Culture and Customs of Greece

Artemis Leontis. Culture and Customs of Greece. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. 2009. Pp. xxi + 266. 26 illustrations, 1 map. Cloth $49.95.

How many Greeks does it take to buy a watermelon? A book that can fruitfully engage this question tells you much about life in Greece and belongs to any modern European culture syllabus. Indexed from Acropolis to Zorba, in eight narrative chapters, following the structure of this Greenwood Press series on the "culture and customs" of Europe, this book contains a discussion of the land, people, and history of Greece; religious practices; social customs, gender roles, and the family; leisure, holidays, and the Greek table; language and literature; music and dance; media, theater, and cinema; and architecture and art.

Illustrated with photographs taken by the author and others, this volume also includes a chronology, from the Stone Age through the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern periods to 2008; a glossary that explains filoxenia as well as frappé and frontistirio as well as parea; and a selected chapter-by-chapter bibliography that cites many useful websites. In short, this is a volume those of us who used to lecture on modern Greek culture in American universities would have wished to have had not only for our students, but for an educated general audience, including colleagues in other fields.

Three major themes that help organize the narrative of the book involve urbanization and the evolution of greater Athens into a dynamic, problematic, and exciting metropolis, where nearly one third of the population of Greece resides; the performative aspect of Greek culture that reflects the way people play their parts for one another, onstage and off; and the living relationship of inhabitants to the distant past. An overarching theme corresponds to the centrality to Greek culture of Greek, a language with...