Visitors to our website, www.polemikes-tehnes.gr can see our basic activity up to now: the Pan-Hellenic Internet Guide to the Martial Arts. Leaving all arrogance aside, we can certainly say that it has become the reference point for anyone interested or already involved in the martial arts and fighting sports in Greece.
Our successful effort on the Internet was accompanied by the Pan-Hellenic Guide to the Martial Arts; the latter is already out and it includes the most comprehensive and reliable description of the martial arts and fighting sports available in Greece, the schools representing them, introductory essays about the history and the development of the most well-known among them and extensive guides regarding the criteria potential students should base their selection on. Printed martial arts guides have being the cornerstone of our other venture, martial arts’-related publications.
Print media have been one of our primary pursuits since, despite the two serious efforts that have been made in the past (by “Dynamiko” magazine in the late 1970s and by “Alkimachon” publications in the early and mid-2000s) Greek bibliography remains to a great extent inadequate. Our aim is to add to their titles and cover the full gamut of martial arts and fighting sports.
Who is our audience? First of all practitioners themselves –they are the ones who need the most a theoretical background for their study (if they are students) and their teaching (if they are teachers). Second, those who are interested in getting involved with the martial arts but who prefer to learn more about them first. And third, those who have an interest in these arts as products of cultures, very different from ours; even if they never get practically involved with the arts, these people can gain deeper knowledge of the worlds they created them.
Starting point of our course (after the print edition of the Guides to the Martial Arts) is our invaluable collaboration with Shambhala and Dave Lowry’s “In the Dojo”, one of the best entry-level books for Japanese martial arts and an equally important second step is our collaboration with Kodansha, Japan’s biggest publishin house; first fruit of this collaboration is “A Life in Aikido” by Kisshomaru Ueshiba, the official biography of aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba.
Of course it’s not our intention to stop there: we will continue aiming for the highest possible quality and for transferring to the Greek market the best we can find in the international bibliography, bringing more titles to arts that are already represented and introducing new titles to arts that aren’t even though they enjoy great popularity in terms of numbers of schools and practitioners. Like in our other endeavors, we do not intend to exclude any art and any culture; our sole motivations are the field’s needs and our wish to enrich it as much as possible.
One a final note, we would like to stress that we do not intend to limit our endeavors to our own publications: we would be particularly happy if we could lend our expertise and infrastructure in rights’ negotiations, translation, editing, publishing and promotion of books to anyone interested in publishing a martial arts’ title. There are numerous collaboration paradigms and we are certain that we can find one that will suit the needs of any individual or institution sharing our enthusiasm for the growth of the martial arts’ field.