Greeks In Chicago

Greeks arrived in America with the expectation that freedom would permit their families to thrive and be successful. With hard work, belief in the Orthodox faith, and commitment to education, Greeks ascended in Chicago, and America, to positions of responsibility and success. Today Greek Americans are among the wealthiest and most successful of immigrant groups. Greeks recognized a historical imperative that they meet the challenges and aspirations of a classical Hellenic heritage. Greeks in Chicago celebrates the rich history of the Greek community through copious pictorial documentation.

What do we mean when we speak of ancient Greeks? A person from the Archaic period? The war hero celebrated by Homer? Or the fourth century "political animal" described by Aristotle? In this book, leading scholars show what it meant to be Greek during the classical period of Greek civilization. The Greeks offers the most complete portraits available of typical Greek personages from Athens to Sparta, Arcadia, Thessaly and Epirus to the city-states of Asia Minor, to the colonies of the Black Sea, southern Italy, and Sicily. Looking at the citizen, the religious believer, the soldier, the servant, the peasant, and others, they show what—in the Greek relationships with the divine, with nature, with others, and with the self—made him "different" in his ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. The contributors to this volume are Jean-Pierre Vernant, Claude Mosse, Yvon Garlan, Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, James Redfield, Charles Segal, Oswyn Murray, Mario Vegetti, and Philippe Borgeaud.

Greek immigrants came to Chicago in droves in the early 1900s, and most of them made immediate contributions to the city. Greek men grew up learning that theyd need to own and operate their own businesses to be successful. As a result, most of them were tough, individualistic and hard working. The fact that they were raised in poor and remote mountain villages, where mere survival was considered an accomplishment, contributed to their character, personality, and individualism. When a shop owner was asked why he was successful, he replied, Just hard workthats all. Nobody can move you, no matter how strong they are. He was among the Greeks who worked and struggled to open up their own businesses, with names like The Petropulos Range Co., the Collias and Menegas Restaurant, and Rusetos and Company Ice Cream. Other company names were based on Greek cities or mythological and historical characters. Celebrate the history of a hardworking people, and learn lessons about business and life by studying The Entrepreneurial Spirit of the Greek Immigrant in Chicago, Illinois: 1900-1930.

For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing society. It follows that the roasting or cooking of meat was a political act, as the division of portions asserted a social order. And the only proper manner of preparing meat for consumption, according to the Greeks, was blood sacrifice. The fundamental myth is that of Prometheus, who introduced sacrifice and, in the process, both joined us to and separated us from the gods—and ambiguous relation that recurs in marriage and in the growing of grain. Thus we can understand why the ascetic man refuses both women and meat, and why Greek women celebrated the festival of grain-giving Demeter with instruments of butchery. The ambiguity coded in the consumption of meat generated a mythology of the "other"—werewolves, Scythians, Ethiopians, and other "monsters." The study of the sacrificial consumption of meat thus leads into exotic territory and to unexpected findings. In The Cuisine of Sacrifice, the contributors—all scholars affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies of Ancient Societies in Paris—apply methods from structural anthropology, comparative religion, and philology to a diversity of topics: the relation of political power to sacrificial practice; the Promethean myth as the foundation story of sacrificial practice; representations of sacrifice found on Greek vases; the technique and anatomy of sacrifice; the interaction of image, language, and ritual; the position of women in sacrificial custom and the female ritual of the Thesmophoria; the mythical status of wolves in Greece and their relation to the sacrifice of domesticated animals; the role and significance of food-related ritual in Homer and Hesiod; ancient Greek perceptions of Scythian sacrificial rites; and remnants of sacrificial ritual in modern Greek practices.

Just released 224 pages, more than 400 full-color, original photographs, hard cover with striking dust jacket, 11" by 11" coffee-table book showcasing the beauty of the Greek Orthodox Churches of the Midwest! ECCLESIA, Greek Orthodox Churches of the Chicago Metropolis, by Panos Fiorentinos, takes the reader on a photographic and historic journey through all 59 churches of the Chicago Metropolis, one of the nine regions of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America. This one-of-a-kind photographic chronicle captivates the reader with the unique beauty and rich tradition of these parishes, some of them established more than 100 years ago and located in cities and towns throughout Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minneapolis, Missouri and Wisconsin. In addition to showcasing these churches through stunning photography, Fiorentinos has chronicled, for the first time in one place, their individual histories. ECCLESIA educates through scholarly essays that explain the Greek Orthodox Church's architecture, fundamental beliefs and history, as well as the meaning of its icons and symbols. It also provides a historical perspective about the Greek immigrants who founded many of these churches, while paying tribute to the various ethnic groups and converts who are now part of these parishes' heritage. This book will appeal to those interested in the architecture and interior adornment of churches, the establishment and growth of religion, genealogy, immigration, and regional history, and will be a unique addition to the historical, religious and photography collections of colleges, universities and local and regional community libraries.

The understanding of the soul in the West has been profoundly shaped by Christianity, and its influence can be seen in certain assumptions often made about the soul: that, for example, if it does exist, it is separable from the body, free, immortal, and potentially pure. The ancient Greeks, however, conceived of the soul quite differently. In this ambitious new work, Michael Davis analyzes works by Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle to reveal how the ancient Greeks portrayed and understood what he calls “the fully human soul.” Beginning with Homer’s Iliad, Davis lays out the tension within the soul of Achilles between immortality and life. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics to explore the consequences of the problem of Achilles across the whole range of the soul’s activity. Moving to Herodotus and Euripides, Davis considers the former’s portrayal of the two extremes of culture—one rooted in stability and tradition, the other in freedom and motion—and explores how they mark the limits of character. Davis then shows how Helen and Iphigeneia among the Taurians serve to provide dramatic examples of Herodotus’s extreme cultures and their consequences for the soul. The book returns to philosophy in the final part, plumbing several Platonic dialogues—the Republic, Cleitophon, Hipparchus, Phaedrus, Euthyphro, and Symposium—to understand the soul’s imperfection in relation to law, justice, tyranny, eros, the gods, and philosophy itself. Davis concludes with Plato’s presentation of the soul of Socrates as self-aware and nontragic, even if it is necessarily alienated and divided against itself. The Soul of the Greeks thus begins with the imperfect soul as it is manifested in Achilles’ heroic, but tragic, longing and concludes with its nontragic and fuller philosophic expression in the soul of Socrates. But, far from being a historical survey, it is instead a brilliant meditation on what lies at the heart of being human.