Constantine P. Cavafy

Giannis Smaragdis has just become the first Greek director to be elected as a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. “I consider it a great honor to be elected by the European Academy of Sciences and Arts as a member in the field of Arts and Culture. I perceive this distinction as a triple duty,” said the director among other remarks.

Professor Gonda Van Steen, the Koraes Chair at the Centre for Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics at King's College London and a member of the academic committee for the Alexandria Cavafy House, joins Thanos Davelis to explore why making Cavafy widely accessible - from his Alexandria home to the Cavafy Archive in Athens - is important, and look at why his work still inspires us today.

In the last few months there have been encouraging signs that what Cavafy might have termed "mia kapoia lysis" to the vexed question of the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens might be found.

Gregory Jusdanis

Odysseus Elytis was one of the most important Greeks. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. He was one of the select members of the so-called "generation of the nineteen thirties" in the field of artistic creation.

Oxford University's Foteini Dimirouli will be conducting an online seminar on "C.P. Cavafy in the World: Origins, Trajectories and the Diasporic Poet," hosted by the British School at Athens, on February 1, starting at 7 p.m. local time.

During these festive days along with the joy and happiness of the holidays we see before our eyes - albeit sometimes almost imperceptibly or by association as the Alexandrian poet Cavafy would say - images of unhappiness and incapacity.

Greek academic and literary figure Dinos Christianopoulos died Tuesday in Thessaloniki, where he had resided since his birth. He was 89. 

During this time of isolation I think of Cavafy.

Ambassadors and other diplomats from 18 countries have rallied in support of Greece's "Stay Home" campaign against the spread of coronavirus reciting Greek literature in a video posted on the Greek Foreign Ministry's Facebook account Thursday.