Word: cretan
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...content to reign as figureheads; they like to rule too. Resentment over the Greek King's penchant for mixing in politics boiled over at the start of World War I, when the first Constantine exerted his influence on behalf of Greek neutrality. Constantine was forced into exile by a Cretan political wizard named Eleutherios Venizelos, and the feud went on for decades. The monarchy's popularity plummeted even further when George II backed the military dictatorship of General John Metaxas, who ruled Greece from 1936 until the Germans and Italians overran the country...
What TIME had done to Evanghelos Georgakakis was to tell his story, "The Losing Winner," in our March 3 issue. It was the story of the deep inner powers of a man, a onetime Cretan shepherd lad, blind, with an artificial right hand and only one finger with any sense of touch on the left. Yet, at 33, using Braille and tape recorders, he had topped all 361 candidates in the Athens bar examinations. Despite this, as the story told, he was unable to find a job. No one, it seemed, wanted a blind and crippled lawyer...
Greeks were understandably astounded last May when Evanghelos Georgakakis came out ahead of all the other 360 candidates in the Athens bar exams. Reason: Georgakakis, 33, has no eyes, an artificial right hand, and only one finger on his left hand that has any sense of touch. A onetime Cretan shepherd boy who received his disabilities from a German mine explosion in 1944, Georgakakis uses the tip of his tongue to "read" Braille, got through law school by tape-recording and memorizing 60,000 pages of legislation. Highly impressed by his showing, the bar examiners took an unprecedented step: they...
...sometimes washed overboard during his voyages. Modern Greeks are less superstitious. Despite gale warnings one evening last week, Captain Emmanuel Vernikos, 50, decided not to delay the departure of the Heraklion, his 8,900-ton auto-and-passenger ferry on its scheduled thrice-weekly 190-mile crossing from the Cretan city of Canea to Piraeus, Athens' port on the Greek mainland...
When the second and incredibly violent eruption ripped Thera around 1470 B.C., however, it caused the central and western part of the little island to sink and generated tsunamis (seismic sea waves) between 100 and 165 feet high. "Within 20 minutes, these waves hit the Cretan coast with terrifying fury," says Marinates, "destroying everything they could reach." The waves were accompanied by a rain of volcanic ash that buried nearly everything left standing and by fumes that poisoned the population. In the wake of the catastrophic eruption, most of the surviving Minoans fled Crete, sailing to other Mediterranean islands, mainland...