Greek Nationalism in Thessaloniki

Beautiful Thessaloniki! Here is a small collection of random shots from my visit to this city last year. I stayed for one night at this cheap hotel, only to move out immediately after discovering that it was mostly used for prostitution.

A couple in traditional Pontiac costumes pose in a rally to remember the "Pontic Genocie", a collection of massacres and Christian-Moslem clashes at the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Was this an actual genocide like the Armenian one? Or was it a bloody, guerilla civil war between two different ethnicities inhabiting the same place? Perhaps historians can know better.

A gallant statue of Alexander the Great dominates the waterfront of Thessaloniki, a city which actually didn't exist when he was alive.

Ok, so these three pictures might be a bit drab but believe me, Thessaloniki is still a beautiful place to visit.

Fauna from the Garden

I took a walk out in my garden last night to look for millipedes. I couldn't find any, but instead I ran into a whole bunch of other critters...

I saw small slugs...

...as well as this polka-dotted monster that was as long as my index finger. Mr. Ümit Kebapçı has identified the first slug as a Deroceras, while the spotty giant is possibly a Limax maxiumus. Thank you so much!

I also saw this huge Helix Aspersa snail.

This tiny Cyrtopodion kotschyi gecko is very peculiar because unlike the majority of gecko species, it lacks ahedsive pads on its toes. (Compare it with pictures of other geckos I posted earlier.) Instead, it manages to hold on to walls with zig-zag kinks on its fingers. I wonder if they belong to a more "primitive" lineage than other geckos, or if they have secondarily lost their finger-pads.

You viewers are probably saturated with photos of all the green toads (Bufo viridis) I keep finding everywhere, but who could resist such cute things? I placed a small lacewing in front of this frog, and he ate it without thinking twice. It happened so fast that I couldn't take a picture.

Of course, frogs should better watch out for hedgehogs (Erinaceus concolor) like these. These spiny animals have been getting more and more common around where I live, possibly because they keep having sex all the time.

Athenian Nightlife

Drinking in the streets is an universal phenomenon, especially when the weather is suffocatingly hot. These examples are from Athens.

Not a Dog

No kitty no! That's not a real dog, only some crap graffiti! Don't run away, come back!

The Fateful Turkish Elections

Election fever! After last week's huge post about political parties, here are some pictures from the fateful election that rocked the nation on the 22nd of July. Voting takes place in schools, here is the view from the one on our street.

We got into one of the classes to see hastily-constructed "voting chambers" made out of desks and chairs. Behind the "chamber" you can see one of the "Life of Kemal Ataturk" posters that are a staple fixture in every Turkish school.

The huge vote sheet was made even larger with the participation of hundreds of independent candidates. Each one of those unmarked circles you see represents one of those hopeful participants. Besides them, there are eleven proper parties. You have only one choice.

After making your choice, you fold up the huge voting sheet and put it in the dirt-yellow envelope. The envelope then goes into one of these boxes. Counting all the votes used to take days, but this time it was all over in a matter of hours, thanks to a newly computerized vote-counting system.

This group of friendly volunteers helped with the voting process...

...and later on, marked our fingers with permanent ink to make sure we didn't cast another vote.

Although the practice of finger-marking is sometimes condemned as being de-humanizing and paranoid, I see it more like a sign of prestige. I didn't slack off at a beach and voted, and I have the markings to prove it!

In the end, however, none of this mattered. I voted for the center-leftist CHP, but the conservatives at AKP won a staggering victory by getting 48 percent of the votes, mostly due to their success at stabilizing the economy and reforms in health care, free housing and so on. Life goes on...