While some people dream of winning the football the basketball world cups, Konstantina Stara claimed the most prestigious award in Japan‘s gardening realm.

Stara won the gold medal in the 2015 Gardening World Cup, a gardening exhibition held in Japan, with her garden design entitled “Parea,” which is the Greek word describing a group of friends.

During an interview with the Athens Macedonian News Agency Stara, who lives in Thailand, noted that gardens have been a very significant aspect of Japanese culture for a long time.

To read more, please visit: Greek Reporter

by

Anastassios Adamopoulos

Archaeologists in southern Greece have discovered gold signet rings and a chain, gold and silver goblets, a sword and over 1,000 fragments of semi-precious stones in a tomb believed to date back to 1,500 B.C., the Greek Culture Ministry said.

“It is the most impressive display of prehistoric funerary wealth in mainland Greece which has come to light in the past 65 years,” the Ministry stated.

The discovery was made by American archaeologists working in the Pylos region in the southwest Peloponnese this summer.

The jewellery and weapons are thought to have been used to surround the shroud, placed in a wooden casket, of a warrior aged 30 to 35, likely a prominent figure of his time in the early Mycenaean period, the ministry said.

To read more, please visit: Euronews

Young professionals from Greece, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom have been inspired to take up the ambitious “Colossus of Rhodes Project,” aiming to revive one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek titan-god of the sun Helios, erected on the Greek island of Rhodes by Chares of Lindos, in 280 BC, to celebrate Rhodes’ victory over the ruler of Cyprus, Antigonus I Monophthalmus. It was one of the tallest statues of the ancient world standing over 30 meters (around 98 feet) high.

The bronze structure was destructed after Rhodes was hit by the 226 BC earthquake, however, it was not until 654 AD that Saracens ransacked the island and sold the statue’s relics.

Over 2200 years after its collapse, architect Ari A. Palla, archaeologist Christos Giannas and public relations-marketing professional Dionisis Mpotsas from Greece, civil engineer Enrique Fernández Menendez and economist Matilda Palla from Spain, architect Ombretta Iannone from Italy, as well as civil engineer Eral Dupi from the United Kingdom, recommended its restoration, as part of a European initiative the financing of which is addressed to the general public.

To read more, please visit: Greek Reporter

Greek student Dimitris Hatzis is the youngest person ever to create a life-sized humanoid using a 3D printer.  The 15 year old student from Kavala (Northern Greece) created the robot as part of the "InMoov" project, an open source platform.

Hatzis was able to costruct the robot using the platform that is centered around the development of a man-sized robot humanoid.  Like others on the project, he was able to access instructions from platform and share his project.  Success came for the student after a year of daily work.

Only six people in the world, including Hatzis, have been able to complete the task.  Dimitri is the youngest ever.  Other successful candidates are the original designers
of the robot; Frenchman Gael Langevin, two Russians, a German and an Italian.

For more information, please visit: Greek Gateway

A total of 162 suspicious transactions were reported and 133 individuals detained earlier this month during a joint operation to combat online fraud in the airline sector, Europol said in a statement last week.

Under the coordination of Europol, the operation included travel and credit card companies such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express, 35 airlines and 32 countries* across 109 airports and targeted criminals suspected of fraudulently purchasing plane tickets online using stolen or fake credit card data.

“This operation was the culmination of many months of meticulous planning between Europol, law enforcement, prosecuting and border control agencies, airlines and credit card companies, and is a perfect example of how our combined forces can track down the criminal syndicates responsible for committing large scale fraud and other offences,” said Europol Director Rob Wainwright.

The rise in internet-facilitated crime — often via fake online “travel agencies” — affects millions of travelers every year with the banking, airline and travel industries suffering massive financial losses in the process. Europol adds that in many cases credit card fraud has been linked to drug trafficking and human trafficking, among others.

To read more, please visit: Greek Travel Pages

As reported by London's Independent Newspaper, archaeologists unearthing the lost ancient city of Selinunte on Sicily's southwest coast have found a city frozen in time, little different from the day 2,500 years ago when it was suddenly attacked and its residents massacred and enslaved.

The allure of Sicily's beauty is nothing new.  Around 650 B.C. the Mediterranean island seduced a band of colonists from the port of Megara in ancient Greece who settled near the mouth of a small river on the southwest coast.  The colony - names for the wild celery ("selinon" in Greek) that grew in the surrounding hills overlooking the sea - grew into a prosperous trading port.  Ships from across the ancient world sailed into its harbor.  Residents of the city of 30,000 at the far western edge of anceint Greece purchased good from Egypt, Tirkey and France with coins imprinted with images of celery leaves.  With its commercial wealth, the city erected mighty temples to a pantheon of Greek deities.

Approximately 2,500 years ago, however, the glory days of the city the Greeks called Selinus came to an abrupt end,  In 409 B.C., an estimated force of 100,000 troops from Carthage traveled across the sea from modern-day Tunisia and laid siege to the city.  After Selinunte held out for 10 day, the Carthaginian invaders breached the city's walls and massacred approximately 16,000 residents and soldiers who tried to defend the city.  Another 5,000 residents, mostly women and children, were taken as slaves,  The once-thriving city became a ghost town after the attack.  Carthage's attempts to repopulate Selinunte never took hold, and it finally razed the city around 250 B.C. during the First Punic War.

To read more, please visit: History.com

Amidst warm applause and in a highly emotional ceremony, UNICEF Greece on Thursday presented the Lambros Kanellopoulos award to Greece’s coast guard for its search-and-rescue efforts in the Aegean, especially its work for the protection of refugee and migrant children. The award was one of the prizes handed out by UNICEF in 2015 for Universal Children’s Day celebrated on November 20.

Earlier, a video of coast guard officers’ sensational efforts to save small children had been shown.

According to senior coast guard officer Athanassios Hondronasios, the number of refugees and migrants arriving by sea had increased 1,873 pct in comparison with 2014. During that time, there had been 4,800 rescue operations, in which 89,000 refugees and migrants were rescued, including 16,500 children and infants.

To read more, please visit: Greek Reporter

The location of a crushing defeat of Sparta by Athens, the ancient city of Kane is mentioned countless times in ancient Greek literature by writers such as Herodotus and Sappho. Yet the exact position of the island on which the city sat has long puzzled archeologists. It now seems, however, that what is a modern-day peninsula jutting out from the Turkish coast used to be isolated from the mainland by sea, forming the fabled lost island.

A team of researchers, led by the German Archaeological Institute, drilled into the ground of the peninsula to examine the rock that formed it. They found that it was made up of loose soil and sediment, which they think was deposited at some point before the Middle Ages, joining the island to the mainland. This theory was corroborated by the discovery of the remains of a submerged ancient harbor, as well as the earlier findings of pottery fragments, which suggested that the region used to form part of an important trade route.

The island was one of three, called the Arginusae, of which two are still separated from the mainland.  It was where the third one had gone that had puzzled the researchers.  They now think that perhaps run off from the agricultural fields on the mainland, or even potenitally an earthquake could have caused the narrow channel, which is a few hundred meters wide, to fill up with soul and sediment, forming the split of land.

To read more, please visit: I Love Science

Rhodes is officially in the running for the title of European Cultural Capital 2021, after municipal authorities submitted the Dodecanese island’s bid.

Rhodes Mayor Fotis Chatzidiakos described the bid as a “journey that has just set off from its first port”.

“This is the result of painstaking work done over many months… Rhodes aims to establish itself as an influential destination historically, one of intellectual development in the sciences and the arts, and as a center of dissemination of European ideals,” the mayor added.

“At the moment, the world is observing Greece and Europe as a whole struggling with massive issues: immigration, refugees, religious dogmatism and extremism, conflicts and economies of different speeds. It is vital that Europe regain its credibility as a strong economic center and one of compassion,” Mr Chatzidiakos said.

To read more, please visit: Greek Travel Pages