IT'S NOT ALL JUST GREEK TO ME!

I have had two weeks now, travelling in Greece, trying to decipher signs and learning to read some Greek along the way. It comes in fits and starts, but it has helped me in reading road signs and understanding different concepts.

This was my favourite, and illustrated perfectly the difficulty in distinguishing one Greek character from another.  But it was an "aha!" moment that I had getting off the plane from Thira to Athens, and it certainly helped that there was the english above it. Honestly, I had seen this particular word dozens of times, but almost always when there was an emergency exit sign with a pictogram inside a museum or hotel.



Following the triangle indicating the direction of the exit, there are 6 letters. I understand why my brain never bothered to try and translate more letters when it understood less. But, when I thought about it, I was curious, so I tried to break it down, like all the other words that made no sense until I transposed them to the alphabet I knew (in a reverse dyslexia explained by Rick Riordan in the Percy Jackson series). There are 2 Os, so no help. I know the open triangle from math and delta doesn't help. The remaining letters (first, second and last) all look like an E, but when I started to think it through in my painfully slow translation, letter by letter, it revealed itself in a remarkable way that any English speaker would recognize:

E X O D U S