Today, unfortunately, education does not start in the home and school is in no position to fill that void. - Helene Ahrweiler

Speaking as a historian, there has never been an empire that was not multinational.

Yes, I haven’t changed my mind. For decades, anything that was decided in Europe came with a footnote, an asterisk, added by the British. But we can’t move forward with asterisks; they have to go.

Europe has always been mixed-race, it has never had such a thing as biological purity. The crucial question today is how the migrants and refugees will be assimilated. Unfortunately, we continue making the same huge mistake – in Europe and in Greece. We treat foreign nationals like a separate community that cannot be assimilated. By doing so, we create a foreign territory within our own. The Arabs say that the land of Islam is wherever there is a single Muslim. The people coming to Greece, therefore, need to learn our language and customs, to be assimilated into Greek institutions in a manner that is not just restricted to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the hot spots, but which includes the entire country. We’re afraid of losing our culture by sharing it. But without contact with others, culture ceases being a culture.