Helena Handbasket

By Tivoli

Glossa's street heroes

Most towns in Greece have streets named after Hermes, Homer and Eleftherios Venizelos, but not so Glossa. By far the majority of streets in Glossa have no name, but some do. I was happily surprised the other day to notice that one inconsequential street is named after Lord Byron and so thought it might be fun to find out what the others are all about. I knew that there is a Nirvana St and a Canary St so it all seemed a bit random. As I walked round the village I began to feel that all the streets had in fact been named after heroes of some sort and that there simply haven't been enough of them to name every street. Yes, it's quite normal to name streets after heroes but I was still curious to know more about these less well known characters.

I have been told that the naming of the streets is a contentious issue; that somebody just decided to do it and chose the names and ordered the signs, that nobody uses the names and that they should be removed in preference to being maintained. My research suggests that our street-namer had a taste for revolutionaries, feminists and poets

So here are some of Glossa's heroes;
Laskarina Bouboulina - Revolutionary & Feminist
Lord Byron - Poet & Revolutionary
Konstantinos Doumpiotis - Revolutionary
Konstantinos Kanaris - Revolutionary
Alexandros Papadiamantis - Poet & Feminist
Pavlos Nirvanas - Poet

(Apologies, I cannot make the Doumpiotis link work in English, so if you are interested enough you will have to Google and Translate it for yourself)

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