Juliet du Boulay   Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford UP, o/p; Denise Harvey, Límni, Évvia). An account of the village of Ambéli, on Évvia, during the 1960s. The habits and customs of an all-but-vanished way of life are observed and evoked in an absorbing narrative.

 

John K. Campbell   Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford UP). A classic study of a Sarakatsáni community in the Píndhos mountains, with much wider applicability to rural Greece.

Rae Dalven   The Jews of Ioannina (Lycabettus Press, Greece, available in the UK/US). The history and culture of the thriving pre-Holocaust community, related by a poet and translator of Cavafy, herself an Epirot Jew.

Loring Danforth and Alexander Tsiaras   The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton UP). Many visitors find Greek funeral customs - the wailing, the open-casket vigils, the disinterment after three years - the most disturbing aspect of the culture; this book helps make sense of them.

Renée Hirschon   Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: the Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford). A classic 1981 study now reissued in a revised edition. It shows how this community in Kokkinia maintained a separate identity three generations after 1923, and is also a pioneering study of how the spatial characteristics of the emergency housing dictated kinship and friendship. It's inevitably nostalgic, as increasing wealth has largely dissolved the community, but still of vital importance to understanding why Athens is so higgledy-piggledy.

Gail Holst-Warhaft   Road to Rembétika: Songs of Love, Sorrow and Hashish (Denise Harvey, Límni, Évvia; available in the UK). The most intriguing Greek urban musical style of the past century, evocatively traced by a Cornell University professor; useful discography has been updated to the mid-1990s.

Anastasia Karakasidou   Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood (University of Chicago, US). An excellent if controversial work on the recent formation of Greek national consciousness in Macedonia, declined for publication by Cambridge UP.

John Cuthbert Lawson   Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals (University Books, New York; o/p). Exactly as the title states, and still highly applicable a century after its writing; well worth scouring libraries and antiquarian dealers for.

Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis , eds Ourselves and Others: Development of a Greek Macedonian Identity Since 1912 (Berg, UK). A collection of essays by experts of several nationalities, covering much the same ground as Karakasidou, examined from the historical, linguistic and anthropoligical perspectives.

Nikos Stavroulakis   Salonika: Jews and Dervishes (Talos Press, Athens, available in the US). Monograph by the former curator of the Jewish Museum of Greece, lavishly illustrated with old photos, of two of Thessaloníki's most distinctive communities - which only vanished in the 1920s and 1940s respectively.

T.J. Winnifrith   The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People (Duckworth; St Martin's Press). A rather heavy-going hotchpotch on the existing Vlach communities in Greece and the Balkans, but the only study easily available.