The refugees of Rethymno...

  Mr Paraskevas Syrianoglou knows a lot about refugees! He knows even more about the refugees of Rethymno and of our area-Tsesmes! The "Tsesmelis"! As a president of the Rethymnian Minor Asians Association he made us the honour to talk in our school on May 19th and we thank him a lot for that! We learned so much on that Saturday (especially we, grown-ups), so as to be able to teach it to the younger ones, too...
  We learned how so many Greeks were made to leave their homes in Minor Asia during the first decades of the last century, how they were scattered around Greece and that about 4200 of them arrived in Rethymno...

  We also learned how difficult life was at the beginning both for the refugees (lack of accommodation, clothing and warm covers for the night and terrible living conditions with people being literally "piled up" in public buildings) and for locals (lack of clean water, dirt and sanitation problems in the city due to overproduction of waste for which there wasn't an efficient drainage providence)...
  We learned that refugees weren't treated with the same hospitality by all of the local population and that there were people who, not wanting to accept them, made their life even more difficult (luckily the exceptions were few)...
  We learned, as well, about how important the contribution of the refugee population to the local society and economy was, how great a boost they gave to the development of agricultural production (especially to the suburban areas, like Tsesmes) but also to the arts-and what good gatherings they made with locals in the evenings!
  So, we thank Mr Paraskevas for once more, not only for his interesting lecture, but also for the 4 books of his that he donated to our school library!
Lastly, we owe a "thank you" to the residents of Tsesmes with (or without) refugee origins, who shared with us their experiences and memories from their childhood years and their ancestors.

Can't make heads or tails of this!

United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, London... Aren't they all the same???
Hmmmm... Actually not! Unfortunately enough, there are some small and bigger differences amongst all of them...!

The United Kingdom is a country called so for a reason! What reason? But, of course, the fact that it consists of 4 DIFFERENT kingdoms, "United" so as to form a bigger one! They are, that is, like a big country consisting of 4 smaller ones!  If you take a look at the following picture, you will see all four of them, painted in different colours each..
But let's take them one at a time:

• The "great island" that you can see, is called Great Britain. Great Island= Great Britain! The term "Great Britain", thus is simply geographical.
  On the island of Great Britain, now, there are three out of the four kingdoms we were talking about:
  1. Scotland), in blue colour,
  2. England, in white colour and
  3. Wales, in red colour. 
• The "small island" you can see is Ireland. The term "Ireland" is geographical too, because it refers to the small island we talked about.
  On the island of Ireland there is kingdom number 4, Northern Ireland,the one in yellow colour, as well as another, totally different country, The Rebublic of Ireland!

Well, wht's left? Oh, yes! London! London is a city- the capital city of England and of the whole of the United Kingdom! London is in England and it is marked with a black dot on the map! But we'll say more about it some other time!

The kids always express themselves more simply, of course...:

You heard (in order of appearance) the 6th Grade students: Anna, Angela, Popi, Vaggelio, Titsa, Kostas, Maria, Michelle and Katerina!!!