Maria Katsounaki

Should we talk about Georgis Grigorakis and “Digger,” Yorgos Zois and “Arcadia,” or Theo Angelopoulos and his “Trilogy” project, cut short by his tragic death? Or what about Dimitris Nakos' “Meat” that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024, or the unforgettable documentary by Filippos Koutsaftis, “Mourning Rock,” a tribute to the West Attica town of Elefsina that took more than 10 years to make and was first screened in 2000, beautifully raising the curtain on a new century?

The trial into the events leading up to the 2023 Tempe rail tragedy is slated to begin on Monday in the central Greek city of Larissa – and the omens are not good. Among the 36 defendants that will be taking the stand are executives of the Greek railway company, the maintenance firm and the operator – OSE, ERGOSE and Hellenic Train, respectively – along with the stationmaster who was on duty that night and two colleagues who were not at their posts as they should have been.

The legendary incident with famous Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis is mentioned by singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos in his autobiography: In 1979, Hadjidakis, as director of the acclaimed Third Program – the public radio station of Greece's state broadcaster ERT, which mainly broadcasts classical music and culture – is playing Savvopoulos' new 15-minute song titled “A Long Zeibekiko for Nikos,” which had been censored, every day. The phones at the radio station are ringing off the hook, with associates of the then minister Athanasios Tsaldaris asking the station to stop playing it. Hadjidakis is unmoved. Eventually, the minister himself calls. Hatzidakis listened to him “sullen, gloomy and without uttering a word.” At one point he asked the minister if he was finished. And when Tsaldaris said “Yes,” Hadjidakis responded: “Minister, you are an idiot!” And he just hung up the phone.

This happened in the news last week: Greece's farm subsidy scandal was pushed aside for a day to give way to the comments of the European Public Prosecutor who brought it to light. The spotlight focused exclusively on Laura Kovesi, who was at the center of the 11th Delphi Economic Forum. Does she have the right to speak or not? Her comment that OPEKEPE – the Greek state-run agency at the center of the scandal – “is an acronym for corruption, nepotism and clientelism” is, however, a bit jarring, even though she stressed that there is no “corruption-free country.”

There are simply too many incidents involving electric scooters to count – thankfully, not all of them fatal. What we do know is that in 2025 alone, 400 children and teenagers under the age of 16 were injured in such incidents. We also know that 17 accidents took place in the first two months of this year, which means almost one every three days. The recent death of a 13-year-old boy in Ilia in the Peloponnese, however, shocked the country and triggered reactions. And we don't know how many of the incidents recorded have resulted in serious injuries that required hospitalization and which may have left serious, perhaps even irreversible, damage.

It is quite strange: The more parties we have, the poorer our political life seems to become. There is the breakdown of SYRIZA, new parties with founding declarations that resemble school reports, others that are a blast from the past, new parties that declare in every possible way that they belong to the past, several others crowding on the right of the right and on the left of the center, and a “gray zone” of undecided voters hovering at 13.5% and competing for second place in the polls.

“Which kid from high school knows that you're dealing drugs?” The way things are going, soon some kid in a classroom will raise their hand to answer positively. The conversations between the two criminal groups that sold drugs to school students in the northern suburbs of Athens were made public on Friday, but they are no different from similar ones that have appeared in the news in the past.

Shakespeare's “The Comedy of Errors” is a great source of inspiration for commenting on a lot of the things we are hearing from Alexis Tsipras and his shadow cabinet at the Greek Left Alliance (ELAS) about the “new” political space they want to create with a “new paradigm of political participation and action.”

The situation appears to have gotten completely out of hand. “Hooliganism,” a term used to describe acts of violence committed by fans of a sports team because of some game or another, has evolved, in certain cases, into something even more terrible.

The questions roll in unaided after Athens ranked 88th among 173 cities on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index for 2026. No one was surprised that Copenhagen, Vienna and Melbourne clinched the top spots, respectively, for offering the best quality of life in the world, based on factors like education, stability, healthcare, infrastructure, culture and the natural environment.