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Dream on if you think that Turkey will be taking back any of those poor souls. In the meantime, in the real world, Greece is still receiving wave after wave of immigrants in the islands of Samos and Lesvos, despite the terrible weather conditions lately. I'm afraid that we'll be seeing more and more of these people dying over the next few months because of bad weather conditions during the winter months. This is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions and I don't see anyone finding any easy solutions any time soon.

I think that the Germans take these things seriously and some heads are going to roll. Despite all the fun we poke here, you have to agree that the Germans have the mechanisms in place to find and punish the culprits of this scandal. If this would have happened in Greece, Italy, Turkey or some other Mediterranean country I'd be pretty certain that there would be massive cover ups.

Interesting read: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/23/iceland-where-bankers-go-to-jail-for-74-years.html

When I read the title I thought you were going to talk about the Black Sabbath album Heaven and Hell (great album by the way... ).

What would you like to know about these centres? If you can read/understand Greek then you can find all the info you need here: http://www.kep.gov.gr/portal/page/portal/kep

Same here

Exactly, that's the way most of these Greek "cooks" learnt how to cook. However, watching your grandma cook doesn't make you a cook qualified to serve food to thousands of people over the course of years

Most Greeks here in Canada started as dishwashers and they slowly evolved into cooks and then restaurant owners. Now how one goes from a dishwasher to becoming a cook without getting any proper training, this is a question nobody has answered properly yet

It's good for the Germans to see what their Greek colleagues had to deal with over the past few years...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/612015/Asylum-seekers-SUE-Germany-for-not-paying-them-benefits-FAST-ENOUGH

Sorry to break your bubble, but this is the real photo of eyo

Just joking around prettyque. You can try our Facebook and Twitter pages too: http://www.facebook.com/Hellenism.net https://twitter.com/#!/HellenismNet

That would be a good ideas, as long as a requirement for a report would be to provide adequate proof of wrongdoing.

It's going to be years before all legal battles are done. Also, I see no real story here. What would the story line be? Crooked German business people cheated the world to make more money? Not much of story there...

The Greek genealogy database is up and running again for anyone interested to add their names in it: http://www.hellenism.net/personal/gen.cgi

Interesting and timely article about the Turkish "deep state": http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-turkish-deep-state-what-life-is-like-when-the-conspiracy-is-real

You touched on an issue close to the heart of eyoismos I'll let him reply to this.

That's right, this is called meandros (Μαίανδρος) in Greek. It allegedly took its name from Meandros river in Asia Minor (ancient Miletus area).

I use Windows 10 at home. I haven't seen any issues with it yet. Saying this, I've never had any issues with any of the previous versions of Windows either, so I may not be the right person to ask

Don't underestimate the people's internal thoughts and motives which we, as outsiders, know very little about. I've met quite a few "Turks" in my professional life, all over Canada and the US. Most of them professionals and immigrants to the US or Canada like myself. I was very surprised to find out that most of them were not introducing themselves as "Turks" but as something else. Other than the obvious Kurds and Armenians (and a few who claimed Greek ancestry when they found out I'm Greek) I heard some pretty weird backgrounds, such as Assyrians (at least a couple), and Dagestani (when someone told me he was a Dagestani I had to Google that one to find out where these people were from as I had never heard this before). In any case, seems that Turkey is not as homogenous as many people think. According to Wikipedia at least 30% of Turkey's population belongs to some minority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minorities_in_Turkey) even though from talking to some of the Turks I've met their estimate is that this percentage is much higher. In a society like this it may take just a spark to start a fire. This spark could be a bombing in a demonstration, or some killing of an important person, or who knows what. On your question around how would I see Turkey splitting up. I'm not sure. I'm not an expert in the area and I don't know much about all this people's histories, background and struggles, to know how they'd react in certain situations and what they'd request. An obvious division would be between the "European" side of Turkey (Istanbul area and the Aegean coast) and central Turkey, while the far east may become Kurdistan or part of a Kurdish territory which will include lands from Iraq too after they clean up ISIS. Who knows how things will play out. It goes without saying that Russia wouldn't want a strong Turkey in the area and they'd be more than happy to see them losing some of their lands and power. I don't really know what the US or the Europeans would want to see in the area. I'd assume that a large and strong Turkey scares all of them so they too would be more than happy to see a division of power in that area. Again, I'm not an expert in these things, I'm just an observer of historical events, and history, more often than not, repeats itself.

Did I say anything about any part of present day Turkey joining Greece? I only talked about the possibility of Turkey changing drastically in the next few years. There's the more secular west and the less secular east. And then there's the Kurds and some other smaller ethnic groups which may start seeing opportunities for independence within a different Turkey.

The end of Erdogan will be the end of the neo-Ottoman Turkey and possibly the beginning of a different - possibly fragmented - and more democratic Turkey. In the meantime, people have taken to the streets yet again: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed Next month's elections in Turkey will show what direction the country will take in the future.

Are you in your right mind comparing Kemal's to Erdogan's Turkey? There are 2 different political philosophies there. The fact that Turkey's economy still seems to be doing ok, when someone is looking from the outside doesn't mean much. There's trouble brewing in many fronts. The Erdogan government has been heavily involved in the turnaround Turkey saw in the 2000's (if you remember IMF came in to bail out Turkey in 2001: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3269669/IMF-may-need-to-print-money-as-crisis-spreads.html),but in the process their economy has become more and more dependand to old world Ottoman practices. Check with your friends again, they'll probably tell you that in order to do business in Turkey you need to have contacts in the government or protection by powerful politicians. This was not the case 15 or so years ago. Also, Turkey is part of the "fragile five" (Google it for more info...) because of her weak growth, high inflation and high account deficits. They're a massive economy because of their huge population, and they can certainly still keep their heads above the water because of the low interest rates in the world markets today, but the writings of craziness and megalomania are on the wall (see Erdogan's palace). Turkey's secular democracy has been slowly changing under Erdogan and many people in Turkey don't like this. You see that things will continue being rosey for Turkey, I see trouble brewing in many fronts (political, financial, social). I guess we'll have to wait and see who's right.

You seem to forget the riots in Istanbul and Ankara just a while back. Turkey is a boiling pot ready to explode for quite some time now. It's just a matter of an important ground breaking event happening at some place in Turkey, at the right place and time, to get things rolling, Turks and Kurds will never come together, where did you get this idea from? It's obviously hard to predict how soon things will explode in Turkey and the country will break into pieces, but anyone who's seen how things evolved in Europe over the past 20-25 years will be able to draw parallels. We live in a time where small groups want to break away from the old world "large countries" which were created mostly in the late 1800's - early 1900's and brought together several different groups of people under their umbrellas. This may made sense 100 plus years ago. It doesn't seem to make sense anymore to many people out there. Ask the Catalans, the Serbians/Croats/Bosnians, the Moldovans, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Checks, Slovaks etc. who all decided (or are trying...) to break away from the "co-op" countries they were forced to be made part of. This is a new era. The era of small communities realizing their real cultural backgrounds and wanting to go back and explore and celebrate their roots. I can guarantee you that Turkey will fall apart sooner or later. I can certainly see the western, more European part of Turkey, breaking away sooner rather than later, then the Kurds will carve a piece of their own in the north east, then who knows who else will ask for independence. You have to remember that what is now Turkey was for centuries a multiethnic mosaic. The young Turks managed to glue all those pieces together for the past 100 years but those times are gone. Erdogan has been pushing things to the edge. The pot is boiling and can only take so much pressure before it explodes. I just hope that when it explodes some of the fragments won't hit Greece too, because the explosion is going to be pretty big and it will upset the balance in the whole area, the Balkans and the middle east. It goes without saying that this is just my non-expert opinion. I'm not an historian or a clairvoyant to be able to predict the future. It's just an "educated" guess based on what we've seen in the past in other places of the world, and what we see developing in Turkey in the past 4-5 years or maybe more.