Estia is a national newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 published daily in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

, Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

. It is generally considered a broadsheet of a conservative, right-wing political alignment, and an advocate of free-market policies. It is named after the goddess Hestia

Hestia

In Greek mythology Hestia , first daughter of Cronus and Rhea , is the virgin goddess of the hearth, architecture, and of the right ordering of domesticity and the family. She received the first offering at every sacrifice in the household. In the public domain, the hearth of the prytaneum...

.

Language

Estia is the only daily written in katharevousa

Katharevousa

Katharevousa , is a form of the Greek language conceived in the early 19th century as a compromise between Ancient Greek and the Modern Greek of the time, with a vocabulary largely based on ancient forms, but a much-simplified grammar. Originally, it was widely used both for literary and official...

, a purist and archaic form of modern Greek

Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...

 that was abolished as the official administrative language in 1976. The use of katharevousa was previously favored by the conservative press, as opposed to dimotiki

Dimotiki

Demotic Greek or dimotiki is the modern vernacular form of the Greek language. The term has been in use since 1818. Demotic refers particularly to the form of the language that evolved naturally from ancient Greek, in opposition to the artificially archaic Katharevousa, which was the official...

, which was favored by the centrist and leftist press. In recent years, however, Estia has adopted a very moderate form of katharevousa. Estia is also the only daily employing the polytonic system of accentuation, which was officially abandoned following legislation in 1982; Estia, nevertheless, uses a simplified polytonic orthography in which the grave accent

Grave accent

The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...

 is replaced by the acute

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

.

Format and layout

The paper's very first edition was misprinted, with Page 1 being on the back and Page 2 on the front. Adonis Kyrou I. decided to keep printing the paper the same way, and the tradition continued to 1997, when it was abandoned due to technical difficulties arising from the change from linotype machines to computer-editing.

Estia did not switch to a modern computer system until 1997. At that time Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

-enabled software had become more widely available and it was possible to continue printing the newspaper in the polytonic system. Until then, the newspaper continued to be set and printed using Linotype machine

Linotype machine

The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....

s. Estia is one of the few Greek newspapers printed in broadsheet

Broadsheet

Broadsheet is the largest of the various newspaper formats and is characterized by long vertical pages . The term derives from types of popular prints usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. The first broadsheet...

 format. It normally contains only about eight pages a day. There are no pictures on the "front" page, and no colour photographs at all. The Greek typeface used for headlines and most of the texts is Asteria.

The paper's most popular column has always been the feuilleton

Feuilleton

Feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles...

 "Pennies, Eidisoules, Perierga" (Strokes, small news, curiosities), noted for its dry, acerbic wit.

History

In 1876, Adonis Kyrou I. founded a weekly publication named Ἑστία, which was a literary magazine similar to the present-day Nea Estia (Νέα Ἑστία) rather than a news-focused paper. Not until 1894 did the well-known poet and journalist Georgios Drosinis transform it into a daily newspaper about politics, culture and finance. In 1941, during the occupation of Greece by the German army, Estia closed, but soon after the liberation it resumed its publication. Estia has been managed by the Kyrou family for more than 120 years. Adonis Kyrou II. was its publisher from 1898 to 1918, Achilleus A. Kyrou from 1918 to 1950, Kyros Kyrou from 1950 to 1974, and Adonis Kyrou III. from 1974 until 1997, when the paper was taken over by Kyrou's nephew Alexis Zaousis. The current editor-in-chief is L. Dimakopoulou.