sofkaradiointerview.mp3
I’ve always Felt a bond with my paternal grandmother Sofka – not least because I was named after her – and what I knew about her life, sounded remarkable. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, as a girl she had escaped to England with the Dowager Empress after the 1917 revolution, worked for
Delving into family history is now something of a modern obsession, but few people have relatives half as interesting as Sofka Zinovieff’s. As a direct descendant of Catherine the Great, as well as the first prince of Kiev, the founder of Moscow, and the closest adviser to Peter the Great, she was off
FASKOMILIA (or Sage Bush) is one of outer Athens’ loveliest places and one of its best-kept secrets. Around 1,000 stremmata of wild, unblemished hillside, it is a peninsular stretching between Vouliagmeni’s lake and the neighbourhood of Varkiza. You can walk along its 10 kilometres of meandering tracks, gazing across the Saronic Gulf to Aigina
IN GREECE it is almost impossible to be unaware of the Catastrophe – the devastation of the predominantly Greek city of Smyrna in 1922 and its aftermath. It is not just the many books, films, exhibitions and articles that commemorate this seminal event, but the large numbers of Greeks who descended from the 1.2 million
THIS summer my husband and I were returning to Athens after a couple of days away. We had stopped for petrol somewhere on the main Athens-Thessaloniki highway and the afternoon was heavy with oppressive heat. As Vassilis filled up the car, I remarked, “I’ll just go and see if I can get some tea.” I
Sofka Zinovieff is the author of Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens and Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life. Her forthcoming novel, The House on Paradise Street, is set in Greece and will be published in the U.K. and Greece, early in 2012. Where do you consider home? Some say home is where you hang your hat,
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sofka-zinovieff-misunderstood-and-insulted-we-are-left-with-the-taste-of-bitter-oranges-1959639.html In recent weeks, friends in Athens have been greeting me with dazed expressions: “How could this have happened? What went wrong?” When I switched on the radio this morning, the reporter was talking of “a third world war”, only this time it’s an economic one and we’re at the centre, being kicked