Personal website of
Dimitri G Demekas

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Contact me:
 dimitri@demekas.com

 

 

 

 
Personal
  

I was born in 1960 in Athens, Greece, and grew up in the city. I attended the Varvakeio gymnasium and the School of Economics at the University of Athens. I graduated magna cum laude in 1983, and left Greece on a scholarship for postgraduate studies in economics at Columbia University in New York. After earning my Ph.D. in Economics at Columbia in 1988, I joined the International Monetary Fund. I have stayed in the US ever since, except for brief overseas assignments.

                 
The house I grew up on 6, Orminiou Street. The house no longer exists.

 

My father was born in Arcadia in Peloponnese. He was of humble background and grew up in the difficult 1920s and 1930s doing odd jobs. He fought in WWII against the Italians in northern Greece and Albania. During the German occupation of Greece (1941-44), he joined ELAS, the largest armed resistance movement, in Kaisariani, a suburb of Athens. After the war, he stayed in Athens and went into the clothes trade. He died in 1985.

 

                      
                             George Demekas, October 1944.

Officers of 1st ELAS Regiment in Kaisariani, 1944. George Demekas second row, second from left.          

 

ELAS officers. General S. Sarafis, ELAS Military Commander, fifth from right. George Demekas second from right.

  

I have two daughters, who were born while I was livin in the Baltics: Sophia in 1997 and Daphne in 1998.

Sophia

                   Daphne

  
  

I grew up hiking and trekking in Greece, a hobby I kept after I moved to the US and started traveling round the world. Here are some of the out-of-the-way places I have trekked.


Aswan, Egypt, 1985.

Khyber Pass, 1989.

  

 

  

Isle of Skye, Scotland, 1993.		   

With Paul Ross, Tian Shan mountains,  Kyrghystan, 1999.

 
 
  

One of my childhood dreams was to learn to fly an airplane. I earned my pilot license in 1989 and have been flying since then.


                       Ikskile airport, Latvia, 1998.

 
 

      At the cockpit of an Antonov 2 biplane,Lithuania, 2000.

  

I tried parachuting and became hooked. I then decided to learn to paraglide. I started in Carinthia, southern Austria, in 2002. Check out www.kaerntner-flugschulen.at

                                 

                                  Ready to jump.                                                                                      Coming to land.                                                                    Two thousand feet over Cesis airport, Latvia

While I lived in the Baltics in the late 1990s, I took up riding and skeet shooting. I return every year to Estonia for an annual riding tour with friends.