Word: cretan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Athenian authorities ordered a marble plaque put up renaming the Athens street fronting the British embassy "Karaolis-Demetriou Street." A Cretan merchant offered a $300,000 reward for Sir John Harding's head, to match Harding's offer of $30,000 for information leading to the capture of Colonel George Grivas, the British-trained ex-Greek army officer reputed to head EOKA...
Biggest Puzzle. Patrick is a kind of dilettante snowman, "detached to the point of selfishness in his chosen serenity . . . his violin-playing, his botany, his photography, his collection of Cretan ikous." Corfu thaws him out-first with a throb of color from its sapphire sea and sky, orange groves and olive trees, then with the pastoral charm of tinkling goat bells and squat white stone houses, and finally with its people, who teach him a language of the heart that is puzzlingly Greek to him. Biggest puzzle of all is his Venus de Miloesque wife Iris, who plunges into...
...meantime, Michales' teen-age nephew has killed Nuri Bey's nephew, and the Turko-Cretan blood bath has begun. Kazantzakis is not one to blink the horrors of war. Eyes are gouged, heads are lopped, women are raped, priests are lynched, villages are burned...
Father was a prosperous Cretan merchant who skirmished with the Turks, wore black clothes and let his beard grow as a sign of mourning over the loss of Greek freedom. Though Nikos Kazantzakis was only four years old at the time, the massacres of 1889 are branded vividly on his mind: "Each morning on my way to school I had to pass near a tree where the Turks used to hang Cretan patriots. The first time I saw a corpse dangling from the tree I was almost sick with fright. He was half nude, his greenish tongue stuck out from...
...found an enormous mass of burned limestone and brickwork. It turned out to be a palace, whose plan suggested in some ways the sophisticated civilization of Knossos on the island of Crete. The diggers speculated that when Knossos was destroyed by the Mycenians (Homeric Greeks) about 1400 B.C., a Cretan architect may have escaped and plied his trade among the Arzawans...