Tag: Greece

  The film is the low res movie I took of the Chios rocket battle, Easter 2012 - please watch it with the sound on otherwise you won't hear the fizzin' of the rockets and the pealin' of the bells... ... The fireworks ‘war’ between the two parish churches of Vrontados, on the Greek Island of Chios, is said to have started in the 19th Century, with children firing stones at each other from slingshots. Now it's the young men who fight, with thousands of homemade rockets that they spend all winter stockpiling. The target on St Mark’s church, separated from the other church by a deep ravine, is the cupola, while the supporters of St Mark's try to score a direct hit on the clock tower of St. Erythianis the Virgin. Despite bans during the Nazi occupation of Greece, and then again when the Colonels were in power in the 1970s, the rocket war has flourished and is now a major spectacle, and...