to catch Trudeau, and the kids were rewarded with handshakes and high-fives.

“The fact that he came here as a Prime Minister when no other Prime Minister has come to the parade is fantastic,” Kountourakis said. “It says a lot about him.”

Spyros Montzenigos, a representative of Montreal’s Hellenic Community, said Trudeau’s appearance was extra-special this year now that holds the country’s highest office.

“It’s the Greeks that voted for him, when he became a deputy, and then he became Prime Minister,” he said. “So the Greek community is supporting him pretty well.”

(thechronicleherald.ca)

April 4, 2016
Lonsdale Greek Festival attracts over 100,000 people

The 29th Lonsdale St Greek Festival, Melbourne’s largest celebration of Greek culture, took over Lonsdale Street last weekend, featuring 3 stages of free entertainment, children’s rides and activities, and over 60 food, drink and craft stalls.

Both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten attended the Greek cultural event which attracted more than 100,000 people over the weekend as did Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews and Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy.

“It was a huge success in every measure. Arguably the most attended Festival over the 2 days,” President of Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria Bill Papastergiadis says. “Our festival is the only festival in Australia with all of the nation’s political leadership attending. In fact, according to the Police Superintendent, the only other event with a similar attendance is the AFL Grand Final.”

Bishop Ezekiel of Dervis and the Consul General of Greece in Melbourne Mr. Christina Simantirakis were also there present along with several federal and state ministers and MPs, local government agents, Community leaders, benefactors and supporters.

Lonsdale St was lined with traders serving a plethora of delicious treats including The Cypriot Kitchen, St. Gerry’s, Greek Street Food, Cypriot Street Food, Mr. Calamaro, To Nostimo, Biskit Bar, Two Men and a Lemon and many more.

“The festival has become a Festival of Food with the quality of the food offering better than ever,” Mr Papastergiadis says stressing that there were a further 79 applications made for stalls that couldn’t be included in the festival.

“The new layout offered more space and was overall a huge success as its three stages catered for different tastes, keeping people from all walks of life and ages engaged until early morning hours.”

The Program featured 17 dance groups and 18 bands and musical acts, with over 300 performers taking part in total featuring diverse styles including Greek reggae, jazz, traditional, rebetika and contemporary music. Cypriot born famous singer Alkinoos Ioannides mesmerised the audience on Saturday night, after the official opening of the festival.

The dance program featured dance groups from interstate, aboriginal performers, Italian traditional dance with highlights being the ‘Akrites tou Pontou’ Phoenix of Dreamtime collaborative work and the Pontian and Cretan groups Dance Off on Sunday night.

Zorba Til You Drop competition gathered a lot of interest again this year, but Toula Katsouranis who managed to last 48 minutes won the Trip to Greece with Qatar Airways. Magic Mic, a new singing contest expected to become an attraction for young talent was held for the first time, and was won by Dion Papaspyropulos who sang “Thelo Na Me Niosis’ by Nikos Vertis.

(neoskosmos.com)

March 6, 2016
Speak Greek in March campaign spreads across Australia and overseas

The Speak Greek in March (SGM) campaign was conceived in order to stimulate the Greek community, the school system and government to give greater priority to the speaking, learning and teaching of the Greek language.

This initiative was started in 2015 by individuals and representatives of literary and cultural organisations within the Greek community. The organising committee’s policy is to encourage the various stakeholders to initiate, develop and implement activities, appropriate to their own fields of endeavour, which promote the Greek language. For example, schools that teach Greek may organise during March (as well as throughout the year) competitions, celebrations, debates, lectures and special projects related to the Greek language.

“We believe that learning another language enhances one’s competence in their primary language. As language and culture are interrelated, retaining our mother tongue will strengthen our ability to maintain our cultural identity in multicultural Australia. It will also benefit Australia, as multilingualism in our globalised world is acknowledged to have cultural, educational and trade advantages,” Mr Mike Zafiropoulos AM, the convener of the SGM committee said.

The retention of our language in the diaspora needs constant support, otherwise it runs the risk of succumbing to the pressures of globalisation and assimilation to the dominant culture and language. There are many reasons for this, including the prevalence of intermarriage and the preference and ease for children born in Australia to become monolingual, speaking only English, the lingua franca of our adopted country.

“Furthermore, our school system, that teaches Greek as a second language, needs new ideas and the ongoing support of the community in order to make the learning of Greek attractive to our youth,” Mr Zafiropoulos continued.

The committee chose March for the campaign for a number of reasons. March incorporates a plethora of Greek cultural activities, it is the beginning of the school year, and includes the celebration of Greek National Day and the Antipodes festival.

Of course, choosing one month for the campaign is only a marketing technique, as the objective of the organising committee is to encourage and promote the speaking of Greek throughout the year.

For the 2016 campaign, an exciting concept has been developed to ensure a heightened interest on a daily basis on the campaign’s goals. It has identified 31 themes, one for each day of the month. The themes vary from simple topics like ‘the alphabet’, ‘arithmetic’ and ‘grammar’ to ‘philosophy’, ‘politics’, ‘economics’, ‘the Olympics’ and ‘mythology’ to name just a few.

All the themes chosen are English words, which have their origin in the Greek language. On its new website, the campaign will include the theme for each day with resources and links for parents, students and the general community. People with expertise in any of the themes are invited to contribute brief content in the form of text, pictures, video or sound for inclusion on the website.

These themes have been strategically placed on specific days to reflect the historical significance or appropriateness of the theme. For example, the ‘history’ theme is on 25 March, Greek Independence Day; the ‘philosophy’ theme is on 7 March, the date of Aristotle’s death in 322BC and the ‘theatre’ theme is on 20 March, which is the International Theatre Day for Children.

While the campaign originated in Melbourne, it has quickly spread to other parts of Australia and overseas. The aspiration of the organising committee is that the campaign is embraced not only by the Hellenic diaspora, but also by other minority communities in Australia.

(neoskosmos.com)

March 6, 2016
Alternate FM Xydakis meets with representatives of the Greek community of Hungary

On the third day of his tour of Central European countries, the Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, met in Budapest with representatives of the Greek community of Hungary. Members of the delegation he met with included the president of the Minority Self-Government of Greek Hungarians, Mr. Koukoumtzis, and the MP representing the Greek minority in the Hungarian Parliament, Laokratis Koranis.
Mr. Xydakis listened closely to the views and questions of the Greek community, and he briefed them in detail on developments in issues such as the refugee crisis, social security reform and the current state of the Greek economy.

(www.mfa.gr)

February 21, 2016
Engaging Greek Diaspora to Highlight Greek Talent & Entrepreneurship

At least 300,000 Greeks have abandoned their country during the last seven years of recession. Adding up to the thousands of well-educated and multilingual Greek expats that left before the crisis broke out, they are part of an unprecedented global mobility of skilled employees and entrepreneurs. What binds these people together is a collective identity, which can only be revealed and redefined within the context of an all-embracing community.

LoveGreece.com and Greek Travel Pages (GTP) have joined forces to showcase the entrepreneurial spirit of the Greeks to the world. The collaboration foresees a LoveGreece weekly column on the GTP Headlines news site which will include a video interview of a Greek entrepreneur that stands out for his/her creative thinking in the business world. Through the exchange of important news on Greek tourism and stories of the individuals hosted on LoveGreece.com, the two sites aim to maximize the recipients of their message. They both agree that Greece’s entrepreneurs and professionals, with their ethos and vision, are an important aspect of the country which is worth highlighting to the world.

This year, Greek Travel Pages (GTP) marks 40 years of continuous and creative presence in support of Greek tourism and industry professionals. GTP, along with Tornos News, constitutes the main source of information for Greek tourism for both professionals and final consumers in Greece and abroad. Through its networks and national and international partnerships, it aims to promote and facilitate networking among the sector’s enterprises.

Inspired by the dynamism and creativity of the Greek entrepreneurial spirit, LoveGreece was founded in 2013 as an initiative to boost and promote the country’s image abroad by profiling talented and successful Greeks. Powered by Gina Mamidaki, LoveGreece is an interactive forum showcasing talented Greeks with an outward-looking mentality and potential. It focuses on exceptional entrepreneurs and successful figures from the worlds of research and innovation, arts and culture, education and social responsibility. The aim is to raise people’s interest and help boost demand for Greek products and services. Love Greece ambassadors include artist Lydia Venieri and Spanish Writer and Hellenist Pedro Olalla.

Love Greece has also joined forces with New Diaspora to communicate the productivity of Greek people both within and outside the borders of their country. Scientists, new startupers, artists, entrepreneurs and businesspeople compose a bloomy and fruitful environment, which the representatives of the two organizations are promoting by creating and exchanging videos, articles and interviews for their respective sites.

Also launched in 2013, New Diaspora started out as a digital storytelling platform focusing on the new generation of Greeks living abroad during the financial crisis. It has since evolved into a participatory media channel whose aim is to tell the complex story of a migration wave in real time and at the same time engage, connect and inspire democratic dialogue and the prolific interaction of ideas, uncovering the common pulse of a ‘nation without borders’.

In its effort to empower Greek ‘neo-migrants’, its actions include the production and distribution of news stories, interviews and other forms of audiovisual and interactive content, the production of web documentaries, as well as the organization of live-streamed conferences, film screenings and networking events.

Within this framework, New Diaspora crosses the line that conventionally separates content providers from consumers. Users turn into participants, eventually becoming co-authors of their collective narrative. “Not only do we tell our story together, but we are also writing the script of the story we want to tell together. We become the story. By making it a story worth told, we can also become the change”.

(www.greeknewsagenda.gr)

February 21, 2016
New Greek Diaspora: The Changing Face of Emigration

A report titled “The Changing Face of Emigration: Harnessing the Potential of the New Greek Diaspora” by Jennifer Cavounidis – Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Planning and Economic Research in Greece (KEPE) – was recently published by the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC, dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. The author, whose research interests are human resources and migration, examines Greek emigration and its economic implications, before exploring policy directions to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of this mobility. She discusses institutional reforms that can create more and better opportunities in Greece, thereby stemming outflows and rendering return an attractive option, and then turns her attention to Diaspora engagement policies to harness the assets, skills and knowledge of Greeks abroad to enhance development at home.

As pointed out in the report, for nearly a century, Greece was a traditional migrant-sending country; it transformed into a receiving country only in the 1970s, with a booming economy that allowed the government to introduce repatriation incentives, such as reductions in taxes and import duties. In the wake of the devastating economic crisis that began in 2008, Greece is once again experiencing emigration. But unlike the two periods of large-scale emigration over the course of the 20th century (with primarily low-skilled, low-educated workers seeking unskilled or semi-skilled jobs abroad) – this time, emigrants are mostly highly-educated young people escaping extremely high youth unemployment levels.

The so called “brain-drain” has become a hot topic in the public debate, considering the dire consequences of the exodus of human capital for the development prospects of Greece and the brain waste incurred by the unemployment and underemployment of educated youth. Even though current concerns about the impact of emigration on the Greek economy have not yet resulted in specific policies to stem outflows or explicitly encourage return, the Greek government has made sincere efforts to this direction by introducing various structural reforms – both in the regulatory framework for businesses and in the labor market – that aim to boost entrepreneurship, investment and employment, while it has utilized EU funds to implement programs that serve the same aim. A noteworthy example of progress made in this sphere is that Greece improved its overall ranking, between 2013 and 2014, in the World Bank’s index on ease of doing business (moving from number 72 to 60 among 189 countries). Such initiatives may help curtail outflows and may eventually induce the return of some emigrants.

The report looks into a number of government and civil-society initiatives to connect with the Greek Diaspora and encourage their contributions—financial, entrepreneurial, and academic—to their country of heritage. For example, the Greek government’s General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad (GSGA) is identifying the needs of new emigrants in various destination countries. However, despite its efforts to map the Diaspora, the Greek government’s tools may be out of tune with new segments of its target population. GSGA outreach to its newest diaspora members rests on the premise that the traditional focal points of Greek communities abroad (such as the Greek Orthodox Church and Greek cultural activities) appeal to current emigrants. While this might be the perception of older, established emigrants, it is doubtful whether new emigrants approach such organizations to the same degree as their predecessors. The typical young Greek emigrant is highly educated, is an avid user of information technologies, and is likely to identify as a cosmopolitan participating in a global society. Therefore, GSGA needs to rethink its mission and seek alternate sources of information about the new Diaspora other than traditional Diaspora organizations, and explore new ways of staying in touch with today’s wave of emigrants, taking into consideration their huge potential to further national goals, not only in the realm of foreign policy but also in economic development. However, given the current economic climate, Greece may be best served by encouraging Diaspora involvement in Greek economic development from overseas rather than encouraging return at present.

(greeknewsagenda.gr)

February 21, 2016
Rethinking Greece: Ares Kalandides on rebuilding the country’s reputation

Ares Kalandides is a Berlin-based urban planner and consultant in place branding. He is the founder and CEO of INPOLIS a Place Management & Spatial Planning consultancy that offers services to cities, neighbourhoods and regions. He has been a consultant to Berlin Partner (the city’s marketing organization) since 1996 and has consulted various districts, cities, and regions in Germany and worldwide.

Kalandides is a director of the Institute of Place Management(Manchester) and editorial member of the Journal of Place Management and Development. He is currently a professor in Metropolitan Studies at NYU Berlin and the editor of the blog Places.

Ares Kalandides spoke to Rethinking Greece about the Greek-German connection, the current crisis narratives, and how to rebuild Greece’s reputation.

Read the full interview here.

February 21, 2016
9 Fascinating Facts You Might Not Know About the Late, Great Telly Savalas

Telly Savalas was one of the biggest stars of the 20th century, gaining fame from dozens of television shows and films, as well as a string of records. His biggest claim to fame was, of course, his hit television show Kojak, in which he played a Greek American detective who had a thing for lollipops.

Here are nine fascinating facts about the late, great Telly Savalas that you might not know.

1) Telly the Greek American

2) Telly the Spartan

3) Telly the Godfather

4) Telly the Pop Idol

5) Telly Honoring Tradition

6) Telly the Jack of all Trades

7) Telly the Singer

8) Telly the Bald Man

9) Telly the Friend

(www.pappaspost.com)

February 1, 2016
Martin Luther King’s Great Greek Friend and Supporter

Archbishop Iakovos is known in the U.S. as the committed and caring pastor who put the Greek Orthodox Faith on the map for Americans and beyond. He is also known as the first Greek Archbishop in 350 years to officially confer with a pope, leaving behind a tremendous body of work as the primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in North and South America for 37 years.

However, Iakovos was also a champion of civil and human rights who showed his support to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not only with his words, but also with his actions. He was one of the first powerful people to embrace the ideas of Dr. King and march hand in hand with him in 1965 in Selma, Ala.

“He had received threats if he would dare to walk with Dr. King, but he never thought twice of his decision,” says a close aid and friend of the Archbishop.

This historic moment for America was captured on the cover of LIFE Magazine on March 26, 1965. (The entire magazine is online and can be read here.)

The New York Times reported, “The striking cover of Time magazine that showed Dr. King side by side with the black-garbed Archbishop Iakovos marked a new presence of Greek Americans and the Greek Orthodox church in American life.”

Iakovos vigorously supported the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, exclaiming when the first bill was passed:

GLORY TO THE MOST HIGH! MAY THIS MARK THE BEGINNING OF A NEW AGE FOR ALL HUMANKIND, AN ERA WHEN THE WORD OF GOD CHARTS AND GUIDES OUR LIVES.”

Known throughout the world as a dynamic participant in the contemporary ecumenical movement for Christian Unity, Archbishop Iakovos served for nine years as president of the World Council of Churches, established dialogues with Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Southern Baptists and Black Church leaders and initiated Orthodox Dialogue with Judaism. In a successful effort to promote closer ties among Orthodox jurisdictions, he founded the Standing conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA) in 1960. He was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civilian honor, bestowed by President Jimmy Carter on June 9, 1980.

Iakovos’ decision to support Dr. King, and the publicity his action received, brought Greek-Americans and African-Americans much closer, resulting in a friendship that the two communities celebrate until this day!

(usa.greekreporter.com)

January 24, 2016
Greece Among Countries With Most Citizens Living Overseas

OECD ranked its country members based on the number of people living overseas. Ireland came first, with the highest number of citizens living in countries overseas, even though the country is quickly recovering from the devastating impact of an economic crisis.

There are approximately 35,300 Irish migrants living overseas. These people fled the country between April 2014 and April 2015.

A graph published by Forbes shows the top ten countries in the list, including New Zealand, Portugal, Mexico, Luxembourg and Iceland.

Greece was ranked 11th, with 6.6% of the native-born population living abroad in 2014.

Countries with large populations, such as Brazil, Japan, the US and China are among the countries with the smaller number of native born people living overseas.

(greece.greekreporter.com)

January 24, 2016